Status of Women committee  Good day. Thank you for your commitment to addressing violence against women in Canada and including me in this conversation. Sometimes I get discouraged with the lack of progress that we make in the area of violence against women and then I consider the fact that really we've only been formally addressing this issue since 1960 in Canada and suddenly it doesn't surprise me.

Status of Women committee  Okay. This results in improved, positive, healthy relationships. Thank you for your time. I hope these insights were helpful and provide some additional food for thought in your recommendations.

Status of Women committee  Our community outreach program exists in community centres across Waterloo region. It's a partnership with our regional government. They fund that program. Our multicultural outreach is provided with cobbled-together funding from various sources. It does some of what Marie-Christine has talked about, but we also have leadership development courses in the multicultural community.

Status of Women committee  That's right.

Status of Women committee  I don't know if I have a specific opinion on that. I can talk about the process we use to engage our multicultural community. We have several components. We have a committee of 30 leaders from various multicultural communities that meet with each other and with us and with other community resources on a monthly basis.

Status of Women committee  Yes, absolutely. When we launched the walk-in counselling clinic, we had about 981 people on a waiting list for service. We were really in quite a crisis. We were no longer even able to return calls, we were so overwhelmed. The walk-in was chosen for a number of reasons. We were seeing a lot of no-shows in appointments, and of course you can't be a no-show at a walk-in clinic.

Status of Women committee  We were taking all of that bumph and that difficulty out of service. That was why we chose the walk-in. We didn't expect that a quarter of our visitors would be women who experience abuse, but that is what emerged. We were delighted to see these very positive clinical outcomes. We also looked at cost-effectiveness in looking at things like emergency department visits, lost days of work, and resource utilization.

Status of Women committee  In addition to the university providing us all these research studies and lit reviews, they came to the table and suddenly said, “Oh, my word, our Faculty of Social Work doesn't have a violence against women course.” They introduced one as a result of our collaboration.

Status of Women committee  The trisector collaborative partnership wasn't a concept we started with.

Status of Women committee  They also have a deep commitment to community-based research, so they're not an ivory tower academic institution. They understand that their contribution and research need to make a difference on the ground.

Status of Women committee  It started with the Ministry of Community and Social Services and our program supervisor for central Ontario suggesting that all the service providers get together to start talking about what we could do. From that, we emerged with the strategic plan. Then we said, geez, we could benefit from the university, so the universities joined us.

Status of Women committee  Of course, absolutely. Now, let me be clear. It wasn't even just the case that we weren't sure where we were headed when we first met. Those 30 organizations were digging their heels in when we first met. I heard the organizations asking, “What's in it for me?” They were saying that this was a lot of time at the table and they were asking how it was going to make a difference.

Status of Women committee  Exactly.

Status of Women committee  Yes, we're on to something. This also looks at high conflict and at custody and access. Those are very critical child welfare domestic violence issues. That agreement is resulting in massive training across our region. Thousands and thousands of front-line people will be trained in this agreement.

Status of Women committee  That's a number of questions at once—