Who We Serve

 

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.

 

Why Negotiation?

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.

 
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Our Signature Program

 

Our multi-week negotiation courses are designed specifically for people from historically marginalized communities.

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.

Additional Services:

  • 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

Negotiation Ambassadors Program

 

A community where select former participants discuss their negotiation successes and challenges and help shape future negotiation courses.

 

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.

Exciting Ambassadors Program with Life Pieces to Masterpieces

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.

 

Our unique curriculum is available for licensing


Incorporate Negotiation Works’ role plays into your negotiation courses.

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


Deliver the Negotiation Works program in your community

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.


For more information about these licensing opportunities, contact us here.

Recent Accomplishments

 

Since early 2021, we have expanded our staff, created new programs, and developed more teaching tools to reach a broader audience.

 

As the public health conditions from COVID-19 began to improve in 2021, we continued to grow and adapt to the changing times. A few of our accomplishments since January 2021 are listed below:

  • 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)