WomenVenture: Career and Work Services

Bridges Out of Poverty: Strategies for Professionals and Communities

“Now I understand the people I’m serving.”

If your business, agency, or organization works with people from poverty, only a deeper understanding of their challenges—and strengths—will help you partner with them to create opportunities for success.

Bridges Out of Poverty represents a powerful tool for change. Based in part on Dr. Ruby Payne’s myth-shattering A Framework for Understanding Poverty, Bridges reaches out to the millions of service providers and businesses whose daily work connects them with the lives of people in poverty.

Bridges training contains case studies, detailed analysis, helpful charts and exercises, and specific solutions you and your organization can implement right now to:

• Redesign programs to better serve people in poverty

• Build skill sets for management to help guide employees

• Upgrade training for front-line staff like receptionists, case workers, and managers

• Improve treatment outcomes in health care and behavioral health care

• Increase the likelihood of moving from welfare to work

Participants will create a mental model of poverty, review poverty research, examine a theory of change and analyze poverty through the prism of the hidden rules of class, resources, family structure and language.

The seminar puts into words what many veteran professionals and community members have experienced. Throughout the workshop, participants will receive specific strategies for improving outcomes for people living in poverty, but the focus of the workshop is to provide a broad overview of concepts.

About the trainer, Jodi Pfarr:

Jodi Pfarr brings the knowledge gained from direct experience with not-for-profit organizations. Pfarr is Executive Director of Emma Norton Services, providing housing to single women with low incomes. Pfarr holds her Masters of Divinity, and is formerly a certified critical debriefer for the St. Paul Police Department. She is familiar with police culture and the challenges officers face. She sits on the board of the Downtown Minneapolis Neighborhood Association and has advised several city and county agencies on projects relating to these issues. Pfarr has been a consultant for aha! Process since 2001.