Thank you for that question.
COVID presented so many challenges for many of us. For a while we were required to reduce the number of shelter beds that were available to women in our community. Our area has a small urban and a large rural area. In the northern parts of our region, the population density is two or three people per square kilometre, which means they don't have access to travel or services that are readily available. The challenges were such that we needed to get creative. The pandemic invited us to be creative about many things that we were doing.
The heartbreak and some of our realities were that if our shelter was busy, in non-COVID times, we were able to contact other shelters and ask them if they had room. We would be able to provide transportation for women to go to other communities and bring them back when we had more shelter beds available. That also wasn't possible.
Those things were combined with the rural realities for many women at a time of tremendous uncertainty. I often asked myself and our staff how a woman experiencing the uncertainty of gender-based violence can imagine leaving when the outside community is going through such uncertainty itself. I think many women stayed because it was just too much, so they had to amp up their coping strategies.