When families thrive, everyone succeeds.
Family-friendly workplaces make it easier for employees to balance their jobs and their home lives. These workplaces don’t just benefit individuals, they boost overall health, stability, and long-term success for families and communities alike.
But here’s the reality: experiencing sexual or intimate partner violence can have lasting effects on a person’s health, opportunities, and financial stability. Survivors often face extra challenges like missed work without pay, increased housing costs, and unexpected childcare expenses. These hardships hit especially hard for hourly or low-wage workers and for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) employees, who often have less access to family-friendly workplace benefits.
That’s why strong, equitable workplace supports like paid sick leave, paid family and medical leave, and childcare are so important. They not only help create economic security for survivors but also strengthen the overall well-being of our communities.
To help workplaces make that shift, we’re excited to introduce Families Thrive VA, a new website and resource hub designed to support the creation of more family-friendly policies across Virginia.
On the site, you’ll find:
- Clear language connecting violence prevention and economic security
- Policy recommendations in three key areas: paid sick leave, paid family and medical leave, and childcare
- Real-world examples and best practices from organizations across the country
- Downloadable brochures you can share with your team or community partners
Our hope is that this guide can serve as a starting point and a way for workplaces to begin centering the wellness and wholeness of their employees.
This work builds on the incredible foundation laid by the North Carolina Early Childhood Foundation and their Family Forward NC initiative. With their support, we began conversations with staff at sexual and domestic violence agencies across Virginia to learn what policies would make the biggest difference in their communities.
From those listening sessions and collaborative discussions, three priorities rose to the top: paid sick leave, paid family and medical leave, and access to childcare.
Each section of our website walks you through what these policies look like, why they matter, and how to make them work in practice. And this is just the beginning. We’ll keep updating the site with new research, case studies, and practical tools.
We’d love for you to explore Families Thrive VA, share it with your networks, and reach out if you’re interested in training or technical assistance. Together, we can build a Virginia where every family—and every survivor—has the support they need to thrive.
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