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. In this policy brief, we summarize the major findings 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. We also present recommendations for workforce development programs serving domestic violence survivors.

What we found

• We recommend that service providers that offer workforce development training should consider how to work with domestic violence survivors to address their unique needs, to ensure they can overcome the barriers to their financial and career goals. Considerations include providing some programming virtually and providing child care support to increase survivors’ ability to participate.
• Workforce development programs should consider creating robust systems for referring clients to other supportive services and conducting warm handoffs. Most programs are not able to meet all of survivors’ diverse needs themselves, so creating vetted and comprehensive databases of service providers would help programs fully support clients.
• Workforce development programs should consider increasing training, internship, and employment options for clients and providing paths into a wider range of professions to meet clients’ interests and to increase their chances of securing internships and employment.

Why this matters

Survivors of gender-based violence often face multiple barriers to employment that may not be addressed by traditional workforce development programs, including limited skills, gaps in their education and work histories, housing instability, and mental health and substance use needs.

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 multiple sources of data, 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.