By Ruth Melville

To honor Norfolk resident Barbara Spiegel’s leadership in caring for victims of domestic and sexual abuse in Litchfield County and for helping Torrington emerge from a widely-publicized alleged rape scandal with a better understanding of the issue, The Register Citizen named Spiegel their 2013 Person of the Year.

Spiegel grew up in Miami, Fla., but her connection to the Norfolk area goes back over 35 years. In 1977, after getting an M.A. in counseling, she came to work at the Wilderness School in Goshen. The school, now located in East Hartland, is an Outward Bound-type program designed to help teenagers at risk.

In the summer of 1980, Spiegel left the Wilderness School and took a summer job at a Minnesota Outward Bound program. There she met her husband-to-be, Tom Hodgkin. At the end of the summer, Spiegel came back to Conn. and started tutoring at Northwestern Connecticut Community College (NCCC) in Winsted. Within a few months, Hodgkin joined her back east and also started tutoring at NCCC.

The next few years were busy ones, even by Spiegel’s high-energy standards. She had started law school part-time, was still tutoring at the community college and had given birth to the couple’s first child, Jaime. In 1987, they moved to Colebrook, where their daughter Alison was born. By that time, Hodgkin was teaching writing and English literature at NCCC (as he still does today) and Spiegel was practicing law in Litchfield County.

Her experience serving on the board of the Susan B. Anthony Project (SBAP) in Torrington was a turning point in her life. The SBAP provides a wide range of services for abused women and their children and for victims of sexual assault. Spiegel found her six-year term on the board exciting, but left when her term was over in 1994. Only a year later, however, the SBAP’s executive director left the position and Spiegel was hired to take over. As she puts it, the job appealed to “the psychology, social work side” of her personality.

Under Spiegel’s leadership, the SBAP’s budget has grown over the past 19 years from $600,000 to $1.6 million and the staff has almost doubled, from 15 to 28. In addition to the vital work the organization does, Spiegel also relishes the “opportunities to learn and grow.”

The SBAP has continued to take on new challenges. A successful capital campaign from 2003 to 2006 enabled the project to buy and restore the old Coe Brass building in Torrington, which now serves as their Counseling and Advocacy Center. This expansion gave the SBAP greater visibility in the area and brought in new support. The organization also won a prestigious Kresge Foundation Challenge Grant and is currently working on building an endowment.

Spiegel and the SBAP were recently in the public eye because of their active and public response to the widely reported sexual abuse case in Torrington last winter in which two 18-year-old boys were accused of raping two 13-year-old girls. Because of its previous work in the schools (the project runs prevention and education programs from pre-kindergarten through high school), the SBAP was well placed to help the community come to grips with the crisis. Spiegel explains, “We were able to go in quickly and work with teachers, trying to help teachers and students make sense of it all. It was an opportunity to do what we’ve always done, but with bigger ears listening.”

Coming so soon after a similar case in Steubenville, Ohio, the Torrington case attracted much national attention. As the public face of her organization, Spiegel was interviewed by The New York Times and CNN. Her message, both to students and the press, is that “the victim is never at fault.”

When The Register Citizen announced the recipient of this year’s Person of the Year award, Jacqueline Miller, president of the SBAP’s board of directors, said that the organization was “lucky to have her.” Norfolk can say the same.