Pathways to Sustainable Employment: Bridging Community Justice and Social Enterprise Programs for Criminalized Women

Within the context of the Canadian criminal justice system, women face significant challenges when striving to secure and retain employment due to structural stigma and punitive practices. These challenges form barriers to accessing employment programs or sustainable career paths. To explore these barriers, a qualitative research study including semi-structured interviews and focus groups incorporating an arts-based project was conducted with fourteen women who navigate such obstacles. The arts-based experience mapping exercise served as a foundational generative method to magnify the women’s experiences and validated the transformative contribution of arts-based methods to research processes. Through examination of the intersections established between community-based justice organizations and social entrepreneurship programs, the participants determined how bridging these systems together can support criminalized women to attain sustainable economic security. The constructivist grounded theory analysis reinforced an urgent need for the justice sector to shift from existing institutional-based employment program models to sustainable community-based configurations. The findings from this analysis informed the author’s creation of the Comoptigen Theory and Program Implementation Framework, which provides principles and program components for guiding the creation of a bridged employment program for criminalized women. This study advances the discourses about how restorative trauma-informed approaches and community-based justice development initiatives can contribute to strengthening the social economy in Ontario. Further outcomes of the research include concrete recommendations and practices for how community justice non-profit organizations can deliver employment programs integrating trauma-informed models of collective care.