Women over age 50 are the fastest-growing share of employed people in the United States. Citing those statistics, Pennsylvania Women Work is taking steps to encourage the trend.

To support PWW’s efforts, the Champions in Action program of financial group Citizens, along with Trib Total Media, has delivered a $50,000 grant to support the Next Chapter Careers initiative of the workforce development organization.

Mark Rendulic, Pittsburgh market president for Citizens, presented PWW executive director Kristin Ioannou with the check Thursday.

“It’s an important piece of work you do,” he said at the ceremony, held at PWW’s office in Bloomfield. “It’s something that we believe is really important.”

Founded more than 30 years ago, PWW serves state residents — and not exclusively women — with a number of programs to help them find employment. Their services range from career coaching to mentorship programs to more intensive workshops and more.

Ioannou said that the organization has helped more than 75,000 people in its history.

In remarks at the event, she said that PWW “focuses on supporting women as they travel through the journey of looking for a new job, whether they have recently become unemployed, maybe they pause in their career or maybe they were unexpectedly downsized.”

From recent high school graduates to executives with decades of experience, PWW has seen the width and breadth of the workforce.

“What makes us different is that we have a one-on-one, individualized approach,” she said.

Ioannou told the story of a woman she called Mary, whom she had met at a recent event. Mary is an executive who had worked more than 30 years with the same company, loved her job and intended to retire there — until her entire division was outsourced and she was downsized.

“To say she was devastated is an understatement,” Ioannou said. “When women like Mary come to our organization, what they find is a community of people who really support them through the process.”

Shanyn Winnowski is manager of participant learning at PWW, where she provides career coaching to incoming clients.

“Our participants reach out through our website and sign up for a coaching call. So each day I speak to different participants,” she said. “I just let them start talking, tell me anything they feel I need to know.”

After hearing the new clients’ stories, she provides recommendations for different paths and services that the organization can offer. “Every meeting is different. Every interaction is different.”

She’s spoken to women who received college degrees, dropped out of the workforce to start families and then had to re-enter years later by choice or necessity; women who have been in careers for a long time and are forced to change paths for any number of reasons; and women who are looking at the prospect of job hunting for the first time at the age of 50 or over.

Older women are a large percentage of the population Winnowski sees, and “I have a soft spot for them because I see so much success in what they’ve already done.”

In addition to the $50,000 grant, the Champions in Action honorees receive volunteer support from Citizens. The Champions in Action program has existed for 24 years and has granted more than $12 million to organizations with annual budgets of under $5 million.

“We are proud to join Citizens in honoring PA Women Work’s commitment to empowering women,” said Jennifer Bertetto, president and CEO of Trib Total Media. “With programs like Next Chapter Careers, PA Women Work is helping to ensure more women have the tools, confidence, and connections to take the next step toward long-term self-sufficiency and thrive in today’s workforce.”

“Today, in particular, workforce development is a major initiative for us,” said Rendulic, the Citizens executive. “The connectivity to the health of the economy, which is important to us, and the health of the community is a kind of natural connection.”

Pennsylvania Women Work’s website is pawomenwork.org.

Expanding access to play-based therapy and intervention

Specialists at these centers use the Early Start Denver Model, which combines applied behavior analysis therapy, or ABA, and child development strategies in a play-based format to help kids with social interaction, communication, motor skills and coping mechanisms.

“Basically, we engage with the child in a fun, play-based routine the same way that a mom or a dad or a caregiver would play with their child,” said Dr. Ian Goldstein, co-founder and CEO at Soar. “And then we teach the child skills like speech, language — whatever the skill may be — using ABA-based principles.”

A young child with autism may get, on average, between 15 and 30 hours of therapy per week for one or two years before graduating from the center and moving on to the school system, where they can ideally access other long-term support, Goldstein said.

“This is meant to be an acceleration program to help children build skills at that time of life when their brain has its greatest neuroplasticity and capacity for change,” he said.

The CHOP-Soar centers will also coordinate children’s care with other specialists in the area who can treat them for additional medical and psychological needs. This can be especially helpful for families who struggle to navigate these complexities on their own, Goldstein said.

“Getting the services in the first place is a hurdle, then trying to coordinate them for one child is very, very hard to do,” he said. “So, having this partnership should allow us to really be able to collaborate for those kids who have higher-needs cases of autism.”