Status of Women committee  I'm hearing the interpreter's voice, but I'm having a hard time. I see your lips going in French, but I'm not really hearing—

Status of Women committee  —what's happening in English.

Status of Women committee  Are you asking me if we take senior women? We absolutely do. We take any woman who is 16 years of age or older. We have had women in the past who have been abused by their children, and women abused by their elderly spouse. We actually have what we call an accessible room on o

Status of Women committee  We were called “family resources” before and our mandate was for up to eight weeks, but now with the new shelter standards we can take them longer, so we do if we need to.

Status of Women committee  We are an emergency shelter.

Status of Women committee  I would say that in the past five years we've had to take the women for longer times because we do not have second-stage housing in our area. If a woman is there for two months and finds an apartment available, say, for two months, we will keep her because we're not going to let

Status of Women committee  I think it's imperative to teach young school-aged children what healthy relationships are. A lot of young boys and young girls do not know what a healthy relationship is because they are not living in a healthy relationship. I think it would be very important for the school bo

Status of Women committee  In our shelter, the women usually stay for around two months. They can stay longer if they need to, but that is usually our quota. We usually are able to help them get into affordable housing by that time. If not, we usually do keep them at our shelter, but I know that a lot of s

Status of Women committee  That could be one suggestion. One of the suggestions I made was to maybe add temporary beds to the shelters that are already in existence. I'll take, for example, Genevra House, in Sudbury. It's already a 32-bed shelter. I do not know if it has the capacity to increase its number

Status of Women committee  My ultimate recommendation would be to open a harm reduction shelter specifically for women dealing with addictions who have suffered abuse and are leaving violent situations. The existing shelters need training dollars for very intense education for their staff who are dealing

Status of Women committee  Thank you. I would first like to thank you for having me here today. I would like to note that I have been working at the Horizon Women’s Centre/Centre Horizon pour femmes in Sturgeon Falls for 28 years. I by no means consider myself an expert but I do have extensive knowledge a