I'd like to answer that.
I think the Coalition Against Family Violence has been very effective in having all of us work together. It's not easy. It takes a lot of work--it takes skill--among the members to compromise and to come to agreement. But the issue in the Northwest Territories is so pervasive and so impactful on the lives of women, and the front-line workers hear and experience so many chilling stories and examples, that it really motivates us to work together as a group.
We want to make progress in a planned way. Barb Lacey was talking about services for men who use abuse; well, the coalition has been working on that issue over a long period of time. We're finally now at the point where there's going to be a pilot project, but a huge among of time has been spent in the development of a good program for that, a program that will be effective and that takes into account all the learnings across the country.
We had a real arm-wrestling experience when we were trying to fit those 17 action items into the amount of money. We knew that we had to support the existing shelters that were underfunded and we knew that the women keep asking us for services for their partners, so with limited funding, how do you do that?
Our government partners were at the tables with us. We finally came to an agreement that we would fund the shelters and seek outside funding to augment the territorial government funding for the development of the program for men who use abuse. We have heated debates and heated exchanges, but we are all really driven by what we see every day and by the pain for women, children, and whole communities--and for the men, too.
We're a small territory. We form relationships with each other, and trust develops over time. We work hard to try to preserve that and to move forward in ways that will really, at the end of the day, have a positive outcome for those women.