Yes, and Women's Worlds 2011 was of course held this summer here in Ottawa.
In terms of our interaction with Status of Women and where I was going with this, there has been access to funding for us, as there has for every women's organization over the last few years, through the community fund. We took the hard decision not to go after funding until we really had a solid strategic plan, which brings me back to what I've been talking about today. DAWN has been carefully building partnerships and relationships over the last few years with our partners in the disability sector and the women’s sector because that's the only way we're going to see systemic changes: if we engage with government and with the people who really are on the ground and present for women with disabilities across this country.
This is the first application we've made since 2007 because we felt that our strategic mandate was to develop medium- and long-term plans, and not some quick fix, not “let's do a project and create a little tool here”. It's really about long-term change and real inclusion for women with disabilities.
I will come back to Women's Worlds and what that represented. The fact is that DAWN Canada will be at the second World Conference of Women's Shelters in Washington, D.C., in March 2012. The subject of my abstract is precisely that: breaking down the barriers between the disability sector and the violence against women sector so that we are finally and completely part of the sector.
One in five Canadian women is a woman with a disability—one in five. The World Health Organization and the World Bank released a report in July 2011, the first report done on disability over the last 20 years, and that report—and I can certainly send it to anyone on the committee who's interested—reveals that there are more than one billion people with disabilities on the planet. If you remember the seven billion we've been talking about recently, this means one in seven people on the planet, and more than half of those people are women.
In this country and around the world, we are the largest minority in the world. I hope it stays with you after I leave and take my train. We're the largest minority in this country because we're inside every population you look at. If you look at aboriginal women, immigrant women, white women, black women, or any women in this country, you're looking at women who face disability. You're looking at women who will age into disability.
To come back to the question of elder abuse, this is not something that's going to get better. It's going to get worse. That is why it's really important for all of you to remember that when you go forward in your work for the government you support every initiative that will bring about better housing and better economic, social, and health inclusion for women with disabilities in this country, because they are the most overlooked, most forgotten women in this country.