Every March, women across the globe celebrate and remember the journey they have taken to have basic equal rights. While it’s important to have a designated date and month to remember those achievements, women fight all year long for equal opportunities, the end of gender-based violence and for their rights to be respected.  

United Way is no different, supporting women on a daily basis. Annually, United Way grants $10 million to a diverse network of about 90 programs dedicated to serving women.  

“Roughly 70 per cent of those seeking social services in Peel, Toronto and York Region are women. I think that’s largely because women tend to be caregivers. We’re the ones — not exclusively, but primarily — looking after our families,” said Jennifer Chegus, Senior Philanthropy Officer at United Way Greater Toronto.  

The services they need vary from providing help for their kids, counselling for themselves and support when dealing with intimate partner or gender-based violence, as they rebuild their lives.  

“And yet there still isn’t the attention, the funding and seriousness given to the issue. We need to talk about it,” said Chegus. 

Chegus specifically wants to talk about the importance of shelters for women. “They are survivors. Shelters are providing that safe haven. We will often say the programs that we provide can help meet a woman where she’s at, because everyone has such diverse experiences,” she said. 

An example of a project supported by United Way is the Thunder Woman Healing Lodge Society (TWHLS) in Toronto. They provide support for Indigenous women in conflict with the law, welcoming women from institutions all over Ontario — soon to be expanded to the federal level — at the Healing Lodge where they can stay up to a year. The Lodge offers 24/7 programming to help women heal from their traumas, learn about their culture, find housing and community support and start building healthy relationships with their families. 

For Alexus Joudry-Roy, one of the program’s managers, the support is visible in the little things done to reconnect them to their culture. “A lot of them will come in, knowing where they’re from, but not who they are and what brought them to where they were today. The healing, the spiritual and cultural aspects are really important.” 

One of the programs offered by TWHLS, “The Way Forward Program”, helps Indigenous women that are on bail or probation find housing and start a new chapter of their lives. 

Patti Pettigrew, Executive Director of TWHLS, explains how it helps them heal. “When they come into the program, the expectation is that they do their own healing work, and we facilitate that. A lot of women are coming in who are generational residential school survivors or their parents were products of the Sixties Scoop. Some of them come in and their mothers were part of the missing and murdered Indigenous women. So there’s a lot of trauma that they’ve experienced in their lives and we try to facilitate their healing.” 

The larger impact is about helping these women to build a new story. “We’re reducing recidivism plus the women gain a stronger understanding of who they are and their place within their community. Women are to be respected, so I think they come out with a higher self-esteem,” Pettigrew said.  

United Way has been supporting TWHLS by funding counsellors that contribute to the healing process. “In the room with that counsellor is where a lot of that (trauma) comes out. Without the opportunity, we would provide all of this programming for a woman and then nowhere for them to lay it down after. They would just be sitting with it. So having that counsellor provided to us is crucial to the work that we do. It’s a very important position within the organization,” Joudry-Roy said.

TWHLS is currently fundraising to expand their facilities so they can increase the number of Indigenous women receiving support. “Donations are the best way to go because then we can apply them where they’re most needed. It all revolves around helping the women and keeping them out of prison,” said Pettigrew.  

For Joudry-Roy, help also comes in donations of small things like hygiene products that can make a difference in their daily lives.  

Chegus first understood the impact of the program when she heard about how one of the women helped by the program was able to provide Christmas gifts for her family for the first time after getting the training, empowerment and confidence she needed for a job.  

“It is about helping women find safety, helping them adjust when they are safe from harm, enabling them to be employed, to be self-sufficient, to provide for their families. That’s the impact. We don’t want people to be burdens on the system. Let’s create an environment where we can help people and provide what they need to provide for themselves,” said Chegus. Changing the narrative, any way we can.