For rural women, access to community services is going to be one of the biggest obstacles they face. Let me give you an example from here, locally.
Many of the volunteers in our community are seniors, and they're the most vulnerable in the COVID-19 pandemic. Many seniors take care of our local food bank. When the middle of March came about, it had to close its doors for six weeks until another organization took over taking care of the availability of food. You're looking at very vulnerable people who don't have access to a food bank for over six weeks.
Then it changed to a drive-through method. As I talked about earlier, not everyone has access to a vehicle here. Friends and family members could not drive seniors, so they were walking there. It was March—well at this point it was April, but here the winters last quite a period of time. Now we're going back into winter. We worked with other local organizations to provide a service where we received incoming calls and then organized volunteers to pick up food hampers and deliver them to doorsteps.
That's just one example of some of the things they're facing.
In regard to the mental health aspect of it, we are doing everything we can to increase capacity within our communities. I'm working with the Canadian Mental Health Association, and we're going to be delivering safeTALK to over 50 individuals within the community in the next little while. That's all about suicide intervention. We're also going to be delivering two ASIST training sessions within the next 60 days. I'm working a lot with the Eastern Door Feather Carriers, which is a life promotion group looking through an indigenous lens to help people overcome some of the challenges they're facing with their mental health.
The impact on rural women is in access, but we're trying to find creative ways, while working together as different organizations, to overcome challenges.