Research commissioned by SisterWorks identified a lack of partnerships between not-for-profits and businesses as a ‘missing piece of the broader puzzle’ of migrant, refugee and asylum seeker employment. To bridge these gaps, SisterWorks is implementing a dedicated partnerships and careers support approach to simultaneously work at an individual level with Sisters to address barriers to economic participation whilst also focusing on partnerships with social enterprises and businesses that offer paid employment opportunities.
This work will be led by the Partnerships Manager, who will look into opportunities to expand our pre-employment workshops to further sectors that are supportive of migrant and refugee women, taking into consideration the interests and skill sets of Sisters, as well as growth sectors in Victoria. A Careers and Recruitment Manager will provide individualised support to Sisters to identify their career aspirations and address the individual barriers to employment for each woman. This position will have a recruitment background with expertise in supporting people from CALD backgrounds and applying a gendered lens. Working closely with the Partnerships Manager and in partnership with external providers will provide an end-to-end approach to support Sisters in seeking and gaining employment.
This new approach builds on our successful Pathways Programs. These programs are dedicated to pre-employment training and support and were developed as part of our Second Chance Education partnership with UN Women. Our Pathways Programs have successfully accomplished aims of not only increasing access and benefit of high quality educational content and learning pathways, but also translating this into increased employment, livelihood and entrepreneurial opportunities.
Outcomes with this model are proven and programs are successful in supporting and creating employment pathways. This program will contribute to the following outcomes:
SisterWorks is currently developing and implementing a Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) framework across the organisation to ensure that the results and impact of our work are effectively captured and measured. This new approach will be supported by the MEL framework to assess the effectiveness of improving employment outcomes for the Sisters we support.
Thank you for encouraging us to sharpen our foundation’s focus on gender outcomes. We naturally gravitate to philanthropy for women and children’s programs but the gender focus wasn’t as sharp as it could be.
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