I'm wearing two hats today. I'm the president of the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres. I represent 26 rape and sexual assault centres across Ontario. We work primarily in advocacy. Similar to what Heidi's saying, we try to encourage conversation, awareness, education, and policy change in order that our communities better respond to the needs of sexual abuse and assault survivors.
I'm also representing a local sexual assault centre in Hamilton. That's the Sexual Assault Centre (Hamilton and Area). Next year is our association's 40th anniversary. We were the third rape crisis centre in Canada. I'm very proud of our community for that.
We provide services to men and women survivors of childhood and adult sexual assault. We have a 24-hour support line. We spend a lot of time doing prevention work. As Heidi was mentioning, a lot of time is spent in Grade 9 health classes with the boys and the girls, talking about consent and relationships, to be able to help them get the language and learn how to do this, because we don't teach our young folks how to do this. We also do specialized programming with newcomer communities because we know there's a huge stigma for them to walk through the door of a sexual assault centre. We try to do bridging programs to make it easier for folks to walk through our door.