The founding of Recognize to Rise
For Angie
Recognize to Rise was founded by Mable Ivory in memory of Angela Jones, her best friend of nearly forty years.
Angie was my best friend from the time we were ten years old. She had a master's degree. She taught. She was married for more than twenty-five years to her high school sweetheart, and I was a bridesmaid in her wedding. She lived in a beautiful home in an upscale suburban neighborhood. She did not come from what anyone would call a broken home.
None of that protected her.
She was being abused. Much of it was emotional, and emotional abuse is domestic violence, though almost nobody says so plainly. She never called anyone, because nothing about the way we talk about domestic violence looked like her life. Hotlines were for other people. Shelters were for other people. She did not need a shelter bed. She needed counseling, a safety plan, someone who understood the courts, and one experienced person walking beside her.
She was saving money. She had found an apartment. She had people who loved her and wanted better for her. She also moved between staying and going, the way most people do under sustained pressure. Years of being worn down leave a mark, and by the end the voice telling her to go was the quietest one she could hear.
What she did not believe, and what I do not think she could ever have believed, was that the man she had loved since high school was capable of taking her life. The danger was rising. She was the last person able to see where it was going, because decades of loving someone make the unthinkable genuinely unthinkable.
In June 2025, she was killed in her own home. She was one of at least eight domestic violence deaths in Summit County, Ohio that year.
— Mable Ivory, Founder, Recognize to Rise
Everything she needed already existed. Nobody ever told her it was for her.
What Angie's story teaches us
These are the things I understand now that I did not understand while she was alive.
Abuse does not discriminate. It cuts across every income, every level of education, every race, every gender and every kind of relationship. It lives in beautiful houses, in long marriages, in households with graduate degrees and good jobs. It takes many forms. Emotional abuse is one of the most common, and it is domestic violence whether or not anyone ever raises a hand.
Recognizing it isn't the finish line. Angie knew. She was already planning. What she did not have was experienced support through the leaving itself, the stretch between deciding to go and actually being free. That stretch is the most dangerous period of an abusive relationship, and it is where people are most alone: money, housing, documents, the law, the pets, and everyone's opinion about the relationship.
That support already exists. Almost nobody knows it. When most people picture a domestic violence organization, they picture a bed. Organizations like the Hope & Healing Survivor Resource Center in Akron, Ohio offer far more than that. They help build an escape plan. They send an advocate to court with you. They provide free counseling. They make room for your pets. None of it requires you to need shelter, and none of it requires an emergency. Angie never knew that any of it was available to her. Recognize to Rise exists to correct that picture, so that the help already waiting is help people can recognize and reach.
The people around you can keep you there. Someone in a hurting relationship is often encouraged to stay. For the children. For the marriage. Because it cannot be that bad. Because things will settle down. It is almost never malice. It is love pointed in the wrong direction by people who cannot recognize what they are seeing.
Nobody names it, even at the end. These deaths get reported as shootings, as tragedy that came out of nowhere in a quiet neighborhood. Neighbors describe a beautiful family. The word abuse never appears. The pattern stays invisible right through the obituary.
If this is you
Someone, somewhere, is living what Angie lived. Accomplished. Comfortable. Convinced it cannot be that bad, because nothing has ever left a mark. Some of the worst abuse never does.
It happens in every neighborhood and at every income, to women, to men, and to people whose relationships the world has never fully acknowledged. If any of that describes you, there are resources available to help you.
You matter. What is happening is not your fault. You do not have to walk through it alone, and you do not have to reach a crisis to deserve help. It already exists, it is free, and it is confidential.
1-800-799-7233
Text START to 88788 · Chat at thehotline.org
National Domestic Violence Hotline. 24/7, free, confidential, and open to anyone worried about someone else.
Founder
Mable Ivory
I watched what awareness did for breast cancer. I know what it can do here.
Mable Ivory has spent thirty years across communications, community development and real estate. She began in media, spending a decade in marketing and communications at Time Inc. and ESSENCE, where she served as Director of Community Development and Partnerships and oversaw a $500,000 Hurricane Katrina relief fund. She has spent the last twenty years in real estate, serving New York City, the New York metropolitan area and Westchester County.
Her connection to health advocacy is older than either career. Mable lost her mother to breast cancer at twenty, and found her way to SHARE, Self-Help for Women with Breast and Ovarian Cancer, a New York City nonprofit, as someone quietly looking for support. At twenty-two she was invited to join SHARE's board of directors, and spent those years seeing an awareness movement from both sides: what it takes to build one, and what it means to be the person reaching for it without telling anyone.
She studied marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business, where she was an MLK Scholar, and is an alumna of the Goldman Sachs One Million Black Women program.
She grew up in Cleveland, which is where she met Angie. She founded Recognize to Rise in 2026, in her honor and memory.
Out of respect for Angie's family, Mable does not discuss Angie's surviving relatives, and asks that interviews and coverage do the same.
For more about Mable Ivory, visit mableivory.com.
Recognize to Rise is grateful to its founding partner, the Hope & Healing Survivor Resource Center in Akron, Ohio.
