Her Justice Social Work Manager exceeds goals

Women and families in crisis often face multiple, urgent issues.  For Her Justice clients, accessing legal remedies is a critical step in their journey to safety and self-sufficiency, but these remedies remain out of reach for clients who are overwhelmed by daily struggles to survive.  Often, one simple intervention or support can help stabilize a client enough that she is able to fight for justice now and begin planning her future.  That’s why we recently hired a full-time social worker, Veronica Gonzalez.

Veronica provides crisis intervention, safety planning and case management to clients, connecting them with providers of other services, and advocates for them with social services agencies to find employment or housing or obtain public assistance.  She is also relaunching our Client Network, a monthly gathering that brings clients together to learn a new skill and socialize in a safe, supportive environment.

Veronica also supervises several part-time social work interns, supports volunteer attorneys by helping them identify and address, through appropriate referrals, their clients’ non-legal needs.  Offering this social work resource reassures volunteer attorneys that their clients will receive the additional help they need and, most importantly, strengthens clients, providing them with stability and access to important services, thereby making them better able to manage the demands of the legal process, and achieve a more positive outcome.  This support is particularly critical for immigrant clients, as often they don’t take advantage of services offered at the City’s Family Justice Centers because either they are unaware of these services or hesitant to use them for cultural reasons or language barriers.

We’re thrilled to acknowledge that in her ongoing work to support our clients in their daily struggles to survive, Veronica has already surpassed her objectives for counseling and referral services.