That sounds good.
Good morning. I am a board member with the Native Women's Transition Centre. I welcome you to our community.
For the majority of my life, I guess, I've been around the organizations that are around the table today, because it's a passion and an issue that's been ingrained in me by my grandmother, and it's about being able to speak out on women's issues for future generations as well.
To give you a little bit about the Native Women's Transition Centre, they're one of the agencies that has been around for about 30 years. We really have provided an opportunity for aboriginal women to follow their journey with healing. The recovery from family violence is a lot of the work we're doing.
First and foremost is providing an opportunity for them to have a place to talk about their healing, about where they came from, to understand the relationships, both the personal relationships and the relationships in systems, and the places that they've been through the different organizations and within our own communities.
The centre embraces the aboriginal traditional values in order to heal the generational scars of the colonization and the residential schools. I mean, you know...you've heard it around the table. What we try to do is provide an opportunity for them to speak with elders, to talk about who they are as individuals, because that is lost. When you talk about hitting 50, even I, as an aboriginal Métis woman, am still at that place of understanding who I am and where I came from. It's an opportunity to talk with other families, individuals, women, and children about where they fit. It's really a free choice in understanding the values and personal situations for us, to bringing that forth for us.
We provide programs, but I'm not going to get into a lot of the programs, because I can give this information to you about what we've done. One of the things that I think I'd like to talk about is some of the barriers we're faced with and maybe one of the new things that is coming up with us.
Everybody around here has talked about the issues of funding. Funding is an ongoing concern; it seems to gets smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter. With that, we talk about funding issues around what is out there for women and children. There are more standards and there is legislation that comes in; it's harder to get in when policies are developed that sometimes hinder access to services. I think part of that, as Sharon and others have indicated, is around the risk of violence off reserve and on reserve. We talk about the numbers of women who are on reserve and who then come to the city, where there are no resources.
We could talk about housing at 0.5% occupancy; I could be wrong, but we know it's out there. Also, businesses that continue to change housing places into condos make it a lot more difficult for housing for families and children.
We talk about systemic discrimination. There are still youth who have a hard time getting into educational schools or into work because of not having the advantages of support to be able to go to those places. Whether it's discriminatory, whether it's racist, it's out there.
We talk about poverty. On average, nothing has changed in the sense of how living expenses have increased but funding for living has not. We need to talk about that and how that fits in for families who are struggling biweekly or every day to put food on the table.
We're talking about the generational impact of the residential schools. We can talk about this; it's still out there. I don't know how many times in my field I'm asked when we are going to get over this. But the idea is that this is generational. This is historical. I'm sitting in front of you without my language, with having to push myself through mountains and mountains of trying to get where I am today to talk to a standing committee. This is just a small little drop in an ocean, but it still has to be discussed: there are huge impacts for our children because of colonization.
On the lack of safe and affordable housing, again, we're talking about it. You've heard it in the media. We're talking about increasing rents, larger families.... Even bedbugs are out there. That has a huge impact on safe and affordable housing. What do we consider to be safe and affordable? For some, we have families who are living not even in a bedroom, but in a bachelor suite, with five family members.
In aboriginal families we use our extended families as well, so sometimes you also can see aunties and uncles within a one-bedroom apartment. That's how we survive and that's how we support each other. At the same time, I think it has to be opened up and viewed as a major issue that's lacking.
When we fit that into it, we're talking about what else there is for you to do except to maybe get caught up in the gangs and to get caught up in the false image that they're there to support you. You get sexually exploited as young children, and it becomes part of the sex trade, or a way to be able to put food on the table.
If that doesn't work--