What We Are all About

Welcome to the Survivor Voices Inclusion Project (SVIP). The goal of this exciting two year project is to discover creative and meaningful ways of engaging women survivors of abuse in the day to day activities of women’s service agencies. This project will build on the amazing work of the Survivor Voices Project completed by the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH) in 2008. Survivor Voices taught us that many of women survivors want to be involved in the work of women service agencies such as shelters and second stage houses but some do not know how or where to begin.

That is where SVIP starts. We are working towards the goal of improving access and quality of services to women transitioning to violence free lives through engaging survivors in these agencies. This is a fancy way of saying that we want to improve services by including the wisdom, knowledge and skills of survivors. When women’s shelters began in this province in the 1970s, it was survivors and women affected by abuse and violence who came together to create these safe spaces for women. We want to go back to those grass roots, nothing-for-us- without-us way of thinking.

To obtain our goal, we want to bring service agencies, specifically shelters and second stage houses and women survivors of abuse to the table together to talk about what survivor inclusion means and how to make it happen. Through a grant received by Status of Women Canada we; Dawn the Project Coordinator and, Sue the Project Liaison will be working with agencies and survivors to create innovative, meaningful and exciting new ways for OAITH member agencies to engage the expertise of survivors. Our goal is to include the voices of survivors in how agencies operate; from volunteering to designate Board inclusion. We hope to develop a model that will empower women and their children to live free from all types of abuse and create positive social change in how society views female survivors of abuse.

We are very excited and proud to have the opportunity to work with survivors and all of our amazing member agencies on this project. We feel this project will be an incredible opportunity for women across Ontario who have experienced abuse to use their voices to support others in crisis and end violence against women.

How the Whole Thing Works

Now that we’ve told you a bit about the project we want to fill you in on how we are planning on meeting our goal of creating a model of survivor inclusion. Over the next two years we will be connecting with OAITH member agencies and survivors across Ontario. We are aiming to combine the amazing steps that OAITH members have already taken in including survivors in their work, with survivors’ knowledge of how they are already involved and how they feel they can be involved further. Together we will come up with the best solutions to any barriers facing both survivors and agencies, in order to create an efficient, smooth running model of survivor inclusion.

But how will are we planning on bringing everyone together? Throughout the life of this project, we will be travelling across the province to conduct workshops with survivors and service agencies. These workshops will hopefully create open and safe spaces for survivors, shelters and second stage homes to work together to create meaningful ways of engaging survivors in agencies. As well, we hope to come up with ways of overcoming the barriers that can make inclusion difficult. We know attending a workshop might be hard for some women due to issues with transportation, language barriers and child care. We will work with these women and help support them to participate. We will make every effort to help women by finding creative ways of assisting them with barriers that may make their participation in the project difficult.

We know that women are busy people and cannot always take time away from their daily lives to come to a workshop. Because of this we have created surveys to allow women who want their voices included the opportunity to tell us what they are thinking. These can be found under the survey link at the top of this page. There are individual surveys for both survivors and service agencies, however, we know that many women would identify with both of these and encourage them to complete both surveys. We do recognize that many women do not have easy access to the internet. We would be happy to send printed copies of our surveys to anyone who would like to complete them this way. We are also available to all those wanting to take part in our project via phone.

Throughout the life of the project we will take all the amazing ideas we get from all of you and put them together in a model of survivor inclusion. Once this is done we will send it out to those who have participated and ask for their feedback. Our hope is that service agencies and survivors will use our model and let us know what worked and what didn’t. After we get all this feedback together we will use it to improve our model and create a final version. This final model will be distributed to OAITH members across the province. Our hope is that this model will promote survivor engagement across the province and that those using it will be able to use the expertise of survivors to create better access and quality of service for women and their children as they flee abuse and violence.

Of course we can’t do any of this without you. To learn more about how you can get involved, please check out the YOU tab on this page. Together we can create exciting new ways for survivors to get involved in shelters and second stage houses and make transitioning to violence free lives easier for women and children across Ontario.

Who We Are

We at the Survivor Voices Inclusion Project are looking forward to working with all of you over the next couple of years. We wanted to let you know a little bit about us and OAITH. First let us introduce the staff for this amazing project.

Dawn is the Project Coordinator for this project. She has worked in numerous projects before, both in Canada and internationally. Dawn’s work has spanned diverse issues facing women including HIV/AIDS, chronic illness and violence against women. Her education background includes social service work, journalism and international development. Dawn currently resides in the Durham Region and she is thrilled and proud to be working with OAITH. Dawn is passionate about bringing survivor’s voices into the forefront of how service agencies work.

Sue is the Survivor Liaison for this project. She is a survivor of abuse and participated as a survivor in OAITH’s 2008 Survivor Voices Project. She said that she is proud that her voice was heard and written on an actual OAITH report. This experience encouraged Sue to get involved in other volunteer work and she became the co-founder of a survivor’s  group in her area. Sue has been the chair of this group for four years now and is also active as a survivor within OAITH.

Sue is honoured and proud to be the Survivor Liaison for this project. She is dedicated to doing her best and using all of her passion, tenacity and energy coupled with her desire to be involved in informing meaningful change for survivors and how their voices are valued in society.

The Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH) is the organization behind this amazing project. In February 2011, OAITH was granted funding from Status of Women Canada to complete a Blueprint project. The goal of this project is to create meaningful and engaging ways of including survivors in the work of shelters, second stage women’s houses and other women service organizations.

For almost 35 years OAITH has been active in working with survivors, emergency shelters for abused women, second stage housing programs and other women’s service organizations to promote change in areas abused women and their children identify as important to their safety and freedom from violence. OAITH works from an anti-oppression, anti-racist, feminist perspective. This means that we recognize that in many cases violence against women and children occurs as a result of the unequal power status of women and children in society.

OAITH has been active in many initiatives including working with the first provincial review of “wife battering” and getting child witness programs in shelters. More recently OAITH has been involved by initiating the Step it Up Campaign, which is working on getting governments to restore previous cuts to service and survivor inclusion programs. In 2008 OAITH completed Survivor’s Voices with the goal of calling on services and policymakers to include survivors of women abuse in their work. This project included online surveys and focus groups of survivors from across the province. These women came together in 11 different communities across Ontario from Toronto to Red Lake to talk about what services they felt needed to improve and how. They also told service providers that they wanted to be a bigger part of the picture.

Since 2008, OAITH has been working towards fuller survivor engagement including bring the Survivor’s Voices report to cabinet ministers in the province. There has been some positive change stemming from the report generated from what survivors have to say. The Ministry of Community and Social Services now funds survivor inclusion at local coordinating levels and OAITH itself has included internal policy changes to embed survivor inclusion in the association.

OAITH, Dawn and Sue, with the support and funding of Status of Women Canada are very excited about this amazing opportunity to work with survivors and women’s service agencies. We know that by engaging survivors in the work of shelters, second stage houses and other women’s service agencies, women and their children transitioning to violence free lives will have access to amazing programs and services across Ontario.

What YOU Can Do To Get Involved.

OAITH and the SVIP want to hear what you, the survivor and service agency, have to say. You have taken the first step by checking out our website. There are many others ways for you to get involved in our project.

You can; complete our online survey, attend a four hour workshop in your area, join our Facebook group, follow our Twitter feed, submit your art to our Share gallery or simply call or email us with your ideas about how to effectively and meaningfully engage survivors within the agencies created to help them. You can also get involved by helping us build a network of survivors to participate. We are looking for survivor leaders in different areas to help us spread the word and get others voices heard.

If you want more information about the project, or to find our more about how to get involved in your area, please contact us using the link above. We look forward to hearing your voice and working with you over the next two years!