Survivors of gender-based violence often face multiple barriers to employment, including limited skills, gaps in their education and work histories, housing instability, and mental health and substance use needs. This executive summary presents the major findings and recommendations from our evaluation of the Career Readiness Training Program (CRTP), Sanctuary for Families’ workforce development program in New York City designed specifically for domestic violence survivors. Our findings suggest that after completing the program, clients were more successful in overcoming critical barriers to employment such as low self-esteem, gaining employment, and improving financial self-sufficiency. The full final report presents our results in greater detail.

What we found

• Clients demonstrated progress toward multiple short-term outcomes measured at program completion, including gains in using office technology; improved literacy, reading, math, and language skills; improved professional development skills and career readiness; increased confidence in career outlook; and improved self-esteem.
• One year after completing the program, the share of clients employed full time or part time had increased by 24 percentage points from the baseline, from 18 to 42 percent.
• Clients also demonstrated improved self-esteem and financial self-sufficiency one year after completing the program: their self-esteem improved while they participated in the CRTP, and they maintained that improvement in the year after completing it. In contrast, clients’ financial self-sufficiency stayed about the same during the CRTP but increased in the year after completing the program, corresponding with their increased employment.

Why this matters

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 10 men experience intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. To maintain control and minimize survivors’ ability to leave the relationships, abusive partners often use tactics that prevent survivors from accessing employment, finances, and other economic opportunities. And people who do leave abusive partners may not have had opportunities to gain the experience, skills, and education necessary to be competitive in the workforce, which can make it difficult for them to obtain living-wage employment and financial security. Accordingly, economic empowerment is vital if survivors are to recover from domestic violence and maintain safety and well-being for themselves and their families. Our findings suggest that workforce development programs designed to address the multiple barriers domestic violence survivors face can improve survivors’ career readiness, employment, and financial self-sufficiency.

How we did it

From fall 2019 through summer 2021, we conducted an evaluation of the CRTP. In the process, we collected data through multiple methods and from multiple sources, including observations of program sessions, interviews with program stakeholders, focus groups with clients, programmatic data, three waves of client surveys, and interviews with a comparison group of people who did not participate in the CRTP.