The funding will be used to seed the establishment of a survivor advocacy within the peak, by funding paid employment roles for survivor advocates (women with lived experience of family violence), who will use their lived experience to inform the design, delivery, and evaluation of responses to FV and contribute to public conversations about FV including community awareness raising and media representation. This project will enable the peak to scale the work currently underway with the implementation of the Family Violence Experts by Experience Framework, that will embed the lived experience of victim survivors into every area of our work as the peak body for specialist family violence services in Victoria. The funding will resource:
• Five survivor advocate consultant positions x 0.4 FTE for 12 months
• One project coordinator and peer support worker x 0.5 FTE for 12 months
• The development and delivery of peer led survivor advocacy training and intentional peer support
• The development of a corporate FV awareness raising campaign, Are You Safe At Home?, including workplace awareness raising events and a workplace champions program.
• Provision of support and coaching focused on professional development, FV recovery and financial capability building.
This project addresses the need to increase and improve engagement with survivor advocates (people with lived experience of family violence) in the design, delivery, and evaluation of services by situating and developing a mature survivor advocacy consultancy within the peak body. The consulting agency will be able to provide professional development, promotion, coordination, and support for advocates in the provision of internal and external consulting and co-production services. At the same time, the project will support the longer-term economic recovery of victim survivors by proactively scoping, developing, and delivering meaningful employment opportunities and career pathways for survivor advocates within a central part of the family violence system. This approach will also address the perennial challenge of funding a long-term survivor advocacy program by developing a fee-for-service business as a social enterprise, and leveraging the Peak’s membership, position within the broader human services system and relationships with government, community, and private sectors. By centralising this function within the Peak, we can pool the resources across the sector to ensure more consistent and best practice engagement with survivor advocates is established and work with survivor advocates to further develop models of survivor advocacy engagement, professional development, and career pathways.
The project will be governed by a survivor advocate advisory group, who will develop an outcomes measurement framework to ensure the employment agency is established in line with the principles of the Family Violence Experts by Experience Framework, and this will include establishing indicators and a measurement methodology. The project coordinator will undertake outcomes measurement and deliver reporting to the advisory group on a quarterly basis. The outcomes of this evaluation and reporting will be shared with DV Vic's membership, as part of ongoing sector capacity building work we are leading as the peak related to embedding the voice of lived experience in the sector.
If we are to achieve gender equality we will need to pull every lever; being more intentional about bringing women into focus supports smart investment decisions. Philanthropic dollars are limited; it is investments in women and girls that bring the greatest opportunity for social change.
Also known as Australian Women Donors Network (ABN: 28 141 197 471), Australians Investing in Women is a registered charity endorsed by the Australian Tax Office as a deductible gift recipient (DGR1) under a special listing, all donations over $2 are tax deductible.