Thank you very much for your invitation.
My name is Shari Graydon, and my role as president of the Women’s Future Fund is unpaid. I tell you this so you can appreciate that my goal is to make the organization obsolete, because once it's no longer necessary, I will have a lot more time to stick to my knitting.
The Women’s Future Fund is a coalition of national organizations working to further women's equality. Our member groups include a number of those you've already heard from, such as CRIAW, LEAF, and others. The mandate of the coalition is to develop an alternative source of financial support to make women's organizations less dependent on government. Understanding that this wouldn't happen overnight, Status of Women Canada assisted in the development of the Women's Future Fund as a means of accessing workplace giving programs, much as the United Way does. Because such success takes years to build, the agency had pledged to support the coalition through its start-up phase. But the new guidelines have rendered us as well as many of our member organizations ineligible for funds, thus cutting us off at the knees just when we were starting to build and realize significant returns on the investment.
Last year we doubled our revenues and donors. This year we were poised to do so again. Our progress has also been hampered by the fact that although Canadians overwhelmingly support the goal of women's equality, they believe that ensuring human rights is the government's job.
Let me put this in context. No one says the Department of Justice should raise its own revenues. Everybody recognizes that simply making murder illegal doesn't stop the violence. As long as injustice exists, we still need a Department of Justice. As long as inequality exists, we still need a department like the Status of Women. Asking the groups that do the work funded by Status of Women to raise their own money makes about as much sense as asking the Department of Justice to set up its own bingo hall. Yet that's essentially what the Women’s Future Fund is trying to do.
My unpaid work with the Women’s Future Fund is made possible by the fact that I earn enough money as an author and speaker to be able to volunteer and pay taxes. As do all Canadians, I want to know that my tax dollars are being spent responsibility. I have enormous confidence that the moneys awarded to the Women’s Future Fund members deliver an exceptional return. We leverage enormous in-kind support in volunteer labour, and our work is relevant not just to women's lives but to Canada's economic prosperity. UN research from around the world makes it clear that social equality translates into economic prosperity. When women are educated, given genuine choice about child rearing and employment, treated with respect, and paid fairly, the entire society benefits. All taxpayers suffer from the barriers and biases that continue to keep many women from fully contributing their skills and knowledge to our economy. We should all be outraged that instead of spending millions of dollars annually to prevent violence against women, we are spending billions annually on the aftermath of it.
John F. Kennedy once noted that things do not happen; they are made to happen. The equality gains that we've achieved in the last century--and there have been many--exemplify this. Governments didn't simply decide to grant women the vote, or declare us persons. Women's advocacy made that happen. Over the past 30 years, the member groups of the Women’s Future Fund have also made divorce and sexual assault laws fairer, improved the matrimonial rights of aboriginal women, secured maternity benefits and fair pay. We lament that the current government doesn't wish to continue funding this work, which benefits millions of Canadians. If the goal is to make us obsolete, at least part of the solution is to ensure that women have parity in the House of Commons, where the decisions affecting us are being made. If our voices, experiences, and realities were integral to the identification of priorities, the formulation of policy, and the allocation of funds, then our groups would become much less relevant.
I thought I had ten minutes; that is what the correspondence I got said. So I will skip and hope to have the opportunity to come back to some of what I would have said.
In conclusion, because progress doesn't come from deleting the word “equality”, I ask you all to imagine that, in declaring that equality has been achieved, Minister Oda had somehow tripped an invisible balancing wire and men were suddenly faced with the same odds that currently confront women, and my nephews and your sons were now forced to anticipate their new equality in the form of a 30% reduction in expected wages, two more hours per day of housework--unpaid--a 25% risk of sexual assault during their lifetimes, and a 50% chance of living in poverty if they were to become single parents. Those are the realities facing our daughters. They deserve the same realities as our sons.
The member groups of the Women's Future Fund are currently among the resources that government has at its disposal to effect that equality. We are recognized and emulated around the world. We're among the most cost-effective non-profit organizations you can find. And we're working to improve the lives of women and to become less dependent on government funding.
Thank you.