FreeFrom Content Topic Results

In November 2020, FreeFrom launched the second round of their Safety Fund and prioritized distributing grants to queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and Latinx survivors. This report details what FreeFrom learned from the process. 

Before and Beyond Crisis is a roadmap for expanding our society’s response to gender-based violence beyond short-term crisis support. The roadmap makes survivor-informed recommendations for how every pillar of our society–from banks, hospitals, and schools to policymakers, employers, and other stakeholders–can help build a new ecosystem of support that addresses the reality of how GBV shows up in survivors’ lives. 

This report from FreeFrom examines stories, challenges, and solutions from over 50 service providers working in the IPV movement and provides a roadmap for what integrating financial work into the movement to end IPV could look like.

In this report, FreeFrom shares lessons learned from 1,000 survivors who received a Safety Fund grant in 2020 about how to build an effective and inclusive cash assistance program that will work for them. Overwhelmingly, survivors expressed that they need a program steeped in flexibility and trust.

Through their Safety Fund launched in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, FreeFrom collected data from 1,300 survivors in 36 states and Puerto Rico on their financial health, the financial cost of experiencing abuse, what their needs are right now, and how our society can best support them through the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. This report details these findings and serves as a call to action for greater investment in and support for the long-term financial security and safety of survivors everywhere.

Since March, the COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated the stark racial, gender, and socioeconomic health inequalities that have always existed in the U.S. This report makes seven policy recommendations for addressing the socio-economic effects of COVID-19 on survivors of domestic and sexual violence.