Status of Women committee  Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today from a front-line worker and survivor's perspective. Each day when VAW shelters across the country are forced to turn away women and children due to capacity issues, those women and children fall into the homelessness stream a

Status of Women committee  I have the summary, and that's it.

Status of Women committee  I totally understand. Thank you.

Status of Women committee  I think my story personally—

Status of Women committee  I understood the question. In light of what I went through, what I try to do in my work is find a way to make the system work better. It helps because I provide services to women, and I'm a survivor, as you know. I think being a survivor providing services allows women to see t

Status of Women committee  Are you asking what the options are for women?

Status of Women committee  The biggest is throwing a person into poverty, not being able to see a way out, and a lack of safe, affordable housing. There's housing, but it's substandard. There is no child care to be able to take care of children if they are trying to continue in their employment. People can

Status of Women committee  Do you mean what kept me going to get me out of my situation?

Status of Women committee  In my university years, there were so many reasons as to why it happened in the first place. What got me out was the ability to create space apart, distance, and I was able to re-establish in another community entirely, based on the ability to have a friend's parent's house to st

Status of Women committee  I was not able to go to a shelter at the time that I was going through my situation, much like many women in this country. They don't have a shelter to turn to. Often, through the severe isolation and everything else that happens, they don't have friends or family to turn to. The

Status of Women committee  Is it possible to make a recommendation as well? When you're looking at indigenous women, you should invite indigenous women survivors, especially those who do not have their children and who have lost their children due to being in domestic violence. Actually, they didn't lose

Status of Women committee  You know what? I'll make this very personal, and I'll take it back to a time in Ottawa because this is where we are and this was my hometown. Often there are suggestions of empty buildings, and I look around my community and I see in Windsor there are vacant buildings, and I some

Status of Women committee  We don't need warehouses for women while they wait for housing. What we need is housing for them.

Status of Women committee  In our community, the majority of the funding for Hiatus House, luckily, is through the federal government. The balance is provincial, not municipal. The municipality funds homeless shelters. That's part of what I believe the divide is. It's so poorly funded at the municipal leve

Status of Women committee  I'm not a grant writer. I'm front line. Looking at that as a survivor, though, just because the government changes, we don't get rid of fire, ambulance, and police. Why aren't we an essential service?