Tansi, everyone. Thank you very much for asking me to speak.
I want you to know that I've also been given the privilege and the responsibility of carrying the Cree name that means “Eagle woman who watches over the sacred fire”. I take that name and that responsibility very seriously.
As a visitor to the lands of the Six Nations peoples, I want to acknowledge the fact that this meeting is taking place on aboriginal lands, and I want to thank the Haudenosaunee people for the use of their lands for us to come together. All of us, I'm assuming, are visitors here.
I also want to thank the Standing Committee on the Status of Women for the opportunity to speak to the committee on this important issue. In particular, I'd like to thank the committee for moving their venue so the room could be accessible and for ensuring that a taxi could bring me to the door of the Parliament Buildings, as I wouldn't have been able to speak to you if this hadn't occurred.
I am the national chair of the Disabled Women's Network of Canada. On this important day, the 75th anniversary of the first female MP in Canada, I speak to you for the very first time. It's the very first time that a national organization of women with disabilities has ever been able to speak to this august body. It's an amazing fact, I think.
I'm going to tell you a little bit about DAWN Canada, assuming that perhaps many of you don't know what and who we are. DAWN Canada is a national cross-disability network of self-identified women with disabilities, and we have representation in all areas of Canada.
In 1985, a small group of women with disabilities who were part of a national umbrella group, which later became the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, met in Ottawa after they had trouble getting women-specific issues addressed in an all male umbrella group--not too surprising. This historic meeting lasted three days, during which the women identified a number of issues of priority for them, including violence against women with disabilities, mothering, self-image, and employment. After the meeting, the women went home and started to organize locally, and grassroots groups sprang up in many locations.
The group applied for and received funding to conduct research on these four priority issues. This research was groundbreaking and served to make Canada a leader in this area worldwide. In 1992, we became a national non-profit and continued conducting research on issues that women told us were important to them. We developed ethical guidelines for research that ensured our research would always be based on grassroots involvement and would identify policy and organizational changes and would always have an impact on the women who were involved and the women in our network.
This research was a venue where we could work on community development. Since women with disabilities are in large part isolated, lack social and organizing skills, and face discrimination and huge barriers to participation in society, both internal self-confidence and external accessibility barriers, community development is an essential piece of our network.
In 1998 we received core funding from ODI and hired a national coordinator, and our focus changed, in part to follow government funding to focus on employment and IT skills building. Another change was a gradual loss of our grassroots connections and community development. Unfortunately, in 2003 we lost our core funding and have been working to rebuild since then.
One of our stronger affiliates, Pacific DAWN, which covers the B.C.-Yukon, worked locally with a Vancouver office to build their network. With their support and additional guidance, we overcame our barriers to participating--actually, barriers that are even within the women's movement--and after ten years finally got to the point we could apply for regional funding.
This very successful regional project focused on renewal and rebuilding, and it's almost complete. In fact, we just held our annual general meeting a week ago, and that affiliate is finally, after ten years, a non-profit.
This pilot was used nationally to apply for funding for the first time from Status of Women Canada's national office by our national group. We've just completed a six-month project designed to rebuild our governance, identify current priorities for action, and renew our board.
We have taken the opportunity to forward you our three strategic plans for action over the next 18 months. At least I hope Michelle was able to get them to everyone on the committee.
We've also just received a grant of almost $200,000 from Status of Women to carry out work on two of the priorities: violence against women and children with disabilities, and developing long-term housing options for women with disabilities.
Our third strategic plan has to do with employment, and we're seeking funding elsewhere with that.
With the additional help of the national office, we have rebuilt our relationship with ODI, the Office for Disability Issues, and we are in the process of reapplying for core funding with them.
We agree with the words of Minister Oda that it's time to put money into taking direct action for women. However, we disagree with the idea that funding places such as the YWCA or the Salvation Army will be of much benefit for our members.
We also disagree with the idea that all the research has been done. Indeed it has not. In reviewing the most recent Stats Canada document on violence against women, I found that we were not even mentioned. Nor were we identified as a group needing more research, despite our own research and that of others worldwide that identifies violence against women with disabilities as a silent epidemic.
For some of our communities, such as deaf women, we have not even asked the questions about what they need to be safe in a way that they can answer. Working across the barriers of language, culture, disability, and a lack of resources for ASL, or American sign language, reaching and connecting to deaf women, and supporting them to even begin organizing is a monumental task, but it's one we're committed to.
We are also very pleased that Minister Oda recognized that some communities of women face additional barriers to participation and will require additional help from SWC staff. However, we strongly disagree with the restriction by Minister Oda to the four communities of women who can receive additional help from SWC offices.
Indeed, I would have to say that our needs are just as huge if not larger than those of the four groups mentioned. Both provincially and nationally, we have required large investments of time and resources by SWC staff, in order to overcome the many barriers we face. Despite the many issues we face regarding participation, we just don't make the cut and are consistently left off the list. We would request that Minister Oda revisit this restriction with an eye to adding women with disabilities to the list.
We're pleased that Minister Oda kept the grants and contributions area untouched. However, by closing the offices and cutting staff, the impact on our network will be enormous. It takes time and support to work past our extremely low self-esteem and self-confidence, and often our low literacy levels. For deaf women, the average literacy level is grade three.
It takes time to work past our mistrust, bureaucratic intimidation, and our own internal beliefs that we just don't matter. It will take resources to be able to travel so much further to gain the support and guidance of new staff—that is, if we're actually even allowed to get the support. Time and resources we don't have.