Domestic violence is one of the most common causes of physical and emotional injury to women in the US. Emotional, financial, and educational barriers are often too great to shift away from domestic violence leaving thousands of victims trapped. Help resources are fragmented across states and have failed to achieve scale to overturn social conventions as well as provide proper resources. The R.I.S.E. (Reaching Information: Supporting Empowerment) Network will have the power to change that. It is the most ambitious effort in the U.S. to aggregate the right resources and technology to help men and women transform their lives and to initiate the process of healing from domestic violence.

R.I.S.E. is a multi-tiered online and offline community that provides safety, education, and donor-driven resources for abused victims, while also providing essential behavior modification, education and empowerment for families to usher in a new cultural understanding in our most challenged areas such as isolated immigrant communities. Taking full advantage of Web 2.0 and combining safe and secure device technology, R.I.S.E. will address the subtleties of anonymity while providing victims access to each other, experts, and community resources. Ex: Jane wants to leave this week. She has five minutes to check where a shelter is located in another city. She goes online to www.beckysfund.org, answers two questions about her location, need for shelter, and prints out the results at her local library. Then she clicks on the exit button which logs her out, erases the site from the computer's history, and takes her to a shopping site just as her abusive husband walks in the front door.