Two dozen battered women and their children will have two more safe havens in Ventura County this month due to donations from the community and a $15,000 grant in September from the Ventura County Community Foundation.

In July, Camarillo-based Interface Children Family Services was forced to close its five longterm domestic abuse shelters in Ventura County after Gov. Schwarzenegger slashed $20.4 million from the state budget for domestic violence programs.

A total of six shelters, including the five in Ventura County, closed in California as a result of the governor’s action.

After word circulated about the closures, individual donations and a multiyear commitment from an organization furnished Interface with enough money to reopen a shelter in Western Ventura County in August.

Now, with money from the foundation, the United Way of Ventura County and private donations, Interface expects to reopen this month two more transitional shelters—one in East and the other in West Ventura County—for domestic abuse victims, said Erick Sternad, Interface director.

“We’re very pleased for that, obviously, and very grateful to them for their support,” Sternad said.

The money should keep the shelters—each able to house about 12 women and their children—running until June 2010.

Foundation President Hugh Ralston said in a written statement that it’s difficult to imagine a more urgent need than providing shelter and hope for women and children living with the daily threat of violence.

“It’s unacceptable for some of our community’s most vulnerable residents to have no place to turn when violence endangers them in their own homes,” Ralston stated. “While every nonprofit’s budget is strained this year, including ours, the foundation’s board believed we had to help.”

The mission of the nonprofit Ventura County Community Foundation, a group of charitable funds with combined assets of $90 million, is to promote and enable philanthropy that improves communities through grants, scholarships and leadership training.

Interface’s Sternad said the three transitional shelters fill a critical need by providing abuse victims with therapy, job counseling, legal aid and a place to live for three months.

“Without (them), we know that some women are having to . . . go back to battering relationships because they have no place else to go,” he said

Although a lack of state funding forced the transitional shelters to close, the two 30-day emergency shelters for domestic abuse victims in Ventura County never closed.

Interface operates one of the shelters in East Ventura County, and the Coalition to End Family Violence runs the other in West Ventura County.

Sternad said some women arrive at emergency shelters after a violent incident with no money and only the clothes on their backs.

Often they have been kept isolated for years from family and friends and were forbidden to have a job, driver’s license and Social Security card.

It’s unrealistic to expect them to be capable of supporting themselves after 30 days at an emergency shelter, Sternad said. It takes time for them to put their lives together so they can live independently, and that’s where the transitional shelters come in, he said.

Sternad said Interface does not plan to reopen the two other shelters. One of the homes was sold and the other turned into temporary housing for youths at risk of becoming homeless.

The three transitional shelters should be able to serve about the same number of domestic violence victims as did the five shelters, he said, because the length of stay has been reduced from 18 months to 90 days.

Interface officials also think donations can sustain only three transitional houses.

“So we hope that it’s going to be sufficient for the need,” Sternad said, adding that he’s concerned with what will happen on July 1, when funding for the two transitional shelters runs out.

“For now, it’s all we have support for.”