AUBURN — After five years at the helm of Central Maine’s domestic violence response and prevention group, Executive Director Jane Morrison said it’s time to step down.

“They say you kind of know when it’s time,” Morrison said. “I want to be able to enjoy some other things while I’m still healthy and young enough to enjoy it. Life is too short, and friends have told me to take some time.”

Members of the Safe Voices board of directors announced Tuesday that Morrison would be retiring this coming summer.

The agency has launched a search for her successor and hopes to have someone in place by June.

“We have a committee and a timeline in place and we are moving forward one step at a time,” board secretary Victoria Stanton said. “And I think this announcement is an important first step for Jane and for us.”

Morrison said she’ll stay on the job until her successor starts.

“I’ll definitely be here through our Walk to End Domestic Violence on May 31,” she said. “Depending on when they have a new person taking over, I’ll go. So it should probably be sometime in June.”

Morrison came on board in 2010 when the agency was called the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project. The new name, selected to acknowledge that women are not the only victims of domestic violence, was one of the bigger changes that came on her watch.

The other was the annual Walk/Run to End Domestic Violence. Today, it’s big event is run out of Lewiston’s Simard/Payne Memorial Park and draws hundreds of participants. The event brought in $39,000 for the project in 2014.

“They had a walk for years, but it was inside the Auburn Mall,” she said. “They used to raise a couple thousand dollars. So we moved it to Simard/Payne and we’ve just kept enlarging it.”

Safe Voices provides counseling and domestic violence protection programs and operates an emergency shelter. The agency also manages a telephone helpline, 1-800-559-2927, that operates 24 hours per day. The agency employs 28 staff members and has at least 32 volunteers.

Morrison said she won’t be involved in hiring her successor but will be available to offer guidance.

The next director will have to keep the distinct needs of the three counties in mind and should have a strong background in nonprofits and domestic violence issues, she said.

“Of course, you can list a whole bunch of basic characteristics: kind, good and all that,” she said. “But if I had to pick, the top things would be a vision of what the community needs and how the agency can respond to those needs. The second would be experience with nonprofit management.”

It’s the end of a career in social services, Morrison said. She was executive director at Auburn’s Schooner Estates and at Portland-based nonprofit social service agency Ingraham for 18 years.

“My population has really been working with the elderly, working with mental illness and working with domestic violence,” she said.

She plans to remain busy. She volunteers on a number of local charity boards, including the Auburn Public Library and the Androscoggin County Humane Society. All of that will continue, she said.

“It’s hard to believe that this is the time of my life, that I’m really going to retire,” she said. “I may do some consulting or some interim directorships if the timing is right. But I will definitely be pursuing some creative interests, which I’ve put on the back burner in the past — I do stained glass and painting. And I don’t have time in my normal life to do them.”

Her husband, Androscoggin County Chamber of Commerce President Chip Morrison is also retiring.

staylor@sunjournal.com