06/23/2025
IAF grants promote long-term sustainability, as shown by the many former grantee organizations that are thriving decades after graduating from IAF funding.
♀️ For example, Núcleo de Apoyo a la Mujer (NAM), an organization we first funded in 1994, is now a nationally-recognized women’s organization reducing domestic violence in the Dominican Republic. NAM provides direct legal and psychosocial services to survivors. Its team also trains representatives of public institutions and businesses on violence prevention and women’s rights, using information from survivors to help them develop more data-driven laws and policies.
🕊️ We invested a total of $528,000 in NAM. It used the funding to help community groups support around 6,500 legal cases, in collaboration with police and the public prosecutor’s office.
✝️ It also reached 15,750 people with information about violence prevention through workshops, talks, awareness-raising walks, and other public activities, in coordination with the Women’s Church Foundation and Christian Workers’ Movement. NAM provided psychological services to 2,447 survivors of violence (95% female), many of whom went on to become community mentors.
☮️ Finally, NAM also strengthened civil society responses to violence and launched the Dominican Republic’s first peer support organization for survivors of intimate partner and domestic violence, Fundación Mujeres Empoderadas Abriendo Caminos.
⚖️ According to the public prosecutor’s office, working with NAM helped increase early reporting, especially among younger women. It also helped public institutions provide more comprehensive and specialized care and service to survivors of violence. For example, with guidance from NAM, the public prosecutor’s office got a specialist to handle sexual crimes.