Jane Brinkley was Sexual Assault Support Services (SASS) of Lane County’s youngest crisis line respondent at just 18 years old.
“She provided hundreds of hours of compassionate listening to survivors on the crisis and support line,” says Rachael Carnes, Jane’s mother. “Jane was a passionate volunteer throughout the community who taught consent education and designed prevention programs at Planned Parenthood.”
Martina Shabram, SASS executive director and Jane’s longtime friend, says the young woman “cared really deeply about young people having agency, the issues related to how young people’s consent is not valued or not honored.”
Jane Brinkley died by suicide in February 2022, but her legacy of youth advocacy carries on at SASS. Now, however, the SASS program that Jane shepherded into existence — SASS Talks — is under threat.
SASS is one of a number of community organizations providing services for victims and survivors of crime — such as child advocacy centers, prosecutor’s offices and domestic violence agencies — that rely on federal funding to address local needs. With the Department of Government Efficiency’s continuous slashing of federal funding through presidential executive orders, these organizations’ services are now at risk.
SASS is a Lane County nonprofit that provides support and advocacy for survivors of sexual assault and abuse. The nonprofit hosts workshops, coordinates medical and legal advocacy and maintains a 24/7 crisis line.
Shabram says that about half of the organization’s funding comes from governmental sources, and that the federal funding is mostly state pass-through, wherein the federal government grants funds to a state which then allocates it to organizations doing the front-line work.
“That means that right now, pretty much everything that we are, all of the programs that we offer, every service that we provide, we are thinking really carefully about how we ensure continuity of these services, given the possibility that funding will be cut,” Shabram says.
While Shabram says the nonprofit will do everything it can to maintain its core services — its crisis line and advocacy programs — “all the other services we provide could potentially contract as we work to shore up those critical core services.”
According to the organization’s 2024 impact report, which chronicled statistics from July 2023 to June 2024, SASS provided services to 1,609 individuals — a 32 percent increase from the 1,510 people served in 2023. The Crisis and Support Line received 1,503 calls in 2024, up from 1,188 calls in 2023.
Shabram says that SASS averaged 109 requests for emergency medical advocacy per year from 2015 to 2020, but that the average increased to 175 requests per year from 2021 to 2024.
Even if funding were not to be entirely cut, Shabram says, SASS has non-negotiable standards of care that its service providers will not violate.
“We have significant concerns about whether or not, regardless of how many dollars are available, we will be able to meet the requirements set out by those governmental sources,” Shabram says. “For example, if we are required to not serve transgender people, we will not be able to accept that funding source, because we would not be willing to leave our trans siblings behind. It’s just not an option.”
Even prior to the executive orders causing disruption to federal funding of vital community services, SASS has had to jump through hoops to receive federal grants.
Most of the government grants SASS receives, Shabram says, prohibit sexual assault prevention education services. For instance, SASS receives funding from the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), which lists prevention activities as an unallowable cost.
“I often look at these grant requirements, and I think that those of us who are doing the work on the ground see the work very differently than folks who are looking from a statistical level at the 1,005th view,” Shabram says. “You know, the difference between prevention and response from where we sit, doing the work, it’s so nebulous.”
SASS was already preparing for a 40 percent reduction in VOCA funds for the upcoming fiscal year prior to the Trump administration’s executive orders cutting federal funding, Shabram says, due to it not having been replenished at a federal level.
Instead, the organization’s prevention funding comes from a contract with the Eugene 4J School District and Lane County Violence Prevention Coalition grants.
“That is also part of what makes it difficult to do youth-centered work with some of these grants,” Shabram says, “because when we get a request from a school, they might be asking for us to do a presentation on the dynamics of sexual violence, which we could talk about as like a response-based thing, and also prevention.”
She adds, “If we’re funded through a grant that does not allow for us to do prevention, we would have to very specifically not include prevention-based information in the presentation we offered, which is a little bit silly and difficult, and does not meet young folks where they’re at.”
SASS Talks, an annual event featuring a series of presenters discussing the culture of consent and how consent plays a role in different areas of life, is just one SASS program that could be affected by a loss of government funding.
The first SASS Talks took place in April 2023 to honor Sexual Assault Awareness Month and featured discussions of violence prevention through community education.
“The genesis of the idea really came from [Jane] many years ago,” Shabram says. “And so it’s kind of in her honor, or in her memory, that we launched that first one, and that memory and her energy kind of remains an animating force for us in this annual thing.”
Shabram worked alongside Jane at Planned Parenthood of Southwestern Oregon in the REV Youth Leadership Program — Shabram serving as the youth leadership coordinator and Jane as a volunteer youth advocate — for over two years before transitioning to SASS. Jane started volunteering at SASS in early 2020, shortly after Shabram moved.
“She was with us through all of the bad, remote COVID times,” Shabram says. “She and I were actually the last two people in the building together as we were shutting down for COVID in March of 2020, and she stayed part of the team through most of COVID.”
Syd Reed, SASS prevention and development supervisor, began working with the organization after the original SASS Talks, but she says it’s still modeled after Jane’s original concept.
Reed’s work heavily involves youth programming, which often focuses on prevention services that aren’t supported by government grants.
“Having a super youth-dedicated program is relatively new, and we really don’t want to lose all of the momentum we’ve had so far, and all of the meaningful connections we’ve made along the way and up until now,” Reed says. “We are probably going to be relying on community support and funding support that doesn’t come through federal grants.”
Ben Brinkley, Jane’s father, will be playing the cello at the April 26 SASS Talks event at 255 Madison, in support of the organization and its services.
“The youth advocacy program reflects Jane’s vision,” Brinkley says, “but its strength lies in SASS’s overall commitment to reducing sexual assault. Now more than ever, they need our support.”
Shabram says that she is hopeful, but that SASS is preparing for the worst.
“There may come a moment when our community — our Lane County community, our Oregon community — needs to really make some big decisions about what we value,” she says.
“If SASS loses funding for the programming that Jane cared so much about, the loss will be felt far beyond our family,” Carnes says. “It will be a blow to the entire community.”
SASS Talks is noon to 3 pm Saturday, April 26, at 255 Madison Street in Eugene. The event is all ages and has a suggested donation of $20, though no one is turned away for lack of funds. Visit SASS-Lane.org for more information.