Recently Women’s Way announced that it would be making a $240,000 funding commitment to  Women Against Abuse, Women Organized Against Rape and the Women’s Law Project to work collaboratively in the field of preventing and mitigating domestic and sexual violence.

The three organizations will receive $240,000 in funding as part of  Women’s Ways Action Partners grantmaking program from 2015-2017, and they will be working to implement a project designed to propel systems change in the way that City and State entities identify and respond to domestic violence. In addition, the Action Partners funding will also support general operations of the organizations.

With the funding, the three organizations will work collaboratively to to expand their efforts to engage health and human service providers, including the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disabilities Services (DBHIDS) of the City of Philadelphia, in order to ensure that domestic-violence screenings and trauma-informed interventions and referrals are integrated into systems that are likely to encounters survivors of gender-based violence.

“We are proud to support such impactful organizations working on some of the most pressing issues facing women and girls in our region,” said Romana Lee-Akiyama, director of Grantmaking and Diversity & Inclusion for Women’s Way, in a press release. “Their proposed collaboration will help ensure that more women get the services they need to live free from violence and thrive.”

The collaborative will also work together to develop a gender-based violence screening tool that identifies physical, emotional, sexual and economic violence, as well as measures the risk of lethality in interpersonal situations faced by individuals currently interfacing with health and human service agencies.

“No other metropolitan area in the United States has such a citywide coordinated response at the scale and depth that this plan advances. The tools developed with support from Women’s Way will enhance this work, and serve as a model resource for others seeking to address gender-based violence,” said Jeannine L. Lisitski, Women Against Abuse’s Executive Director.

Image via Women’s Way