“I will use what I've learned to be more mindful of my daily interactions and more considerate and realistic about getting to solutions with others.”
– Imani | Together We Bake | 2023

Negotiation Works serves members of historically marginalized communities in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The constituency groups who benefit from our services include individuals currently incarcerated, returning to the community from prison, experiencing homelessness, living in domestic violence shelters, and dealing with other life challenges such as long-term unemployment or recovery from substance abuse.
“I will use what I've learned to be more mindful of my daily interactions and more considerate and realistic about getting to solutions with others.”
– Imani | Together We Bake | 2023
“This course gave me more incentive to advocate for myself in every situation.”
- “Donna” | Together We Bake | 2023
“One of Calvary's core values is empowerment. Learning negotiation skills helps our women to be more independent and self-sufficient and to accomplish their personal goals because it gives them the courage to know that they can advocate for themselves and work through difficult conversations.”
- Katie Gregson | Manager of Education and Programs, Calvary Women’s Services
“The instructors did an excellent job with making everyone feel welcomed so that we could be open and honest on how to handle real life challenges.”
- Portia, 35 | The WIRE | Fall 2021
“I have used negotiations for some time with my daughter's mother, however since I've begun taking this course, our co-parenting has been much more successful.”
- Sa’id, 38 | Georgetown Pivot Program | Fall 2021
“I believed I was a good negotiator before this class. Now that I have proper training I'm ready for any type of negotiation. I won't go into negotiations blindly anymore. Instead, I'll spend time beforehand figuring out possible interests, options, and BATNAs so that I can go in and get the best outcome for all parties.”
- Maya, 32 | Georgetown Pivot Program | Fall 2021
“The biggest thing this class taught me is that calmness and empathy go a long way in helping to negotiate and resolve conflict.”
- Michelle, 50 | Georgetown Pivot Program | 2021
“In this competitive world, you will find that everybody wants the best outcome, so you have to be prepared, and this class has done just that.”
- Samantha, 34 | Calvary Women's Services | 2020
“I am not an assertive person. This class has taught me that I have the right to negotiate. It’s exciting to learn that I can negotiate.”
- “Carrie,” 49 | Together We Bake | 2019
“This class has taught me to negotiate, communicate, understand, and listen.”
"TIFFANY," 28 | SOUTHEAST MINISTRY | 2020
“This class is a refresher course for getting back into life.”
- “SHELLY,” 60 | CALVARY WOMEN’S SERVICES | 2021
“Teaching with Negotiation Works has been wonderful and fulfilling. The participants really want to learn and put so much of themselves and their own life experiences into the class. By the end, many of them already saw the benefits of the course’s strategies for handling disputes in their lives. I’ve never had a teaching experience before where I could so clearly see the impact of the material on my students’ lives.”
- Kathryn Menefee | Class Instructor
“The class helped me a lot. It showed me what factors are successful in negotiations and gave me a detailed understanding of the process.”
"Mariah", 33 | Calvary Women's Services | 2020
“I used to either yell or shut down when faced with a conflict. Now I know how to fully prepare before I go make my case. I am calmer and I use communication skills.”
- Chelsee, 26 | Together We Bake | 2020
Individuals in the communities that we serve need strong negotiation skills as they work to rebuild their lives. Negotiating effectively is critical to their interactions with potential employers, landlords, case managers, family, and friends, yet many have not had access to the self-advocacy and conflict resolution skills that would make them effective negotiators in their endeavors to overcome obstacles and get their lives in order.
Many of these individuals come primarily from low-income communities of color which, throughout history, have been marginalized by collective experiences of housing and employment insecurity, poverty, mass incarceration, and discrimination. Negotiation Works, recognizing the value of each individual confronting these challenges, offers its services through the lens of empowerment in an effort to repair the harm generated by racial injustice over time.
Negotiation Works offers tools community members can use to address their complex needs and empowers them to navigate these situations with confidence and lead fulfilling, productive lives. When the members of a community have the tools to advocate for themselves and negotiate with each other, they are better able to achieve shared goals, create lasting relationships, and improve the stability of the community as a whole.
Negotiation Works provides innovative negotiation and self-advocacy training to empower people emerging from difficult and often traumatic situations—incarceration, homelessness, addiction, domestic violence—so they can more effectively navigate everyday challenges and live their next chapters confidently and productively.
Our trauma-sensitive curriculum offers strategies for handling negotiations and conflict, such as considering various perspectives, taking initiative to achieve one’s goals, identifying multiple options, and using active listening. We design role plays and scenarios drawn from the real-life experiences of our participants–including security deposit returns, custody disputes, and conflicts with co-workers–to help them solidify and practice these skills.
We provide these negotiation skills courses for the clients of our community-based partner organizations, tailoring each course by choosing and customizing scenarios relevant to the group. Led by staff members and trained volunteer instructors, our courses typically consist of four to eight classes, depending on the needs and preferences of the partner.
Course participants jointly craft their own set of negotiation strategies and tips for resolving disputes, which reinforces the basic lessons, supports their learning, and helps them generalize the strategies to all areas of their lives. Participants receive a Certificate of Completion at the conclusion of each multi-session course.
Professional development programs on negotiation skills and strategies for nonprofit staff
Short workshops on negotiation strategies
Curriculum licensing and train-the-trainers courses for organizations and institutions interested in replicating our programs in their communities using their own trainers
We offer an Ambassadors program for former class participants that provides opportunities for ongoing training, community-building, and outreach.
The Ambassadors meet as a group approximately every eight weeks, where they share personal negotiation successes and challenges, assist with developing class scenarios, and engage in community outreach activities. The Ambassadors have published several newsletters with their own negotiation stories, successes, and tips, which you can read here.
Their current outreach efforts focus on providing conflict resolution training for youth. Reflecting our organization’s commitment to promoting participants’ financial well-being and workplace readiness, we provide the Ambassadors with professional development and leadership opportunities and small stipends for their participation and engagement in this program.
In 2025, we guided the Ambassadors in a project that met their goals to share their knowledge about conflict resolution with young people in the community. With the assistance of a high school educator, we provided training for the Ambassadors to help them learn facilitation skills. At the same time, we began seeking potential partners for an Ambassador-led youth program and, together with the Ambassadors, developed a multi-activity youth-focused negotiation skills workshop. In April 2025, a group of Ambassadors had the privilege of delivering this negotiation training workshop to a group of high school boys taking part in Life Pieces to Masterpieces, a comprehensive out-of-school character and leadership program for Black and Brown boys. The workshop was a huge success. The high schoolers said that they gained listening and communication skills from the workshop, and the Ambassadors reported increasing their leadership skills and professional experience in curriculum development and workshop facilitation.
Negotiation Works Ambassadors, volunteers and staff prepare to share negotiation skills and self-advocacy training with teenage participants in the Life Pieces to Masterpieces Saturday Academy.
If you are a negotiation teacher looking to enhance your coursework with role plays that involve real-life scenarios faced by a wide variety of individuals, you can add our content to your own classes. We offer a suite of our unique, tested role plays through the Dispute Resolution Research Center (DRRC) at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Business. These role plays would be of particular interest to students exploring ways to incorporate social impact or social justice work in their professional careers, as they offer avenues for students to build skills to counsel and support future clients or other stakeholders in effective self-advocacy, problem-solving, and dispute resolution.
Available exercises include: The Birthday Celebration, Child Visitation Dispute, Difficult Conversations Vignettes, and Security Deposit Return
If you want to replicate our program in your community, using your own trainers, you can license our curriculum. We work with you to design a specific set of lessons and role plays to meet the needs of your clients and provide all the teaching materials and resources for the trainees. Our licensing agreements are paired with a comprehensive “train-the trainers” program so that your staff will be ready to teach the lessons. A fuller description of our curriculum licensing services can be found here.
Presented Bringing Negotiation Training to Underserved Communities at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program's Fall 2022 Research Seminar Series on Intersectional Perspectives on Gender & Negotiation
Hired a Program and Communications Coordinator to manage our remote and onsite programming and ramp up our marketing and community engagement efforts, and a Staff Instructor to teach and manage a portfolio of our programs
Developed customized professional development workshops for several of our community partners, including for violence interrupters working with Father Factor, through which we offered strategies they can use to address simmering community conflicts before they escalate into violence
Created and published multiple editions of ‘The Negotiator Speaks,’ our Ambassador-led newsletter
Developed a customizable refresher course focused on workplace-related scenarios for our program participants who request additional support after completing our course
Initiated a long-term evaluation process to determine how participants use negotiation strategies when they are at least six months past taking our program
Streamlined our lesson plans to make them more accessible to our volunteer instructors and better aligned with best practices in educational pedagogy
Developed new role plays and teaching materials, including a graphic guide to help participants visualize and internalize the negotiation process more tangibly
Participated in a competitive process and were chosen to take part in a Capacity Building Training Project sponsored by the DC Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants (OVSJG)