But this week, it can also proudly boast 20 years of service to those who have needed their services most across Northern Utah.

During a reception celebrating its 20th year of operation Wednesday evening, NUSAFE CEO JeanLee Carver told the Standard-Examiner they help some of the most vulnerable victims in a time of need.

“We’re the forensic nursing program that provides services to victims of violence in our community,” she said. “We provide sexual assault examinations and domestic violence and strangulation assessments, collection of evidence and care for the patient, and follow up with advocacy so that our patients have the utmost chance of being the best they can be after this terrible event they’ve gone through.”

She said NUSAFE has a team of nurses that are on call 24 hours per day serving an area from North Salt Lake to the Idaho border.

“We get calls from law enforcement, hospitals, advocacy centers, crisis shelters, doctor’s offices when patients have arrived there seeking help and we respond to that,” she said.

According to the NUSAFE website, the group started in 2005 as the Northern Utah Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners, or NUSANE, in South Ogden.

“When we first started in 2005, we had a clinic in the old South Ogden City Municipal Building,” Carver said. “At that time, law enforcement helped us with revamping their wing of that building so that we could set up a clinic”

She said the clinic has been one of the things that sets NUSAFE apart.

“One of the things that is unique about us is that we have a clinic for patients to come rather than assessing them in the emergency departments where it’s noisy, chaotic and confidentiality may be a problem,” she said. “We have a clinic that’s here at the (Weber-Morgan) Health Department — at that time, it was in South Ogden — so they’re in a quiet environment where they are the focus of everything that we’re doing and no one’s there but them and their support people. That’s very unique to the state of Utah. There’s one other team now — just came up a couple years ago in the southern part of the state — that also has a clinic really patterned after what we did.”

Today, NUSAFE boasts a staff of 17. However, Carver said it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for the group.

“We’ve survived in some very lean years in the last 20 where we didn’t really have funding,” she said. “There were times we had $2,000 in the bank to survive. We’ve grown in learning how to apply for grants and for opportunities from the federal government and state in order to survive.”

She added that there were times that many in the group went without any pay.

“I feel like it’s a huge accomplishment that we have lasted this long,” she said. “We are a nonprofit 501(c)(3) that for the first five years of doing this, myself and the other officers received no compensation. Our nurses covered calls for free, and the only time they received compensation, monetarily, was if they did an exam. That’s hard. That’s difficult to do without any financial compensation.”

It hasn’t just been finances that have been up in the air at times for the group. In November 2018, the South Ogden City Council voted to close its former municipal building, which housed NUSANE’s clinic, due to the financial strain of keeping the building operational. The group eventually moved into the Weber-Morgan Health Department in downtown Ogden, where it remains to this day. NUSANE became the Northern Utah Sexual Assault Forensic Examiners — NUSAFE — in 2023.

“Things have improved over the years and we have been able to survive and keep a good team,” Carver said.

And with two decades behind them, she added, NUSAFE remains as committed as ever to serving the needs of the victims of domestic and sexual crime.

“Our goals are to continue to be a strong, valid piece of this community where we interact with our partners — law enforcement, prosecution, advocacy, school education, medical community — that we continue to be a piece of this service that provides care for victims of crime,” she said. “Our goals are to remain strong, to remain current in any changes coming about internationally with regards to forensic nursing and to keep our team well-educated, and provide our services to citizens of the counties we serve.”