Thank you.
The three areas we think are the most promising in terms of practice are our core training for men to end violence, our community engagement, and our programs for youth to end violence. Our men ending violence core training is basically core training that's been designed for men, specifically to provide men with sufficient knowledge and analysis around gender violence so that they're able to be positive male leaders within the community.
We also critique well-known men who are doing this work. It's important to make sure they're staying on track and they are getting evaluations from women's organizations and women who are doing this work.
Through our community engagement program, basically we engage different communities like the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver and different first nations communities. This is kind of a long-term engagement with a process that includes training, raising awareness, prevention, and intervention.
Lastly, I'd just like to speak to our youth ending violence program, because that is the program that I coordinate. Youth ending violence is basically a violence prevention program. It's peer-led, so youth facilitate workshops for youth on dating violence, gender violence, and cyber-violence. Activities are hands-on. We do group work. They do a lot of learning of definitions and that kind of stuff. This is really important because often, I think it was mentioned earlier, the term bullying is used for gender violence, so it's important to have that gendered analysis.
I speak to teachers when I go into schools, and we know there are very gender-neutral programs right now around dating violence. When we go in there, they thank us because we have some experts who can speak to the topic and it's not just their responsibility. We're looking at gender, which is very important, of course.
I've also had times in workshops when young women have come up to us at the end and said they were experiencing cyber-violence online and they didn't know that wasn't okay or that they could talk to somebody about what was going on. Following that, we were able to provide them with services or connect them with battered women's support services—of course we have a lot of front-line services—as well as connect them with teachers or counsellors in their school so that they were able to know that this is an issue and there are things they can do to stop it or prevent it.
That's been my experience.