I was told that our dream is for $700,000 more. That would be the bare minimum for us to have core funding to support who we're supporting and who we're missing. That's the huge thing. We could do as much as we could to create as safe a place as possible. I'm trying to provide my voice for that. We're missing a lot of people who are falling through the cracks.
Yes, I understand the need for all sorts of childhood mental health...but looking at all those different sections.... It's not just saying, “mental health”. Okay, we could mitigate a lot of those mental health things by putting the money into centres like ours. That's great. Let's do that. However, I think, a lot of times, we don't consider children who are coming from domestic abuse situations. It's not as simple as saying, “Leave the situation.”
“Well, can I go to a shelter if I have my children? Is the shelter low-barrier? What if I'm using substances to cope with that sort of stuff? What if my children are using substances to cope with it?" There's putting funding into that, as well. A lot of that could be getting people those basic necessities as they're leaving those situations.
Also, there are organizations people don't think of right away. We might think about putting it into mental health, but if it's put into different forms of things—into torture or into the work we're doing with sexual assault—chances are we might see decreases of further mental health disorders.