Amanda Nardozzi

I really attribute my success to having a supportive family. Throughout my career, from coming into law enforcement when there weren't many women in the field, to completing my advanced degrees while working, to now doing this critical work in the nonprofit sector, having that family support has been essential to achieving my goals and being able to continue serving victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse.

The best career advice I ever received was to pick a goal and stick to the goal. You ask yourself where do you see yourself in 5 years, and you plan and adjust based on that, but you never change the goal. You just change different ways at achieving it, depending on where you are in your life. This advice has guided me through my 25-year law enforcement career and into my current work in the nonprofit sector.

It's hard work, you know, it's very difficult work. It could affect you, so you need to make sure that you're taking time for self-care. Self-care is so important in many industries, and we as women are never told, well, you have to take care of yourself, it's always somebody else. So even if you're in tech or healthcare, or a field like this, or legal, you still have to take that time to take care of yourself, because you can't take care of others. Especially in our field, you can't take care of the people that we're serving if you're not taking care of yourself.

Some of the challenges that we're facing right now is funding. We've had a significant amount of federal cuts. But those opportunities are to look at how we gain revenue in different ways, you know, beyond simple fundraising, reaching beyond the donor. How do we sustain? So there's plenty of opportunity out there to meet additional businesses, provide different modalities. One of our partner agencies became, they wound up getting their Department of Health license in order to charge for services, for clinical health services now, so that's a billable expense. We all work under the model that all of our services are free, so anybody can come here and they don't have to pay, they don't have to have insurance, but we're looking at different ways and different streams. Since we've had to get creative, I think those opportunities have presented themselves, and they will continue to present themselves as people know that we're losing funding, because we provide a really critical service.

The values most important to me in my work and personal life are honesty, integrity, and compassion. These values have guided me throughout my 25-year career in law enforcement and now in my work supporting victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse in the nonprofit sector. They're essential when working with people who are coming in with a lot of trauma and need to trust that they're in safe hands.