StrengthUnited has been awarded a grant of $25,000 from the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls. This first-of-its-kind funding initiative is dedicated to Women’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Women and girls have been disproportionately impacted economically by the ongoing pandemic. The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly jobs report shows that while men have now recouped all their labor force losses since February 2020, more than 1 million fewer women are in the labor force since February 2020.
StrengthUnited provides critical services for women and girls in our community at a time when they are most vulnerable, having survived abuse, assault, and maltreatment. The physical and psychological trauma is all too often exacerbated by financial abuse, and women struggle to recover and support their families.
“Calls to our crisis hotline increased 42% since the beginning of the pandemic,” says Kim Goldberg-Roth, LMFT, Executive Director of StrengthUnited and the Mitchell Family Counseling Center. “At the same time, financial abuse and insecurity have multiplied the impact of the physical and psychological trauma women have experienced.”
StrengthUnited can help women survivors from traditionally marginalized groups achieve economic resiliency through support services, financial literacy programs, access to resources, and more. Through this grant, StrengthUnited will create a comprehensive outreach campaign, focused on providing cultural- and language-specific information, in order to change the conversation about help seeking, featuring stories from other survivors, how their lives have positively changed, and how their financial self-efficacy has improved.
StrengthUnited, a chartered center of CSUN’s Michael D. Eisner College of Education, has served the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys for more than 35 years, providing crisis intervention, support, and prevention services for those who have experienced trauma as survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and child maltreatment, while also training hundreds of new mental health professionals to serve our community. For more information, visit www.StrengthUnited.org.