JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – This month’s Postively JAX winner is quietly doing work for a group of women that is sometimes unseen.
For years, Deborah Williams has quietly shown up for victims and survivors of domestic violence.
Williams is the founder of “Sister Can You Hear Me,” an organization she started 13 years ago after recognizing a need she couldn’t ignore.
“I really had no intention of starting anything,” Williams said. “Until one day I saw the need, and I saw a parent that looked just like me, the same way I was at one time: a single parent raising children and just trying to survive,” she said.
The name “Sister Can You Hear Me” is meant to sound like a question.
“That’s a woman crying out for help. That’s the woman that needs help. That’s woman that needs someone to listen to her and to understand where she’s coming from,” Williams said.
Williams said she is able to connect with many of the women she serves because she has lived through abuse herself.
“Forty-something years ago, I was there. So, I understand what you’re going through,” she said. “I want be in there with you. To every step that you know. I made it, you can make it too.”
Williams said she entered an abusive relationship as a teenager and once believed that violence was tied to love.
When she was 17 years old, Williams said, she believed if a man didn’t hit her, “he didn’t love her.”
“I went through that until one day I just walked past the mirror,” she said. “I didn’t see myself anymore.”
Williams said she left when she was 30.
She said the women she encounters most often need a few basics first: safety, stability and someone who will listen.
“Someone to listen to them, someone to understand what they’re really going through — and shelter,” Williams said. “We have a lot of women that don’t have nowhere to go. You know, the family has given up on them, and I tell people all the time: Don’t give up on her.”
Williams said her organization’s work extends beyond domestic violence support, including outreach that helps people experiencing homelessness.
“We’re out feeding the homeless,” she said. “We talk to them and see: What started this? Why are you out here? Because a lot of times, people are not out here just to be out here. It’s a reason that most people are out here.”
Her long-term goal, she said, is to open a group home — a place to take overflow when shelters are full.
“When they don’t have nowhere to go and they call me and say, ‘Do you have a room?’ Yes — I got you," she said.
Sister Can You Hear Me received nonprofit status two years ago, Williams said. Then a medical emergency forced her to stop — but also, she said, helped confirm her purpose.
“My pulse was at 22,” she said. “I was leaving. I was dying — slowly dying.”
She said she felt at peace.
“But then that didn’t happen,” Williams said. “So I knew it was a purpose for me to be here. And the purpose is to help someone else. So I can live — they can live too.”
Williams said her hope is not simply for survival, but for an abundant life — and for women to one day pass that goodness on to others.