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I was searching for something I could do to help others," Berman-Potash said, pictured above with a Project Debby client.
Naomi Berman-Potash took the frantic telephone call at 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve. "He said he's going to kill me," pleaded Louise, a coworker, who said her boyfriend had just beaten her during a drunken rage because he didn't like her outfit. Berman-Potash picked up her friend and drove her directly to a local Radisson hotel. If not for Berman-Potash's intervention, says Louise (not her real time), "I don't think I'd be alive today."
Hundreds of other women can say the same, thanks to Project Debby, the program that hotel marketer Berman-Potash, 46, created to give battered women temporary shelter in vacant hotel rooms. More than 125 hotels in four cities participate, offering assistance to some 500 women each year. "At a minimal cost," says Rebecca Sinn, who takes part as general manager of the Loews New York hotel in New York City, "you are saving someone from abuse."
Berman-Potash was director of sales and marketing at a Houston hotel in 1989 when she heard the facility's general manager speak about the pressing need to fill empty rooms. That day, Berman-Potash had read in the newspaper that a local shelter for battered women was turning away clients for lack of space, "I thought, 'We have all these empty rooms,' " recalls Berman-Potash. " 'Why don't I just call this shelter and offer them?' "
Easier said than done. Her hotel's sales manager was reluctant, fearing that the presence of abused women might scare away other guests. "I don't want people with black eyes walking through the lobby," Berman-Potash recalls him saying. Her response was to work harder, "I thought if I packaged it and presented it as a safe, anonymous program, hotel people would be interested," she says. She spent the next year working in her spare time with the Houston Areas Women's Center, a facility for abused women, to develop a program that would allow women to check into hotels discreetly, without being identified as abuse victims. (Berman-Potash named the program for her sister, Debby Berman Apple, a real estate agent and believer in women's causes who died in 1989 of multiple sclerosis.)
Now women how find themselves in abusive situations contact local social service agencies that can send them to a hotel for up to three days. The program - offered in Houston, New York City, Tampa and West Palm Beach, Fla. - provides an alternative to shelters, many of which have limited hours and cannot offer private accommodations. "Some people just need a place for a day or two to figure out a plan," says Berman-Potash. "A hotel room offers them a place and time to think."
Seeing the program work has been gratifying to Berman-Potash, a native of Grand Rapids Mich., where her father owned a steel business and her homemaker mother has been perennially active in volunteer work. "There was rarely a day in my family without a volunteer project," says Berman-Potash, who worked in TV and film production before entering the hotel business in Houston. (She has since moved to Milwaukee.) Naomi "never gives up," says husband Mark Potash, 44, a metal company owner, whom she married in 1995. (He has three children, ages 11 to 17, from a previous marriage.) "If someone is hurting, she's there to help."
That was the case with Louise, who worked at the same West Palm Beach hotel as Berman-Potash in the early 90's. Over four months, Louse's boyfriend had become so violent that she sometimes had to wear sunglasses to work to hide her bruises, if she could work at all.
After Berman-Potash (who normally leaves client contact to social service professionals) helped her get the hotel room in 1996, another agency offered an apartment for a month while she put her life back together.
Berman-Potash is now working to expand Project Debby to still more cities. "It's so satisfying to see the direct effect," she says, "that someone tortured for so long is taking their first step."
Husband Mark calls Naomi an "unbelievable
example" to kids (from left) Robin, Renee, and Jay.
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