She co-founded the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project,[2] an inter-agency collaboration model used in all 50 states in the U.S. and over 17 countries.
[3] A leader in both the battered women's movement and the emerging field of institutional ethnography, she was the recipient of numerous awards including the Society for the Study of Social Problems Dorothy E. Smith Scholar Activist Award (2008) for significant contributions in a career of activist research.
She was active in institutional change work for battered women since 1975, and helped found the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in 1980.
She founded Praxis International in 1998 and was the chief author and architect of the Praxis Institutional Audit, a method of identifying, analyzing and correcting institutional failures to protect people drawn into legal and human service systems because of violence and poverty.
[citation needed] Pence's focus was on legislative efforts, legal reform projects, shelter and advocacy program development, and training programs for judges, probation officers, law enforcement officers, and human service providers.