Creating Survivor-Supportive Workplaces: An Interview with Sonya Passi of FreeFrom
A few months ago, we saw a tweet thread from FreeFrom, an organization supporting domestic violence survivors, outlining why their organization chose to have a salary floor of $65,000. Naturally, our curiosity was piqued. We needed to learn more. As we read through their tweet thread of policies, we learned that they also had policies to ensure employees could leave abusive relationships and afford to take real vacations—policies we’d never seen in a nonprofit. So, we decided to reach out to FreeFrom to ask them how they created a survivor-supportive workplace with equitable policies. Here’s our interview:
Can you tell us a little bit about your organization, FreeFrom?
FreeFrom is a national organization whose mission is to dismantle the nexus between intimate partner violence and financial insecurity. Intimate partner violence is a systemic problem in our society which we are severely lacking the infrastructure to address, and our work is to create that infrastructure so that survivors have the resources and access they need to support their financial security, safety, collective power-building, and generational healing.
Recently, FreeFrom posted on Twitter that the organization has a salary floor of $65,000. Can you tell us what that means and why FreeFrom decided to have a minimum salary for all employees?
Having a salary floor of $65,000 means no one at our organization is paid less than an annual salary of $65,000. No matter the job position, description, qualifications, or education level, all employees at FreeFrom are paid a living wage of at least $65,000 annually. And that is just the base salary - it does not include benefits.
Sometimes we hear from employees that their organizations’ leadership believes paying workers salaries above minimum wage is unnecessary, too expensive, and/or that people don’t need that much money for entry-level jobs. Can you tell us your thoughts on why creating this salary floor was important to FreeFrom?
When folks ask me, “how can you afford to pay living wage salaries?”, I say, “we can’t afford not to.” Minimum wage work is bad economics. Our staff salaries are based upon the following principles:
The nonprofit movement is not sustainable and the high burnout and turnover that comes from underpaying staff costs nonprofits money in productivity gaps, rehiring costs, and training costs. We eliminate those by paying well in the first place.
FreeFrom is committed to hiring survivors. We know that healing is incredibly expensive - the CDC estimates that IPV will cost a female survivor an average of $104k. To cover these costs, heal and thrive, survivors need income above and beyond their daily expenses.
We are committed to hiring QTBIPOC folks and supporting their healing. Our team are often first-generation college-goers with no generational wealth to their name.
We know that most employees spend an average of 8 hours a week while at work worrying about money. Paying well is good for productivity.
FreeFrom also tweeted a thread of benefits for employees, including: unlimited menstrual leave, unlimited vacation with a $1,500 vacation stipend, four months of paid parental leave, 5% company match of their 401K retirement, a building wealth stipend of $2,000 in reimbursable fees for home buying or debt management solutions, a personal and professional growth reimbursement budget for things like financial coaching and gender-affirming hormone replacement, and gender-based violence paid and protected leave. And, during COVID, FreeFrom provided free supervision for your staff's kids during their "zoom classes" so staff didn't have to do two jobs at once. Wow! Can you tell us how you came to implement these benefits and why?
We are committed to creating a work culture in this country in which survivors can thrive because we know that there is no safety without financial security and there is no financial security without a source of income. That work for us starts within. We are always listening to our team and learning together about what would make our workplace more survivor-informed and more like a place where folks can thrive and do their best work.
As employers, we have a tremendous responsibility to create conditions in which our staff can be well. Gender-based violence is a systemic problem created and perpetuated by our society which means that all of our institutions have a part to play in interrupting and taking accountability for it. Just like our workplaces need to do more to address racism, they need to do more to create survivor-supportive workplaces.
We’ve never heard of a vacation stipend! We didn’t know employers would reimburse employees to take a vacation! What does that mean?
It is so important to us that our staff are well. We are not at all operating within or promoting a “burn and churn” model. And that means working to ensure that doesn’t happen.
We have had an unlimited vacation policy for several years now but, again, we are a team of survivors. That means many of us are spending all of our “disposable” income healing and surviving. It means most of us have a really new relationship with rest and self-care. So what we noticed was that a lot of folks weren’t taking the time off, even though it was available and encouraged. We added the vacation stipend to add that much more incentive.
FreeFrom is focused on supporting survivors of domestic violence, so you’re experts in what survivors need, which sometimes includes time off of work. Can you tell us about your employees’ gender-based violence paid and protective leave policy? Why should every organization have this?
60% of survivors lose their job as a result of being subjected to abuse. More often than not, this is because they have to choose between prioritizing their safety and showing up for work because they don’t have enough accrued time off. Moreover, if you need time to go to the hospital because of injuries or to court to get a restraining order or to look at apartments so that you can relocate, you are not “sick” nor are you on “vacation,” so you should not have to use up your sick leave and vacation time to take care of yourself. Gender-based violence is created and perpetuated by our society - implementing a policy that gives folks specific time off to deal with the impact of this type of harm is our way as an employer of recognizing our power and our responsibility as pillars of our society.
We are not the only workplace that has this policy - many others have adopted it including Berkshire Bank, Facebook, and Blue Shield of California. Our hope is to normalize this as a type of leave and ensure that survivors aren’t losing their source of income, aka their financial security, because they need to take care of themselves.
We’ve also never heard of a building wealth stipend. Tell us more about why FreeFrom decided to create that?
As I mentioned earlier, FreeFrom is committed to hiring QTBIPOC folks and survivors - in other words, folks overcoming the extraordinary cost of being harmed without a lot (if any) of generational wealth to support them.
In our efforts to support our staff in thriving and building long-term wellness, we created this benefit this year. It is money that staff can use for debt management, saving for a downpayment, retirement or for their children’s education, investing, etc.
What would you say to other leaders who are thinking of implementing similar policies? Was it a hard sell to funders?
We are very fortunate to be 100% privately funded and to have the support of funders who see the effectiveness of our work. At the end of the day, when folks invest in you, they want to know that you are spending that money effectively in service of the goal you are working towards. FreeFrom has accomplished so much in our first 4.5 years. When folks ask us how we are able to “do so much,” I explain that it begins with investing in our team’s wellness.
What’s your advice to other organizational leadership about providing living wages and benefits like these to their employees? What’s the upside?
I would say, if you find yourself getting defensive or shutting down when you hear about these ideas, investigate that feeling. One thing I hear a lot is, “well that’s what it was like for me when I was coming up so why should it be any easier for my employees.” What I want to say to folks when they say that is, “I’m so sorry that is what it was like for you. That must have been so difficult.” Or I hear, “but we are doing work we are passionate about - it’s not about money.” As long as folks doing work they are passionate about still have to pay the same rent and taxes as everyone else, it is about money.
Our society’s work culture is not healthy and most of us have had no choice but to accept it how it is. We’ve got a lot to heal at a collective, community, and individual level and that begins with each of us investigating what feelings of worth and shame and fear come up for us when we think about our own relationship to money.