Program Portfolio

The Joyful Heart Foundation is a national organization based in New York City. Our mission is to transform society’s response to sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse, support survivors’ healing, and end this violence forever. 

Through our Education programs and Advocacy initiatives, we are paving the way for innovative approaches to treating trauma, igniting shifts in the way the public views and responds to sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse, and reforming and advancing policies and legislation on the city, state, and federal levels to ensure justice for survivors. 

We do this by advising legislators and policy makers, strategically engaging with news media, presenting our work at events, and educating our community through our social media platforms and public education efforts.

Education

So much of the reason survivors carry the weight of these crimes alone is because we as a society don’t talk about them. And the perpetrators of these crimes rely on this silence—they depend on us to look the other way. If we talked about sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse more—and placed the blame on the perpetrators where it belongs—it’s likely that more survivors would come forward and that we, collectively, would meet them with the support and resources to help them heal more fully. 

We want to see an end to tolerance of and silence around these crimes. To meet these goals, our Education programs engage the public and turn up the volume on the issues of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse while also seeking to change attitudes that all-too-often blame victims. 

Advocacy

Through our Advocacy work, we seek to improve the criminal justice and community responses to violence and abuse through reforms to laws and policies. We work to bring more compassion and less judgment for survivors and to enhance their access to justice, if that's what they choose. 

Since 2010, Joyful Heart has made the elimination of the rape kit backlog a top priority through our End the Backlog initiative. Through ENDTHEBACKLOG.org, the only website wholly dedicated to ending the rape kit backlog, we shed light on the powerful results of testing rape kit evidence and draw attention to the political and financial changes necessary to achieve comprehensive rape kit reform.

It is estimated that there are hundreds of thousands of untested kits just sitting on shelves in police and crime lab storage facilities throughout the United States, each one a lost opportunity for healing and justice for a survivor. Through partnerships with federal, state and local government, non-profit organizations, law enforcement, advocates and survivors, we are working to bring attention, critical funding, and reforms to improve the criminal justice response to sexual violence.