Community Collaboration
The Women’s Fund is working collaboratively to ensure that together, we are creating a community where women are free from violence–including sex trafficking, domestic violence, sexual harassment and sexual assault.
Survivor Voices Amplified
We are dedicated to ensuring that we have a survivors’ lens on community-wide protocols, agency policies, materials and resources created for victims. Survivors help to inform trainings for professionals; testify for bills and identify services needed in our community.
The Women’s Fund provides funding to Survivors Rising, a survivor-led organization, to provide technical leadership in the community – by survivors, for survivors. Research indicates long-term positive outcomes for survivors who are connected to their peers. Mentored by others who have similar experiences, survivors have a consistent resource giving them the ability to move forward.
Learn more from survivors in Nothing About Us Without Us.
Set Aside for Sex Trafficking Survivors
In 2018, the Nebraska Legislature passed LB 1132, which allows trafficking survivors to come forward and have convictions, for crimes they were forced to commit, set aside and the public records sealed.
More than 90% of trafficking survivors have criminal convictions because of crimes they were forced to commit while victimized. These convictions continue to restrain survivors, preventing them from seeking employment opportunities, obtaining housing and rebuilding their lives. We will propose legislation that will allow survivors to apply to have these convictions set aside and sealed, giving them the opportunity to move past their victimization.
Harsher penalties and set aside legislature are parts of the solution. The Women’s Fund is committed to building provider capacity, increasing education and awareness and creating networks for effective system changes led by strengthening survivor leadership.
Community Response Teams
The Women’s Fund collaborates with a number of agencies to continuously assess and enhance how our community responds to domestic and sexual violence. By building relationships and gathering and analyzing local data, we bring research and best practices based solutions to some of the largest issues in our community. In doing this, we provide leadership to two local teams and their many projects.
The Douglas County’s Domestic Violence Community Response Team (CRT) and the Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) are committed to improving victim safety and holding offenders accountable. These teams constantly strive to improve how each agency responds to these crimes. They do this by sharing information, identifying issues, providing training and changing practices to keep victims safe and hold offenders accountable.
Agencies involved focus on a broad range of issues in criminal justice and civil systems, the child welfare system, advocacy, healthcare and other ‘systems’ that impact domestic and sexual violence victims and have contact with offenders.