I would say we've had limited success in Toronto.
For the group that I work with, in the course of our public education work and outreach work, we have a continuing series of new women who come and go through the organization. We are coming to understand that it is in fact a necessary piece in our organization for women from the more marginalized communities who haven't been fully involved in the political process. Women have fewer economic resources and fewer political resources. We've had to adapt our structure in order to be able to make those voices present within our organization. It was the first step for us.
The second step was then trying to understand how we could mobilize those voices for the local government. One of the ways that local government can in fact start to mobilize those resources is by collecting data differently. It's one of the areas that we looked at.
When we start to break out our housing data and our homelessness data so that it reflects women's experience of homelessness, what do we get? Most often when we talk about women's experience of homelessness, we in fact get something that people refer to as hidden homelessness, and that they don't know what it is. Well, we know exactly what it is. We know that it's women having to move from family to family, from friend to friend, with their children, and so on, but that is not visible.
Our research projects need to be informed in a different way to bring back part of the picture, which the government can paint for us into visibility, while we provide the access so that women whose voices aren't normally heard are brought forward.
I want to add to your piece about rural women. The corollary of that in the large urban environment is all of the disenfranchised communities, the marginalized rationalized communities that don't have access. As we cut back outreach and make administration more efficient, in fact, the only people who can grasp at the money are people from established groups and organizations. It's the urban corollary of your rural experience.