That job was as the house manager at the Domestic/Sexual Assault Outreach Center’s emergency shelter house.

“I was answering phones and tending to the clients’ needs,” Harvey said.

A couple months later, she became a counselor, and in the 22 years since, Harvey has filled just about every position in the organization, except for executive director and child advocate.

Most recently, she was the program supervisor for D/SAOC’s Homicide/Other Violent Crimes Program, which serves victims of violent crimes and their families as they process their loss and navigate the criminal justice system. Friday was her last day.

Though she’s no longer with D/SAOC, Harvey isn’t going very far away — physically or in work. Starting next week, she’s going to be a victim/witness coordinator for the Iowa Attorney General’s Office’s Statewide Prosecutions Division. She’ll still live in Fort Dodge, but she will work cases throughout the state.

Harvey recalled her first time working with a homicide case. It was 2004 and the victim was actually a friend of hers. She was a counselor for D/SAOC at the time, but the director asked her to help out.

About six years later, she became a counselor and then program supervisor for H/OVC, which covers a 15-county region.

“I’ve worked with some really great people throughout the years, whether it’s my co-workers, law enforcement, my clients,” Harvey said. “I’d do it all over again.”

Recently, Harvey and her co-workers looked back at her two decades with D/SAOC and H/OVC and estimated that she has worked with around 5,000 clients. The bulk of that, she said, are clients she saw through the H/OVC program.

“There’s bits and pieces of each of them that stick out,” Harvey said of the clients she worked with.

Generally, she said the most memorable cases are those that involved children, but others have a solid spot in her memory, too.

“I remember going with a wife when she first went to go see her husband at a funeral home and hearing her wails,” Harvey said.

More than anything, she said, she remembers the resilience the victims and survivors and their families have shown through even the most horrific cases.

“During a case, we see and we hear some of the worst of the worst,” Harvey said. “But seeing somebody get up and being able to read their victim impact statement and face their attacker, those are the small successes.”

Over the years, Harvey said, she’s enjoyed building strong relationships with local law enforcement and prosecutors. She also cherishes the relationships she’s built with the other D/SAOC staff.

“I’ve always said that one thing that’s kept me in this is my co-workers,” she said. “My co-workers are my family.”

That family becomes even more important when they’re working on the really emotionally taxing cases.

“We rely on each other a lot,” said Jamie Huse, a child advocate for D/SAOC who will also be taking over Harvey’s role with the H/OVC program. “You can’t go home and talk about it. You can’t be like, ‘I had a terrible day, I saw all these horrible things,’ because everything’s so confidential. You see all those terrible, horrible images and hear their trauma and get that vicarious trauma, so we’ll regroup and we’ll sit here and just talk it out and cry it out together.”

It takes a special kind of person to spend years and years advocating for victims and survivors, helping them navigate the courts as they seek justice and counseling them through some of the hardest days of their lives — and Harvey is that special kind of person, Huse said.

“She just has that natural way with people, giving hope and light to those when they’re in some of their darkest times,” Huse said. “She just has that natural ability and that natural positivity and people know she genuinely cares. It’s not just a job to her — she really wants to make a difference to someone.”