Thank you, Ms. Sidhu. This is a very important and much-needed question at this time. I'll try to answer it to the best of my capacities.
First, what I see as the solution to the problem that we Torontonians are all facing is that one barrier to accessing the services could be a lack of awareness about the resources that are present.
Another important barrier is lack of knowledge of the language, because most South Asian women who are homebound and are working at home and do not have access to any of those language instruction classes have very big barriers. Being a South Asian woman myself, I have also met many others who do not even know how to navigate with a GPS, how to connect to these resources, or even how to make a phone call, so language has become a huge barrier.
A third barrier, which has come since COVID-19, is mobility, because when we come here as immigrants, the major problem is that there is always a barrier to mobility, both from a financial point of view and physically. Sometimes South Asian women, especially Punjabi women, who want to go from here to there have to depend on their male counterparts in the family. They have to wait for them to come home from work and then for them to take them somewhere. This is one of the problems. I think awareness and education about all the resources available are the key. More connection between the community service organizations and the communities and a more diverse touch to these types of services will help us remove at least some of these barriers. This is my belief.