'Demoralizing': Healing Hearts failed to pay counselors for months

Contracted counselors working at the Healing Hearts Crisis Center have not been paid on time or even at all for several months due to a ‘bureaucratic tangle.’  

Healing Hearts is Guam’s only rape crisis center and is under the purview of the Guam Behavioral Health and Wellness Center.

A source who wishes to remain anonymous told KUAM the payments have been very slow for the past eight months, calling it ‘demoralizing.’

They reached out to KUAM as the contracted counselors were ‘left in the dark’ without an explanation for the delay. 

KUAM reached out to Healing Hearts Program Manager Shirley Untalan who said she ‘cannot disclose any information.’ 

It’s a ‘complicated situation,’ according to Jayne Flores, the Administrator for the Governor’s Community Outreach Federal Programs Office. 

“What we have been doing with Guam SAARCA, which pays the counselors for Healing Hearts, is they pay the counselors and they invoice us and we reimburse them,” said Flores. 

The Governor’s Community Outreach-Federal Programs Office receives the sexual assault services provider grant, which can only be awarded to a non-profit organization.

In this case, the federal grant is awarded to Guam SAARCA, or the Sexual Assault And Abuse Resource Center Association. 

“There has been some issue with the invoicing and the reimbursement because Guam SAARCA is a very small organization and their personnel have full time jobs, they are very busy and the invoices sometimes pile up and sometimes we don’t get the invoices. That is one component,” said Flores. 

Another roadblock is that it’s an annual grant that requires the MOU to be signed off by several GovGuam agencies every year.  

“Sometimes there’s holdups with the agencies, specifically with the Attorney General’s Office where we will submit the MOU and it will sometimes take more than a month or two to get it back to us,” Flores added. 

Flores said it's a multi-layered issue for why the counselors have not gotten paid. 

She admits the last invoice her office received was in June for ten counselors, which means these counselors have not been paid in four months. 

“I apologize for this situation to all the counselors out there who have been giving these valuable services to our survivors of sexual assault. We are going to do whatever we can to try to fix this and mitigate this so that it never happens again,” Flores said.