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TURNING POINTS: AN ANALYSIS OF YWCA VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN SHELTERS AND FAMILY VIOLENCE PROGRAMS Phase I Report CAROLYN GOARD, DIRECTOR YWCA FAMILY VIOLENCE PREVENTION CENTRE & SHERIFF KING HOME, YWCA OF CALGARY LESLIE TUTTY, PHD., FACULTY OF SOCIAL WORK, UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY i Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge YWCA Canada, in particular Jenny Robinson, Manager of Advocacy & National Initiatives and Elaine Teofilovici, CEO for conceptualizing the need for the environmental scan and for being there when we needed your expertise and advice. The project Advisory Committee, chaired by Jill Wyatt and including Kristine Cassie, Lyda Fuller, Judy Goldie, Susan Logan, Sheila Loranger, Colette Prévost, and Marion Taylor were generous in their encouragement, hard work and feedback. The funding support from Status of Women Canada allowed us to undertake this project in the first place. Many thanks to Barbara Riley for her support and continued interest. Special thanks and much appreciation to Jennifer Childerhose for going beyond the call of duty, completing too many hours of audio-tape transcriptions to conceive of, and working too many early mornings and late nights to complete the project. Finally, and with deep gratitude, we thank each of the YWCA directors, staff and board members from across Canada who graciously provided their time and information to assist us in assembling this environmental scan. We dedicate this report to all Canadian women and children whose lives are touched by abuse. We applaud your courage, whether addressing abuse from within relationships, or taking the often-substantial risk to leave. We pray for your safety and hope that you find the needed resources to transform your lives into ones that are free from violence. ii Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 National Shelter Survey ADVISORY COMMITTEE Kristine Cassie Director of Human Services YWCA of Lethbridge Lyda Fuller Executive Director YWCA of Yellowknife Carolyn Goard Director of YWCA Family Violence Prevention Centre & Sheriff King Home YWCA of Calgary Judy Goldie Director of Housing YWCA of Greater Toronto Susan Logan Counselling Services Manager YWCA of Edmonton Sheila Loranger Manager of Shelter Services Kamloops Community YMCA-YWCA Colette Prévost Executive Director YWCA of Sudbury Jenny Robinson Manager of Advocacy & National Initiatives YWCA Canada Marion Taylor Director of Children & Family Services YWCA of Vancouver Elaine Teofilovici CEO YWCA Canada Jill Wyatt - Chair CEO, YWCA of Calgary iii Table of Contents PREAMBLE TO REPORT ....................................................................................................................................iv EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ......................................................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1: WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT WOMAN ABUSE AND SHELTERS ........................................1 Introduction..................................................................................................................................................1 The Environmental Scan Process ..........................................................................................................12 CHAPTER 2: ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN: YWCA VAW SHELTER INTERNAL SERVICES......................15 The Context of the Results ....................................................................................................................15 The History of VAW Shelters in Canada ..............................................................................................15 YWCA Shelter Services, Funding and Staffing....................................................................................21 YWCA VAW Shelter Internal Programming ........................................................................................39 CHAPTER 3: YWCA SHELTER EXTERNAL PROGRAMS AND BEYOND ..............................................47 YWCA Shelter External Programs..........................................................................................................47 CHAPTER 4: CHALLENGES, SUCCESSES & RECOMMENDATIONS....................................................71 Challenges ..................................................................................................................................................71 Successes ....................................................................................................................................................75 Summary & Recommendations ............................................................................................................79 REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................................................83 APPENDICES ......................................................................................................................................................83 Appendix A: The Environmental Scan Interview ..............................................................................89 Appendix B: Dates of Site-visits & Telephone Interviews................................................................92 Appendix C: Summary of National Shelter Study Process/Activity..............................................94 Appendix D: VAW Site Summary Overviews ......................................................................................95 Appendix E: YWCA Tables ....................................................................................................................106 Appendix F (i): Compendium of Service Definitions: Internal Programs ....................................1 10 Appendix F (ii): Compendium of Service Definitions: VAW Programs for Non-Residents......1 13 iv Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 Appendix G (i): Compendium of Services for VAW Emergency Shelters....................................1 17 Appendix G (ii): Compendium of Services for Other Emergency ................................................1 18 Appendix G (iii): Compendium of Services for Non-VAW Specific..............................................121 Appendix G (iv): Compendium of Services for Non-Residential Programs ..............................125 Preamble to the Report It was truly a privilege for us to be involved in this project and to bear personal witness to the impressive work of the YWCAs in sheltering women and children fleeing abuse and providing associated Violence Against Women (VAW) programs. Every individual who participated in the project is passionate about her work. Many respondents mentioned how wonderful it was to take time out of very busy schedules to reflect on their work and their accomplishments. There is much to celebrate! An apt metaphor for the project is the patchwork quilt, which for two centuries has brought Canadian women together to create works of beauty and utility, often in the face of extreme hardship and poverty. The first patches of material must be identified and cut out by individual women. Each patch is unique in its design and colour. Women gather and sort the patches to design the surface of the quilt, then sew the patches together. Batting is secured to fill out the quilt and a backing is attached to provide a strong foundation. The result at this stage is often breathtaking. The final stage of quilting is completing the detailed “quilting stitching, ” which adds further beauty and strength to the quilt. The completed quilt is more than just a blanket and certainly more than the individual squares. Each square adds essential detail, but without the unity of the quilting, each would be only a small unique piece of fabric. Stitching the squares together gives them strength and utility as well as a higher level of beauty. To borrow an old gestalt analogy, the whole is definitely more than the sum of the parts. So it is with this project. YWCA Canada identified the need for a “quilting bee” and created the space for YWCAs to come together through the creation of the YWCA National Shelter Project Advisory Committee. Jenny Robinson organized the event. The patches in the metaphor are the individual YWCA and YMCA/YWCAs that participated in the project. Leslie Tutty gathered information together about the ‘herstory of quilting bees’ to provide the context for our quilt. Carolyn Goard gathered the patches together with great care through the long process of site-visits and telephone interviews. Jennifer Childerhose and Marie Conroy laid out the patches through hours of painstaking transcription of the interviews. Leslie and Carolyn pieced the patches together in a first qualitative analysis of the interviews. The second level of analysis was stitching the patches together. The YWCA National Shelter Project Advisory Committee meeting in Calgary on April 7th, 2003 provided input for the creation of “batting” for the quilt. Leslie and Carolyn wrote the report, thus applying a backing to the quilt, creating a strong foundation for Phase II of the project, to complete the “detailed quilting” work through identifying “Best Practices.” v It is fitting that in many YWCA shelters across the country, beautiful quilts adorn the walls. They add beauty and warmth to our facilities and remind us of the strength and support in our diversity and solidarity that we find when women gather to share stories and work. Thank you so much to all of the “Patches” that so generously shared their time, stories and expertise in the creation of our “Quilt.” vi Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 Executive Summary INTRODUCTION Few manuscripts document the history of the Canadian shelter movement and the broad range of services offered, not only by transition houses, but also community agencies that help women and their children leave abusive relationships and begin the long process of recovery from their damaging effects. This research report provides such an overview. The overview sets the context for tracing the history of the development of YWCA shelters for abused women in Canada and the variety of other YWCA services deemed important in helping women and children make a transition to a life free of violence. We document the contribution of the YWCA, which, for the past century, has assisted and continues to support and shelter women needing assistance. We present the results of an environmental scan of Canadian YWCA and YMCA/YWCA organizations both currently offering shelter services specific to abused women and those that are non-VAW (Violence Against Women) specific. We document their challenges and successes, their organizational structures and funding, the range of services provided and the research evaluating their successes. THE ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN PROCESS & REPORT The environmental scan was done using two primary methods: interviews conducted through on-site visits (11) and teleconferences (13). Both used the same core interview questions; however, the site visits allowed a much more in-depth discussion and review of each centre’s facilities, programs, challenges and successes. The 24 on-site visits and telephone interviews occurred between October 4, 2002 and February 6, 2003. The report includes environmental scan information on all Canadian YWCA shelters that provide specific VAW shelter and associated services. Non-residential VAW services provided by the YWCA of Edmonton are also included, in addition to non-residential VAW services from six other shelter sites. This summary information has been included to highlight the scope of VAW services provided by YWCAs across the country. The report documents many innovative YWCA projects and collaborations. Local YWCAs are happy to share their unique programming ideas with sister agencies. An example of this is the “Are You Cool?” brochure developed in Peterborough that many YWCAs are now utilizing in their violence prevention work with teens. THE RESULTS The YWCA is embedded in Canadian VAW shelter “herstory.” YWCAs were among the first wave of shelters, with the YWCA Munroe House in Vancouver established in 1979 as the first second stage shelter in Canada. Ajax Quinby, the first director of YWCA Munroe House, is acknowledged as one of the matriarchs of the ‘feminist’ VAW shelter grassroots movement in Vancouver. Lynn Zimmer, the Executive Director of the YWCA of Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton since 1983, was a founder of one of the first emergency shelters in Canada, Interval House in Toronto. The YWCA Sheriff King Home in Calgary built in 1983 represents the first emergency VAW shelter in Canada built specifically for that purpose. Each YWCA shelter that provides VAW services exists within the context of a community that vii has supported its development. Each is unique. No matter the size of the shelter or the scope of programming that it provides, YWCAs have demonstrated creativity in developing local service delivery models. Currently, there are 14 YWCA shelters whose specific mandate is to shelter and serve women and children fleeing abuse. Seven additional YWCA shelters have a number of beds designated for abused women and children or which routinely take the overflow from the local VAW shelters. These 14 YWCA VAW shelters provide a total of 317 beds and annually shelter 5,218 women and children fleeing abuse. New shelters have been built to replace old, out-dated and non-accessible buildings. Other YWCA shelters have focused on different populations, such as homeless and other women with specific needs, including pregnant teens. Most importantly, women and girls affected by violence often do not identify themselves as having experienced abuse, or they are much more focused on meeting basic needs such as food, shelter and employment. As such, a significant number of the residents in all YWCA shelters have been affected by violence, whether current or past. An estimated 11,109 women are sheltered/housed annually in 45 YWCA facilities in the 24 sites that participated in the project. The 24 YWCAs that participated in this study spend approximately 16% ($12,508,676.00) of their combined annual budget ($65,186,139.00) on shelter operations and family violence intervention. The largest contributors to operational funding for YWCA VAW shelter beds across the country are the provinces/territories. Two-thirds of operational funding comes from this source. In general, these dollars support the provision of basic essential shelter services as described in the internal programming section of the report. Provincial/territorial contributions for YWCA and YMCA/YWCA shelters range from a low of 44% in Alberta to a high of 100% in the Northwest Territories. In addition to core shelter services, YWCAs often provide family violence treatment services and preventative programming for women, children and sometimes men who are affected by family violence. These programs are frequently run in partnership with other community agencies. They are often supported through local United Way funding and, in Alberta particularly, through municipal funding. In many locations, they are dependent on one-time grants and special project funding. CHALLENGES AND SUCCESSES The greatest challenge identified by most YWCA project participants is ensuring excellent service provision in the face of severe funding constraints. None of the YWCA residence/shelters that provide a few designated VAW beds are core funded. These facilities in particular struggle with inadequate funds to provide shelter for women and children fleeing abuse. In the face of such funding adversity, it is particularly important to develop and foster positive working relationships with funders. Directly related to the lack of funding is the fact that shelters frequently turn women and children away because of the lack of available beds. The lack of safe, affordable housing across Canada is a serious crisis. Women leaving VAW emergency shelters face long waiting lists for sec- viii Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 ond-stage or subsidized housing. Inadequate levels of social assistance and a lack of subsidized daycare further compromise women’s ability to successfully leave abusive relationships. Another major challenge facing shelters is attracting and retaining qualified, committed staff and volunteers who are sensitive to the unique cultural/ethnic and other special needs of women and children accessing shelter. A related challenge is attracting board members and other volunteers to the YWCA who reflect the cultural and linguistic characteristics of the community. Burnout among staff is a common phenomenon related to a variety of factors, including the intensity of the work, low wages, and, at times, organizational dysfunction. Several shelter directors identified the lack of service standards as a serious problem in ensuring that a common frame of reference exists, requiring funders to meet their obligation to ensure that safe accountable services are available to women fleeing violence. Some participants linked the lack of standards to the fact that shelters today are often not grounded in a feminist analysis of woman abuse. This does not bode well for ensuring that women are supported in leaving relationships in which they are being abused. Community relationships with other agencies, the police (municipal and/or RCMP), child welfare/children’s aid, health care providers, lawyers, victims assistance units, for example, were mentioned frequently as representing ever-present demands on shelter directors’ time and energy. All YWCA VAW shelters face similar challenges. The respondents recognized and acknowledged the limited role that shelters can play in fundamentally addressing the reality of violence in the lives of women and children. There is much work to be done to encourage societal change and radically increased government support to prevent the long-term and serious consequences of living with violence. The successes celebrated in the context of the interviews were many and impressive. Most important, is the fact that the YWCA provides safe, accessible and welcoming environments for women and children seeking shelter, often in life-threatening circumstances. YWCA VAW services across the country are actively working to improve service delivery while addressing the increasingly complex needs of the women and children accessing their own and other VAW services. The respondents reported that integration and the breadth of YWCA services goes a long way in supporting women and children as they struggle to attain autonomy. While still a challenge, working conditions for staff have progressed successfully within the YWCA. Participants reported success in implementing hard-won salary raises that served to increase staff morale. Several discussed making strategic staffing changes designed to ensure that the right people with the right skills were in the right job to effect quality service delivery. It was not uncommon, even in the face of the prevalent theme of frequent staff turnover, to hear of individuals who were long time committed, excellent employees. In the words of one shelter director, “Anywhere I go in Canada, I can always recognize a YW person.” The participants identified successes in working collaboratively in the community. This often resulted in their gaining increased respect and recognition for the work of the YWCA. The respon- ix dents acknowledged the tremendous support of their boards and the general community for the work being accomplished in VAW shelters and other VAW services. RECOMMENDATIONS Conducting this environmental scan offered a unique opportunity to hear the voices of directors and staff members from a number of YWCA and YMCA/YWCA shelters and services for women across Canada. We asked about the scope of their services, their history, what they do well, what remains challenging and how well they are connected within their communities and beyond. Gathering in-depth information on a subset of 24 YWCA organizations from the over 500 Canadian transition houses and VAW shelters provided a telling glimpse of the realities of working in this service sector. The common thread being their affiliation within the YWCA Canada, we cannot say with certainty that these issues equally affect other shelters for abused women. However, we suspect that they do. We conclude with the following recommendations: • It is time once again to listen to the voices of women. We must ask the women who use our services what they find helpful, what they require to live their lives free from violence. This report represents Phase I of this project. The prospectus for Phase II proposes talking to women residents, ex-residents and participants in shelter and non-residential VAW programs, and asking them what they need (or needed), what they think about the services they received, and whether the two are congruent. In reflecting on the results of the environmental scan and the questions that always emerge when one is conducting such research, we fully support this direction. • The program descriptions collected for the environmental scan reflected a broad range of innovative ideas and unique service deliveries. Phase II will provide further information with respect to best practices. Health Canada has created several very helpful compendia of shelters and programs for abusive men; however, these provide mostly contact information and brief overviews, as was their intent. Phase II of this project could begin the process of collecting program materials and manuals with the goal of eventually securing other funding to develop a critical analysis of what options are available and what works best in, for example, support groups for women. • YWCAs are united in their common goals and purpose in delivering VAW services. All YWCAs bring to VAW work the perspective that violence against women occurs within the context of the abuse of power within a patriarchal culture. However, local and provincial realities impact how we frame the services that we deliver. They also affect opportunities for developing and delivering these services within our local communities. While acknowledging the threads that bind us together in our shared VAW work, it is important, also, to admit that some of the unique services that we are delivering serve to create tensions among us. Examples of these “questionable services” captured in the report include “therapeutic counselling” and provision of service for perpetrators. We suggest that it is critically important to facilitate an open, respectful dialogue about these different perspectives, similar to that begun at the Advisory Committee meeting in Calgary in April 2003. x Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 CHAPTER 1 1 CHAPTER 1 What We Know about Woman Abuse and Shelters INTRODUCTION Less than 30 years ago, the first shelters for abused women opened in Canada. At the time, women’s groups had considerable difficulty convincing funders, the government and the public at large that the physical and emotional abuse of women by male intimate partners warranted the creation of special facilities to house and protect them. Since then, shelters have become widely acknowledged as being at the forefront of interventions to assist and prevent woman abuse. They have become available in all large Canadian cities and many small towns. They have become centres for disseminating knowledge about the issue, and offer a variety of programs to all family members affected by domestic violence, including the children who often witness the abuse, and, in some cases, even the men who are abusive. Violence is finally being seen as a serious problem that results in injury and emotional harm to women, children and families. Canada is atypical in the extent to which the government, through Statistics Canada, has acknowledged and studied the problem through including questions on violence in intimate relationships in its General Social Surveys and regular Transition House Surveys. This research has provided a firm grounding with respect to the nature and extent of the abuse of Canadian women and a sense of what resources are utilized in escaping abuse from intimate partners. Despite the utility of this data, however, few manuscripts document the development of the Canadian shelter movement and the broad range of services offered, not only by transition houses, but also community agencies that facilitate abused women and their children leaving abusive relationships and beginning the long process of recovering from its damaging effects. This chapter provides such an overview. WHAT IS WOMAN ABUSE? The beating and denigrating of wives and girlfriends has not always been seen as a problem. In Victorian England, the often-cited “rule of thumb” refers to a judicial decision that a man could legally assault his wife with a cane as long as it was no thicker than his thumb. In Canada, before 1905 and the intervention of a famous group of five Canadian women, women were not considered “persons” and could not vote. With such negligible status, what else was needed to keep women in line? The early research evidence on the extent and the serious nature of the abuse of women by their intimate partners caught the bulk of North American society off-guard and was initially 2 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 regarded with scepticism. DeKeseredy and MacLeod (1997) refer to woman abuse before 1970 as the “problem with no name”. Before then, the public knew little of the problem of “wife battering”. It seemed inconceivable that men would strike their women partners, let alone beat them and cause severe injury. In the early 1970’s, the women’s movement made great strides for women in North America, demanding equal opportunities for education and employment, and access to abortion. Nevertheless, it came as a complete surprise to many that intimate male partners would emotionally bruise and physically assault their partners. If women are equal to men as was argued, why wouldn’t these wives, both legal and common-law, simply leave? When the issue of wife abuse was raised in the Canadian House of Commons in 1972, laughter was allegedly heard throughout the chamber. The terminology to describe the problem has shifted over the years. “Wife battering” changed to “wife assault” to highlight the fact that if the attacks had been perpetrated by a stranger, they would warrant police intervention and assault charges. This term was commonly used in the late 1980’s and 1990’s when many communities trained police officers about the issue and experimented with changing the judicial system to deal more appropriately with assaults that police officers, until then, often treated as private “non-matters”. However, using the term “wife” obscures the fact that women in common-law relationships were also assaulted, as well as adolescent young women in dating relationships (DeKeseredy & Hinch, 1991). We used the term “family violence” for a number of years, but since that includes all forms of aggression in families, including child abuse and neglect, it seemed too general. Further, while “domestic violence” is often used with respect to violence in intimate partner relationships, it also obscures the gender of both the typical victims, women, and the typical perpetrators, men, in a problematic way. The majority of academics and service providers in the field view gender as a key aspect of the power and control issues inherent in violence. Throughout this document we will utilize the terms “woman abuse” and “violence against women”. This is not to deny that men can be victims of intimate partner violence, in relationships with either women or men. However, the serious abuse of men by women intimate partners is not as prevalent; estimates suggest 8 to 9 times as many women as men are abused, and there is no documentation that men need the same resources, such as shelters, (Tutty, 1999). As the 1999 General Social Survey on Victimization conducted by Statistics Canada clarifies, abuse against women by male partners tends to be more serious: Women were more than twice as likely as men to report being beaten, five times more likely to report being choked, and almost twice as likely to report being threatened by or having a gun or knife used against them. Woman abuse occurs repeatedly more often: 65% of women compared to 54% of men were assaulted on more than one occasion, 26% of women as compared to 13% of men were victimized more than 10 times. The results of the abuse more often led to injury for women: 40% of women were injured compared to 13% of men who had reported violence in the past five years. Women CHAPTER 1 3 were five times more likely than men to require medical attention for these injuries. Perhaps most informative is that women fear their partners’ violence to a significantly greater extent, with 38% of women compared to 7% of men fearing for their lives (Statistics Canada, 2000). More important than how often it occurs are the various forms violence takes, plus its impact on women’s lives and those of their children. The abuse that women endure from intimate male partners takes many forms, and typically extends throughout the relationship. While a number of women are physically abused, the control and degradation of being emotionally abused may have as strong or a stronger effect on a woman’s self-esteem and, thus, her ability to protect herself or her children. It is not uncommon for women in abusive relationships to be sexually abused by their partners. Leaving an abusive relationship is typically more dangerous than remaining, as is clear in the extent to which abused women are stalked and threatened with murder after separation. Coping with an abusive relationship creates considerable anxiety, especially if the threats and physical abuse continue over time (Tutty & Goard, 2002). Such stresses not uncommonly result in depression, panic attacks, suicidal ideation, or substance abuse (Gondolf, 1998; Tutty, 1998). Each of these symptoms could suggest the need for psychiatric intervention, implying that the abused woman is mentally unbalanced- a position that ignores the context of her situation. However, rather than looking at the symptoms in isolation, a number of authors have identified a cluster of symptoms that are similar to those experienced by other victims of violence such as rape, robbery and physical assault. The symptoms include “anxiety, fears, recurrent nightmares, sleep and eating disorders, numbed affect, flashbacks, hypervigilance and increased startle responses” (Houskamp & Foy, 1991, p. 368). Women who experience several of these problems may have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a condition that was recently included in the DSM-IV (Ristock, 1995). The advantage of the PTSD perspective is that, by definition, this is seen as “normal responses to abnormal occurrences in the lives of these victims” (Gleason, 1993, p. 62). While not all abused women experience PTSD, trauma can be a major impediment for women who seek emergency shelter, affecting their ability to problem solve and make appropriate decisions with respect to their safety. Women leave abusive relationships as much for the sake of their children as for themselves. Giles-Sims (1983) found that two critical motives prompting a woman to leave were the fear that her children might be hurt and concern that the children had witnessed the abuse. MacLeod’s Canadian study (1987) concluded that abuse of children by their father or father figure was a major reason that women sought admission to an emergency shelter. Children are another reason that some women return to abusive partner relationships. In Smillie’s (1991) interviews with several women who returned to their husbands despite having maintained themselves independently in the community for over a year, the women reported difficulties both with the stresses of being a single parent and with the children’s behaviour. In Tutty’s 1993 research on a shelter follow-up program, women reported similar difficulties and also felt guilty about depriving their children of a father. They were often pressured by their children to reunite the family. 4 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 While the staff of battered women’s shelters have long been concerned about the children who accompany their mothers to interval houses, it is only recently that more general concern has been expressed about the effects on children of being exposed to violence between their parents (Jaffe, Wolfe & Wilson, 1990; Moore, Peplar, Mae, & Kates, 1989; Moore et al., 1990). Such children are at high risk for developing behavioural problems, including either aggression or withdrawal, especially if they have been physically abused themselves (Hughes, 1988). Recent research also conceptualizes such reactions as being the result of trauma, similar to the PTSD conceptualization of women’s stress. Clearly, the consequences of the abuse of women by their intimate male partners extend beyond the bounds of the couple relationship. Shelter organizations have taken the lead in providing not only residential care for women and children fleeing abusive relationships, but advocacy and counselling for both residents and women and children in the community affected by violence against women. How did shelters become the mainstay of the violence against women’s movement? The next sections document this history in the Canadian context. THE HISTORY OF SHELTER AND PROGRAMS FOR ABUSED WOMEN IN CANADA Raising the profile of the serious nature of woman abuse and the cost to the women, their children, and society was a long, taxing process, which many would argue is not yet completed. The first to identify that a significant proportion of women were suffering physical and sexual abuse from their intimate partners were members of the women's movement who, during the 1970’s, participated in consciousness raising groups, women's drop-in centres, health centres and action groups (DeKeseredy & Hinch, 1991; Gilman, 1988). Many of these groups were supported financially by the Secretary of State Women's Program and federal and provincial Status of Women's councils (Hebert & Foley, 1997). Women who leave abusive relationships often lack basic essentials such as housing and financial resources. Services to provide these were either not developed or were scarce. Some women’s drop-in centres began to provide overnight accommodation, and some families volunteered the use of their homes for refuge, called “safe-houses”. However, according to Flora MacLeod (1989) the need for larger safe facilities with trained staff and sufficient accommodation for children soon became apparent. With grassroots groups of women activists developing emergency shelters to provide refuge for otherwise unprotected women and children, transition houses were gradually established across the country (Denham & Gillespie, 1998). Even today, shelters remain the primary resource to protect women from assaultive partners. The first shelters in Canada opened in 1973. These included Vancouver’s Transition House, Ishtar in Langley, B.C., Oasis House (now Calgary Women's Emergency Shelter) in Alberta, Interval House in Toronto and Saskatoon’s Interval House, all of which were apparently established CHAPTER 1 5 with little or no knowledge of the others (Hebert & Foley, 1996; F. MacLeod, 1989). Gillian Walker (1990) commented that, “houses were being set up in Toronto, in the United States and in Europe during the early 1970’s, but, in fact, we knew little about each other’s activities at the time” (p. 22). By 1975, eighteen shelters had been established; a further 57 opened between 1975 and 1979 (Rodgers & MacDonald, 1994). While diverse organizations were involved in their development, feminist and women’s groups (Vis-à-vis, 1989a; Gilman, 1988) were responsible for most. Nonetheless, charitable organizations such as the YWCA and religious orders have also been instrumental in developing and operating shelters, although this has not often been acknowledged. As Gilman described the early days, many of the staff were volunteers and included former residents. If staff members were paid, it was minimum wage, more often than not through shortterm Canada Works grants. The major source of financial support was donations from the local communities. For many years, shelters struggled to keep food on the table, relying on regular donations from private community groups. Shelters secured funding through whatever means available, such as the United Way and established community agencies such as the YWCA or other charitable or church groups. Many of the early shelters operated as collectives with a feminist ideology. Abused women were not seen as “clients”, nor were they “cared for” by shelter staff. According to McDonald (1989) they were: encouraged to confront the problems of women and take action. Services are at a minimum and the shelter by definition is horizontally organized, leadership is situational, and decisions are made by consensus (p. 114). Linda MacLeod’s 1980 report, “Wife Battering in Canada: The Vicious Circle”, commissioned by the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, has been credited with raising the profile of woman abuse to a national level. Some women’s organizations endured a long process in convincing governments to finance at least a portion of transition house budgets. For example, in Newfoundland in 1975, the Status of Women Council submitted a grant application to the Department of Social Services, which, in addition to a subsequent application to the province was turned down. It took six years before St. John’s Transition House ultimately opened in 1981 supported with provincial funding (Hebert & Foley, 1997). By the mid-1980’s, many shelters received provincial funding to cover their operating costs (DeKeseredy & MacLeod, 1997). Although the provincial and territorial governments are currently responsible for funding shelters, the federal government has also played a significant role. Since 1978, the “special purpose” Non-Profit Housing Program of Canada Mortgage and Housing (CMHC) has provided capital assistance for a considerable number of the emergency and second-stage shelters built prior to 1988 (Weisz, Taggart, Mockler & Streich, 1994). The capital funds could be used to construct new buildings or purchase and renovate existing structures. The shift to accepting government funding included a requirement to adopt a non-profit organizational model of governance and a social services perspective that views women as clients. 6 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 Given this, fewer shelters still function as collectives. Furthermore, the need to broaden the services within the shelter to children and move beyond the walls of the shelter has led to developing new programs such as outreach programs (for abused women who have no immediate wish to go to a shelter) and follow-up programs (for former shelter residents). This has resulted in more complex management models, ones that make it difficult to make decisions using non-hierarchical means. Nevertheless, a feminist ideology remains key to most shelters (Beaudry, 1985), although whether it is politically wise to acknowledge this varies depending on the community in which the shelter is located. Mann (2000) suggests that three shelter models have emerged since the 1970’s, which she delineates as follows: The first is a feminist, liberationist or collective model, characterized by strong, even radical, feminist ideology and non-hierarchical decision-making practices. The second is a non-feminist, professional protectionist or hierarchical model, grounded in mainstream social service or therapeutic ideologies and traditional organizational practices. The third is a pro-feminist model, a model that combines feminist and professional approaches. (Mann, 2000). Mann raises concerns about the third model in which “staff typically assume the dual role of counsellor to, and advocate for, ‘clients’. Here, hierarchical organizational practices prevail, practices that maximize efficiency and accountability”. If nothing else, the shift to professionalize shelter staff has affected the spirit of internal camaraderie in some shelters, with grassroots and professional staff sometimes in competition (Tutty & Rothery, 1997). Moss (2002), raises a number of concerns about this shift as well. A period of rapid growth for shelters in Canada was between 1988 and 1992 when funding from the federal government through CMHC Project Haven (1994a) supported the building of 78 shelters (458 units) with the provision of $22.2 million. This added about 20% to the capacity of Canadian shelters. A central goal of Project Haven was to build shelters in underserved areas. One third of the new units were for aboriginal communities, while another third serve women in rural regions. A second phase of the project, entitled the Next Step Program, provided funding ($20.6 million) primarily for longer-term second stage housing, developing 62 more transition homes. In 1994, Weisz and colleagues noted that, “it is estimated that of the more than 380 shelters and transition houses in Canada, about half of these facilities have been funded, in part, by the federal government” (p. 7). THE CURRENT STATUS OF SHELTERS IN CANADA The number of shelters in Canada has increased over the last decade and a half. In 1988, Gilman noted the existence of over 265 first and second stage shelters across Canada; in 1994, MacLeod estimated the existence of over 400 first and second stage Canadian shelters. The latest Transition House survey, conducted in 1999/2000 by Statistics Canada, was sent to 508 shelters known to provide residential services for abused women (with 467 completed surveys returned or 92%). It should be noted that not all of the shelters provide services exclusively to abused women, but also serve homeless women and those facing other difficulties. In the year ending March 31, CHAPTER 1 7 2000, 96,359 women and dependent children were admitted to these shelters. While a minority of these simply needed housing, most (over 80%) were leaving abusive homes. Over half of the women, 55%, had dependent children with them, 73% of these were younger than 10 years of age. Most Canadian shelters offer in-house short term counselling (90%), advocacy (89%) and specialized services for older women (84%). More than two-thirds of the children residing in shelters are offered individual counselling (69%) or group intervention (54%). The majority of Canadian shelters are “first-stage” transition homes offering shelter for an average of three weeks. A smaller number of “second-stage” shelters provide accommodation for six to twelve months, typically to former residents of first-stage shelters for whom a longer-term secure facility is necessary because their abuser remains dangerous to them (Tutty, 1999). Emergency shelters in urban centres serve 1000 to 1500 women and children each year, whereas in rural areas the numbers are slightly lower. Of great concern is the fact that many shelters are turning away almost as many women and children as they are sheltering each year. However, not all women leaving abusive relationships require shelter services. The 1999 Statistics Canada General Social Survey reported that only 11% of women who had experienced spousal violence in the past five years had used a shelter. The 1993 Violence against Women survey reported that only 13% of such women had used shelters (Rodgers, 1994). The majority of abused women stayed with friends or relatives (77%), moved into a new residence (13%) or resided in a hotel (5%). One conclusion from such findings is that transition homes are serving those who need them most, providing, “options for women who have few options” (Weisz, Taggart, Mockler, & Streich, 1994). THE EXPANSION OF SHELTER SERVICES Since the early days, when safety and helping residents plan for their future was the major focus of shelters, transition houses have come under increased pressure to provide additional services for non-residents. The 1999-2000 Transition House survey reported that the majority of shelters provide such services including crisis telephone lines (75%), individual counselling (70%), advocacy (64%) and follow-up programs for former residents (74%). Other commonly offered programs include outreach (for abused women in the community who may, in future, need to access the shelter), in-house parenting programs for shelter residents, violence prevention programs for the community, support groups for abused women (both current and previous residents) and, in some instances, treatment groups for male perpetrators. The pressure to extend services has come both internally, from staff and administrators who identified needs that extend beyond shelter stay and address concerns for other family members, and externally, as shelters have become perceived by community agencies as experts on domestic abuse. Once implemented, these programs become seen as critical in addressing the complex needs of both residents and women in the community. However, many of these programs are not funded within the regular shelter budgets, entailing a considerable burden for executive directors who apply for grants to support the programs and for board members who fund-raise the extra thou- 8 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 sands of dollars needed each year. Furthermore, in times of financial cut-backs, shelters are under the scrutiny of the general public and government representatives with respect to their necessity and relative expense. ARE SHELTERS AND SHELTER PROGRAMS EFFECTIVE? While emergency shelters for battered women are perceived as critical resources in most communities, they remain relatively unstudied. Although American surveys of abused women have rated shelters and support groups as among the most effective help sources (Gordon, 1996), few studies have been conducted on the long-term effectiveness of emergency shelters. Much of the large body of published research on women in shelters focused on identifying common characteristics of women who are abused, or organizational issues and features of the shelters. From this research, we know that women who seek shelter are likely to have experienced serious and chronic abuse, and as a result, many experience a number of symptoms including depression, post- traumatic stress and low self-esteem (Tutty & Goard, 2002; Tutty, 1998). Recent Canadian evaluations support the importance of shelters (Grasley, Richardson & Harris, 2002 [focuses on 6 shelters in Ontario, one the YWCA of St. Thomas-Elgin]; Tutty & Rothery, 2002a; Rothery, Tutty & Weaver, 1999; Tutty, Weaver & Rothery, 1999; Tutty, Rothery, Cox, & Richardson, 1995 [all with respect to the YWCA of Calgary Sheriff King Home]; Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, 1994), and shelter follow-up programs (Tutty & Rothery, 2002b; Tutty, 1993; 1996) in providing safety and assisting the transition to a life separate from an abusive partner. Several evaluations have also been conducted on second stage shelters. Russell (1990) reviewed four such Canadian shelters including the YWCA Munroe House in Vancouver (Barnsley, Jacobson, McIntosh, & Wintemute, 1980), Safe Choice in Vancouver (Russell, Forcier & Charles, 1987), Discovery House in Calgary (McDonald, Chisholm, Peressini & Smillie, 1986), and Women In Second Stage Housing (WISH) in Durham (Scyner & McGregor, 1988). Although the results of the four diverse studies are not directly comparable, all of the programs asked about consumer satisfaction. Individual counselling was seen as helpful for both the women and their children. Russell (1990) reported that the residents commonly valued individual counselling provided to themselves and their children – though, not surprisingly, needs vary and not all women require the same types or levels of help. Russell concluded that; “Given the prevalence of psychological concerns among women in shelter, reluctance to provide counselling services can be viewed as counterproductive and even dangerous.” (p. 26) Many of the difficulties that the women reported in these studies are the expected tensions associated with communal living, including conflicts over children’s behaviour and varying childcare practices. In Calgary, McDonald, et al. reported that women had “more internal control and more social independence at six-month follow-up compared to what they experienced when they entered the house.” (McDonald, 1989, p.122) An evaluation of 68 second-stage shelters of the CMHC Canadian Next Step Program (SPR Associates, 1997) concluded that second-stage housing is a critical factor in women deciding not to return to abusive partners. In general, women who had stayed in the second-stage facilities were highly satisfied compared to those who had accessed other assisted housing options. As one would CHAPTER 1 9 expect, finding affordable accommodation on leaving second-stage facilities was a major concern for the women in the study. Other key resources are support groups for abused women, which emerged from and often remain linked to shelters. Since shelter residents live communally, groups are an ideal medium in which to provide information about partner abuse. The value of the information is enhanced when residents share their own experiences and provide feedback to others (Pressman, 1984). While most writers propose that group intervention is preferable, Rinfret-Raynor and Cantin (1997) found that using a feminist perspective is more important than whether the counselling is in a group or individual format. Canadian research on support groups supports the efficacy of such intervention. In Quebec, Rinfret-Raynor and Cantin (1997) compared feminist group treatment to feminist individual treatment to non-feminist individual treatment for 60 abused women. The variables were abuse, as measured by the Conflict Tactics Scales, self-esteem, assertiveness, social adjustment, marital assertion and dyadic adjustment. The authors found no significant differences between the approaches; women changed, on average, in all three. Tutty, Bidgood and Rothery (1993; 1996) found statistically significant (pre-test/post-test) improvements in areas such as self-esteem, perceived stress, attitudes towards marriage and the family and depression in their study on support groups in the Kitchener Waterloo region of Ontario. With a sample of 38 Calgary women attending a more process-oriented group, BabinsWagner, Tutty & Rothery (in preparation), reported statistically significant (pre-test-post-test) improvements on physical and non-physical abuse, self-esteem, clinical stress, family relations, depression and sex roles. However, marital satisfaction worsened to a significant extent, a probable consequence of women acknowledging the severity of violence and emotional abuse in their relationships. Tutty, Rothery, Cox and Richardson (1995, cited in Tutty & Rothery, 2002b) conducted qualitative interviews with 32 women who had elected to attend a support group offered by the YWCA Family Violence Prevention Centre and Sheriff King Home in Calgary. The support group members had a number of characteristics that differentiated them from another 54 women who had sought emergency shelter from the YWCA Sheriff King Home: support group members were significantly more likely to be legally married, were more educated and reported higher family income levels. With respect to family violence characteristics, they experienced less severe levels of both physical and non-physical abuse from their partners and had significantly fewer previous shelter admissions: most, 72%, had never resided in a shelter. Although the physical and non-physical abuse was less severe than that reported by shelter residents, all but six women described their partners as using some physically violent acts, and the reported levels of emotional abuse were substantial. The interviews with 19 of the 32 women after they had completed the support group identified continuing issues, but some improvements. There was a mix of those still living with their assaultive partners and those who had left. At the time of initial interviews, five of the nineteen no longer resided with their partners. At follow-up, four to six months later, a further four women 10 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 had left the abusive relationships. Understandably, the needs and issues of the women who had left their partners were different from those who had not. However, in evaluating their experiences in the support group, there were no important differences between women who remained with their partners and those who had already left. Both sets of women commented on the competence of the group leaders (in these 10 week groups, most of the leaders were social workers), the utility of the support that they received from fellow group members, and the value of information provided. As one group member commented: The group really helped me to identify what abuse was, to make sure that I wasn’t taking responsibility for my husband’s abuse, to make sure that I was clear that I wasn’t deserving of it in any way. Moldon (2002) conducted a qualitative study of support groups, interviewing eight women who attended a support group called the “Safe Journey” program in Lethbridge, Alberta. Moldon developed a framework from the women’s comments to describe how the group provides an environment in which abused women move from the ‘lost self ’ to the ‘reclaimed self ’. She entitled the process “Reclaiming Stories,” and views it as a spiral that incorporates both the content and process of attending group. As she describes it: The framework itself has three distinct stages: the lost self, sharing in sisterhood, and reclaiming the self. Two tools facilitate the process of moving from stage to stage: establishing safety and knowledge building. The main focus of the themes is connecting to self and other to begin re-writing stories (Moldon, 2002, p. 93). Dawn McBride (2002) recently completed an evaluation of women’s groups at the YWCA of Calgary Family Violence Prevention Centre and Sheriff King Home. The large sample of 189 women reported significant improvements on self-esteem, depression and post-traumatic stress after group. EVALUATIONS OF OTHER SHELTER SERVICES Studies have followed women after their shelter stay to identify what they need to facilitate living violence-free. The authors of several studies on follow-up and advocacy services (Sullivan & Bybee, 1999; Tutty, 1993; 1996; Tutty & Rothery, 2002a), all support extending services to abused women beyond their shelter residency. Without such support, abused women may be especially vulnerable to becoming homeless (Breton & Bunston, 1992). In a 1996 Canadian study of women's perceptions of their children’s needs in a shelter (Bennett, Dawe & Power), a number of respondents noted the importance of receiving assistance from staff in both addressing their child’s issues and improving parenting skills. Teaching parenting skills is controversial because it may be perceived as disempowering the mother by implicitly criticizing her behavior. However, some models allow staff to support the mother in intervening more appropriately, rather than criticizing or offering advice in front of the children. Staff also requested more training in the developmental needs of children and methods of intervening with families that support mothers. Hilton’s research in Ontario found similar concerns from mothers about the CHAPTER 1 11 effects of the abuse on children (1992), as did Campbell and Heinrich (1991). In another study, Copping (1996) noted that over the course of their stay in one of five Ontario shelters, children gradually improved their behaviour. Over the past decade, numerous programs have been developed to assist child witnesses either in shelters or in community-based programs (Topley, 1989; Tutty & Wagar, 1994), although most are for children eight and older. As mentioned previously, in the 1994/95 Transition Home Survey, more than half the Canadian shelters offer such group programs. Despite the relatively widespread availability of groups for children exposed to woman abuse, research on the efficacy of such programs is rare. Exceptions are three evaluations of groups for children aged 5-13 years (Cox, 1995; Wagar & Rodway, 1995; McMillan, 2001) conducted on the children’s programs offered by the YWCA of Family Violence Prevention Centre and Sheriff King Home in Calgary. The evaluations concluded that children in the treatment groups significantly decreased their anxiety, improved their attitudes and response to anger, and decreased their sense of responsibility for both their parents and the violence. In summary, although their most important concern remains the safety of their residents and children, Canadian shelters for abused women have changed dramatically over the years, from being rather insular and isolated to being perceived as experts on violence against women within their respective communities (Tutty, 1999). Not only have they led the way in acknowledging the significant negative and long-term effects of living in an abusive relationship, but they have often been leaders in developing new and innovative services. THE CONTRIBUTION OF YWCA* SHELTERS AND PROGRAMS TO ABUSED WOMEN IN CANADA The YWCA is reportedly the single largest women’s shelter provider in Canada. However, the national organization has not yet documented the range of services provided by the 22 (includes Edmonton) independent YWCA and YMCA/YWCAs across the country that shelter and/or provide VAW services to women and children fleeing abuse. Furthermore, YWCA organizations that are not specific to abused women nevertheless provide VAW programs or count women with abuse histories among their residents. This research report fills that gap by providing a history of the development of YWCA shelters for abused women in Canada and the variety of other services deemed important in helping women and children make a transition to living a life free of violence. We document the contribution of the YWCA, which, for the past century, has assisted and continues to support and shelter women needing assistance. We present the results of an environmental scan of Canadian YWCA and YMCA/YWCA organizations both currently offering shelter specific to abused women and those that are non-VAW specific. We document their challenges and successes, their organizational structures and funding, the range of services provided and the research evaluating their successes. * For this report, we have referred to YWCA organizations using the acronyms YWCA or YW. We would like to acknowledge the two YMCA/YWCA organizations that participated in the project. For ease of readability, we have taken the liberty of using the acronym YWCA or YW to refer to all participants in the study, except where we thought it critical to identify the YMCA/YWCA sites. 12 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 THE ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN PROCESS METHODOLOGY FOR THE ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN Leslie Tutty conducted a review of the existing literature and resources on the shelter movement in Canada over the last 30 years, focusing on trends and themes in the sheltering of women from violence in Canada. The literature review provides a context and focus for the work of the YWCA and YMCA/YWCAs organizations in supporting women who are addressing issues of abuse. YWCA and YMCA/YWCAs across the country identified and submitted published/unpublished research reports that relate to their particular operations. A preliminary version of the literature review was prepared for the YWCA Canada in October 2002, with the final version completed in April 2003. After our initial proposal was submitted and approved by the YWCA National Shelter Advisory Committee in July 2002, we defined our research questions and methodology for the initial phase of the research project, ‘Effective Practices in the Sheltering of Women Leaving Violence in Canadian YWCA Shelters/Family Violence Programs’. The environmental scan is informed through two primary methods: interviews conducted either on-site (11) or by telephone (13). Both used the same core interview questions, however, the site-visits allowed a much more in-depth discussion and review of each centre’s facilities, programs, challenges and successes. DEVELOPING THE INTERVIEW SCHEDULE Our original intention had been to develop a standardized survey to mail to the directors of all YMCA/YWCA shelters. The information would provide background for the environmental scan, particularly for those shelters not participating in the site-visits. In meetings to develop the questionnaire, however, we concluded that it would be preferable to develop an interview schedule that could be administered with all of the sites, either in person or by telephone. Our primary rationale was that shelters are quite diverse and creating a questionnaire with items to reflect this diversity would be time-consuming and might still result in gaps or questions, which we would need to clarify through follow-up phone calls. Responding to written surveys is also less appealing than being interviewed. We believed that we would have a much greater response rate if we simply interviewed all directors in person or by telephone. Although we recognized that conducting and analyzing the telephone interviews would be more time-consuming, we believed that it would provide significantly better information and would portray the YWCA programs in a much stronger and contextually accurate light. The Advisory Committee agreed with our rationale and we proceeded in August 2002 to develop the interview schedule. (See Appendix A) The original proposal suggested that we make 7-10 sitevisits, conducting telephone interviews with the remaining 13-14 YMCA/YWCAs that provide VAW specific shelter services. In August 2002, the Advisory Committee developed a list of criteria for determining whether a site would be visited or would receive a telephone interview. Because we wished the sitevisits to reflect the diversity of the Canadian contexts in which YW organizations operate, we considered the following criteria: • representation from Western, Central and Eastern Canada; • representation of different types of shelters; CHAPTER 1 13 • • • • • • • inclusion of rural and urban sites; sites where there have been dramatic changes in service provision; representation of different lengths of shelter experience in the community; site/s with a strong aboriginal focus; site/s with strong diversity focus; at least one site that is remote; willingness to have an onsite visit. In August, we developed a suggested list of locations for visits and telephone interviews. The Advisory Committee approved this list in late August 2002. In addition, the committee recommended that Edmonton be included as a site, because although they are no longer providing shelter programming, they do provide VAW specific counseling services. In early September through December 2002, the telephone interviews and sitevisits were organized. Actual implementation of these visits and telephone interviews occurred between October 4, 2002 and February 6, 2003. Carolyn Goard conducted all of the site-visits. Jill Wyatt, CEO of the YWCA of Calgary, joined Carolyn in Quebec City as a translator. Carolyn also conducted all of the telephone interviews with the exception of Calgary, which Leslie Tutty conducted (See Appendix B for the schedule of sitevisits and telephone interviews.) DATA ANALYSIS The interviews were semi-structured. Notably, in in-depth interviews, respondents tell their stories in their own way and a rigidly structured format may interfere. A semi-structured approach allows the interviewer to respond flexibly to the respondents, while guaranteeing consistency in the type of information obtained. The sitevisits and telephone interviews were audio-taped so that verbatim transcripts could be compiled; transcribing the tapes took approximately 500 hours between November 2002 and March 2003. The first-level analysis of themes, identifying and coding similar material in response to questions across interviews, was completed between March 17th and April 1, 2003. The second level analysis, identifying similarities, differences and gaps in the thematic material, was completed between April 2 and April 18, 2003. (See Appendix C for the National Shelter Study Process/Activity report.) SCOPE OF THE REPORT The sitevisits and telephone interviews yielded a wealth of information related to YWCA shelter/residence/housing/hotel services and programming too voluminous to be analyzed/addressed within the context of this report. Most significantly omitted is the unique history and development of each site, particularly as it relates to the provision of VAW services. Throughout this report, we have included quotes from the YWCA respondents that exemplify or clarify the issues identified in each section. We have edited the quotes, and in cases in which the content has been deemed sensitive; we have omitted the identity of the site. The body of the report includes environmental scan information related to all Canadian YWCA shelters that provide specific VAW shelter and associated services. Non-residential VAW 14 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 services provided by the YWCA of Edmonton is also included, in addition to non-residential VAW services from six other shelter sites. This summary information has been included to highlight the scope of VAW services provided across the country. Preliminary environmental scan information on YWCA shelter/residences, housing/hotel and subsidized housing services is included in the Appendices. This information is summarized in the body of the report. In contrast to the broader scope of the facility analysis, the funding and staffing analysis focuses specifically on YWCA VAW shelters and those facilities that provide specific VAW beds. The report provides a summary of internal and external VAW programming as it is provided across the 24 sites. Predominantly, the services provided by VAW focused shelters are included in the body of the report with the analysis of VAW services provided by non-VAW facilities included in the Appendices. CHAPTER 2 15 CHAPTER 2 Environmental Scan: YWCA VAW Shelter Internal Services THE CONTEXT OF THE RESULTS The YWCA is embedded in Canadian VAW shelter ‘herstory’. YWCAs were among the first wave of shelters, with the YWCA Munroe House in Vancouver established in 1979 as the first second-stage shelter in Canada. Ajax Quinby, the first director of YWCA Munroe House, is acknowledged as one of the matriarchs of the ‘feminist’ VAW shelter grassroots movement in Vancouver. Lynn Zimmer, the Executive Director of the YWCA of Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton since 1983, was a founder of one of the first emergency shelters in Canada, Interval House in Toronto. The YWCA Sheriff King Home in Calgary built in 1983 represents the first emergency VAW shelter in Canada built shelter for that purpose. Across the country without exception, safe, caring, “home-like atmospheres” are provided for women and children fleeing abuse. YWCA VAW facilities are for the most part very well maintained. This may reflect the fact that YWCAs have been in the business of sheltering women since the 19th century. Documented in this report are many innovative projects and collaborations that result in local YWCAs being perceived as leaders in their communities in VAW shelter service provision. Local YWCAs are happy to share their unique programming ideas with sister agencies. An example of this is the “Are You Cool?” brochure developed in Peterborough that many YWCA’s are now utilizing in their violence prevention work with teens. Each YWCA shelter that provides VAW services exists within the context of a community that has supported its development. Each is unique. No matter the size of the shelter or the scope of programming that it provides, YWCAs have demonstrated creativity in developing local service delivery models. Securing and maintaining adequate funding is an ever-present issue in all locations. YWCAs are experts at doing more with less. THE HISTORY OF YWCA SHELTERS IN CANADA As documented in Table I, the YWCA of/du Canada has existed for more than 130 years. The oldest and largest women's service organization in the country, YWCAs and YMCA-YWCAs operate across Canada, meeting the needs of more than one million women and their families annually. The following background information is from their website at www.ywcacanada.ca/: 16 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 The YWCA is a charitable, voluntary organization of member associations, providing high quality programs and services that respond to community needs, works actively for the development and improved status of women and for responsible social and economic changes that will achieve peace, justice, freedom, and equality in Canada and around the world. We are composed of 40 Member Associations operating in over 200 communities across Canada. As well, we are one of over 90 members of the World YWCA headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1870, Agnes Blizzard organized the first Canadian YWCA in two rented rooms in Saint John, New Brunswick. Other associations were quickly established: Toronto (1873), Montreal (1874), Quebec City and Halifax (1875). In 1885, the YWCA of Halifax offered the first YWCA residential service, a home for “delinquent girls”, providing custodial care and training. In 1893, Adelaide Hoodless was instrumental in organizing the YWCA Canada, which held its first annual meeting in 1895 in Ottawa. In a later presidential address, Adelaide Hoodless commented, “We will be the greatest and strongest group of young women ever formed. I mean of women, by women and for women.” Among the services offered by the early YWs were lending libraries, nurses’ training classes, phonography and stenography, all considered non-traditional trades for women and too physically demanding at the time. Many well-known national programs for girls and young women were developed or introduced by the YW. In the early 1900’s, the YWCA Canada introduced the Girl Guide movement to Canada, the YWCA of Toronto started the Big Sister Association, and the YWCA Canada developed the Canadian Girls in Training program (CGIT). Housing and providing temporary shelter for women were some of the early accomplishments of the YWCA, whether as services for “delinquent” girls, housing for women working in munitions factories during the World War I, or Travellers' Aid programs to guarantee the safe passage of hundreds of thousands of women and their families into and across Canada. Many of the YWCA organizations established residences for women over a century ago for safe housing for young girls moving to the larger cities or housing for destitute women. Given this background of responding to the needs of women as identified by their home communities, it is not surprising that the YWs were among the first organizations to respond when woman abuse became identified as a concern. Even before the more public acknowledgement of this issue in the early 1970s, the general YWCA residences were one resource available to women fleeing abusive relationships. In 1954, the YWCA of Niagara Falls moved into a new shelter specific to abused women: When the YWCA started the residence, it wasn’t someplace you move when you go to the city to work and mom and dad knew you were safe. We actually started as a residence for abused women: there was nobody doing this before. (Niagara Falls) In the 1970s and 80s, a number of YWCA shelters specific to abused women opened, including YWCA Munroe House in Vancouver, the first second-stage shelter in Canada. YWCA DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SHELTERS YWCA of Saint John, NB founded YWCA of Montreal established YWCA of Halifax established YWCA of Quebec City established YWCA of Halifax opens a home for delinquent girls YWCA of Peterborough founded Adelaide Hoodless was instrumental in organizing the YWCA of/du Canada First annual meeting of the YWCA of/du Canada in Ottawa, January 23. Canada becomes the 5th member of the World YWCA. YWCA of Peterborough started providing residence for young women YWCA of Hamilton founded YWCA of Kitchener founded YWCA of Edmonton founded DATE YWCA PROGRAMS AND SHELTERS NOT SPECIFIC TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 1870 1873 1874 1875 1875 1885 1891 1893 TABLE I: History of the YWCA Organizations YWCA of Toronto founded February 20th, 1873 YWCA of Prince Albert opened YWCA of Kitchener-Waterloo Mary’s Place opened YWCA of Hamilton founded YWCA of Niagara Falls established YWCA of St. Catharines founded YWCA of Oshawa opens Adelaide House in Oshawa CHAPTER 2 1895 1895 YWCA of Vancouver founded 1897 1898 1889 1905 1907 YWCA of Brandon founded 1907 YWCA of Calgary founded 1907 YWCA of Regina shelter opened 1910 1912 YWCA of Saskatoon shelter opened 1913 1913 1889 1914 Calgary opened first Sheriff King Home 1922 1927 YWCA of Sudbury established 1936 1945 YWCA of Lethbridge was incorporated and began offering residence for women 1949 Niagara Falls moved into new residence initially working with abused women 1954 YWCA of Kamloops founded 1965 YWCA of Yellowknife started 1966 YWCA of Metropolitan Toronto opened its first women’s hostel 1970 YWCA of Metropolitan Toronto moved its hostel to Spadina Avenue building 1972 1972 Kamloops opened 8-bed hostel for destitute women (Y’s Women Hostel) 1974 Thompson Manitoba Shelter opened (100 beds) 17 18 YWCA DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SHELTERS 1974 1975 1978 1978 1978 1979 1979 1980 1980 1980 1981 1982 1983 1983 DATE YWCA PROGRAMS AND SHELTERS NOT SPECIFIC TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE YWCA of Winnipeg opened Osborne House YWCA of Kamloops became a YWCA-YMCA St. Thomas Elgin opened the YWCA Women’s Place a shelter specific for abused women. YWCA of Peterborough adapted residence to provide crisis housing for single mothers with children. Started out reach program YWCA of Brandon opened Westman Shelter YWCA of Vancouver Munroe House the first second stage shelter in Canada YWCA of Oshawa opened Higgins House a six bed transitional or second stage shelter for abused women and their children Kamloop’s hostel became "Y" Women’s and children’s shelter (17 beds) Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 In Toronto, Stop 86, a hostel for young travellers, now a youth hostel for young women 16-25 opened St. Catherine’s Court Street subsidized 18 apartments opened YWCA of Lethbridge opened Harbour House specific to woman abuse Regina shelter for abused women opened (Isabel Johnson Shelter) Calgary built the new Sheriff King Home specific to woman abuse Yellowknife formalized their practice of setting aside rooms for emergency housing for battered women. YWCA of Peterborough opens Crossroads for women and children in crisis and Crossroads II for single women YWCA of Lethbridge builds new building and shelter moves in YWCA of Sudbury opened Genevra House (24 beds) non-specific to VAW Saskatoon built 40 room residence (not specific to abuse) Yellowknife formally establishes shelter for abused women Peterborough combined two shelters administratively (25 beds) YWCA of Peterborough opened the Women’s Safety Network Outreach office YWCA of Saint John joined with YMCA Sudbury’s mandate and funding from province shifted to VAW shelter Yellowknife shelter named Alison McAteer House Brandon moved into new shelter YWCA of Toronto (East York) Women's Shelter opened (25 beds) YWCA of Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton opened Centennial Crescent, 40 Yellowknife shelter named Alison McAteer House Brandon moved into new shelter 1983 1983 1984 1985 1985 1985 1986 1986 1987 1988 1990 1991 1991 1988 1990 YWCA DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SHELTERS 1991 1991 DATE YWCA PROGRAMS AND SHELTERS NOT SPECIFIC TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE YWCA of Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton opened Centennial Crescent, 40 units of housing for women and their children units of housing for women and their children YWCA of Toronto (East York) Women's Shelter opened (25 beds) YWCA of Kamloops opened new shelter for abused women (8 bedrooms, 23 beds) YWCA of Saskatoon asked to take overflow from Interval House by Social Services 1992 1992 1993 1995 1995 1996 1996 1996 1998 1999 2000 2000 In Niagara Falls, Nova House was funded and took over all the VAW work. YWCA of Niagara now only does overflow YWCA of Banff became separate from the YWCA of Calgary Osborne House in Winnipeg separated from the YMCA-YWCA and becomes autonomous. Yellowknife’s Alison McAteer House moved to its own permanent location Vancouver built new hotel/residence. Opens Semlin Gardens, a 28 unit subsidized housing complex. YWCA of Edmonton moved into new building with no residence St Thomas-Elgin shelter separated from the YWCA and becomes autonomous. Durham closed Higgins House (longer stage shelter) Kitchener shifted from longer term homeless shelter to emergency shelter not VAW specific YWCA of Durham Hostel expanded from 37 to 50 beds YWCA of Calgary opened new wing of the YWCA Family Violence Prevention Centre & Sheriff King Home YWCA of Saskatoon received funding specific to domestic violence beds YWCA of Vancouver opened Fraser Gardens in Langley St. Catherines King Street, an emergency housing site (20 beds), opened St. John’s residence closes YWCA of Durham opened Y’s WISH (Women In Safe Housing) YWCA of Vancouver will open Crabtree-Sheway, a 12 unit supported living apart ment complex for pregnant young women with addiction problems in partnership with a number of community agencies 2004 CHAPTER 1 YWCA of Toronto to open new shelter, Arise 2001 2002 2002 2002 2003 2003 2003 2003 New VAW shelter scheduled to open in Sudbury. The new shelter will be built as part of a larger integrated facility. 19 20 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 In about 1979, Munroe House opened the first second stage transition house in Canada. There was the Vancouver First-Stage Transition House, and the women who were working there decided that thirty days wasn’t enough time for women to do all the things they needed to do when leaving an abusive partner and to develop stability and to heal from the emotional crisis of what had happened. So they opened Munroe House in the beginning for a year. (Vancouver) It was begun in 1978, a grassroots movement. Women were seeing women in the community who needed support to get out of an abusive relationship. The board of the YWCA put together the shelter proposal, and in the beginning, there wasn’t a whole lot of money available so we basically did it on a very small fee for service. There was not a lot of core funding because it was too new. It was housed out of the YWCA for a number of years. It didn’t move into its own building until 1981. We began the Family Violence Shelter program here, the women’s shelter, in the late seventies, and it was housed in the basement of this building. The YWCA actually fundraised the money and took ownership of a house and started what we called Women’s Place. They ran that for close to twenty years. (St. Thomas-Elgin) The 1980s were a time of great growth, with YWCA shelters specific to abused women opening in Lethbridge (Harbour House; 1981), Regina (Isabel Johnson Shelter; 1982), Calgary (Sheriff King Home, 1983), Peterborough (Crossroads, 1983), Yellowknife (Alison McAteer House, 1985), and Sudbury (Genevra House, 1987). In some cases, the YWCA was instrumental in developing shelters that later became independent, or the VAW population devolved to other shelters: The YWCA of Edmonton started in 1907 and it’s been fairly influential in our community. The Edmonton Women’s Shelter was originally a project of the YWCA. The philosophy of this YW is that when organizations get to where they might want to be independent, we foster them to do that. The Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton was another project that, at one time, was under the auspices of the YW and then grew big enough that it went on its own. So we’ve been providing services for women for a long time in a variety of ways. (Edmonton) The women’s residence evolved literally a day at a time. If they had a room and they didn’t have someone who was abused and a woman who needed a room, it went that way, until we had more women who were in need of shelter than women who were fleeing violence. It was a gradual adjustment. Nova House (other Niagara Falls shelter specific to VAW) about 10 or 12 years ago took over that portion of it. The bottom line is that’s a very specific market and you need to be able to offer very specific skills to that market and you can’t do it and do general residence at the same time. So it’s probably the best thing that it did get a place that was specific to that problem. (Niagara Falls) CHAPTER 2 21 For whatever reason when they set it up, they decided to make it two corporations. So there was YWCA Women’s Place, which was dedicated to sheltering battered women and there was the YWCA. They had two separate boards, but the YWCA was the accountable and responsible party in terms of the dollars. The upshot was that we separated and they became their own corporation and we divorced from the shelter. (St Thomas-Elgin) Higgins House was opened for abused women and their families who needed longer term support. It was used as a transitional or second stage housing program with priority to abused women. In 1999, Higgins House closed. (Durham) Currently, there are 14 YWCA shelters whose specific mandate is to shelter and serve women and children fleeing abuse. Seven additional YWCA shelters have a number of beds designated to shelter abused women and children, or routinely take the overflow from the local VAW shelters. New shelters have been built to replace old, outdated and non-accessible buildings. Other YWCA shelters have focused on different populations such as homeless and other needy women including pregnant teens. Importantly, women and girls affected by violence often do not identify themselves as having experienced abuse, or their current needs are much more focused on meeting basic needs such as acquiring food, shelter and employment. As such, a significant number of the residents in all YWCA shelters have been affected by violence whether current or historic. YWCA SHELTER SERVICES, FUNDING AND STAFFING The remainder of this chapter provides details on the types of YWCA shelters and organizations providing services to women and children affected by violence against women. This includes funding, staffing and the variety of programs offered to shelter residents. In each section, we incorporate quotes from different YWCA programs that exemplify the issues that emerged in the qualitative data analysis. YWCA SHELTER DEFINITIONS We developed the following definitions to frame the scope of VAW shelter services provided by the 24 YWCAs that participated in the project. These 24 YWCA locations represent 46 (includes Edmonton’s programs) distinct facilities/programs*, which provide programming ranging from a specific VAW shelter focus to subsidized housing. The original intent of the environmental scan was broadened from a specific focus on identifying VAW shelter beds to include identifying and naming other facilities so that the delivery of VAW shelter services could be conceptualized within the breadth of services provided at each location. * Some locations have one shelter/residence facility that houses 2 or 3 different programs. For example, Lethbridge and Saskatoon are both VAW shelters within the physical context of other residential/shelter programs providing shelter for women who are homeless and some longer- term affordable housing for women. Other locations provide subsidized housing in separate facilities. 22 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 VAW Emergency Shelter Residential facilities for battered or abused women and their children. These facilities are generally locked and secure, often with security cameras monitoring entrances. The average stay ranges from 10-15 days to three months across the country. VAW 2nd Stage Shelter An apartment residence for women and children coming out of emergency shelter requiring a safe/locked environment. The YWCA Munroe House in Vancouver is the only YWCA facility that provides this service. Women and children generally stay for up to eight months. Residential facilities for women that provide a mix of emergency short term and medium term housing. It often includes a few long- term housing residents. Specific VAW beds are identified in this mix of beds. Generally do not have the level of security of VAW Emergency shelters. Residential facilities with a mandate to house specified high needs groups of women/youth (e.g. Homeless Women; Girls at Risk; Women with Specific Physical or Mental Disabilities). May have specific VAW beds identified. Residential facilities for women that provide a mix of emergency short term and medium term housing. It often includes a few long-term housing residents. Specific VAW beds are identified in this mix of beds. Generally do not have the level of security of VAW Emergency shelters. Differentiated from the previous category of Shelter/Residence in that they actively market to attract hotel guests. Apartment Units subsidized by the province and/or municipality on the basis of level of monthly income. Apartment Units subsidized by the province and/or municipality on the basis of monthly income. Supportive services available to residents might include group/individual counseling, life skills training, advocacy, and community kitchens/gardens. Shelter/Residence Other Emergency Residence/Hotel Subsidized Housing Assisted Housing YWCA SITE SUMMARIES Site summaries were prepared for all VAW shelters and other categories of shelters that provide identified VAW beds. In general, the site summaries contain all relevant contact information; geographic area served; facility type; number of beds; number of women and children sheltered every year; mandated and average length of stay; union status; and general funding information (See Appendix D for site summary information for 21 facilities/programs providing specific VAW shelter beds). Appendix E summarizes information on: facility type; number of beds and an estimated number of women and children served for the remaining 24 facilities/programs that do not provide specific VAW beds. The following tables and commentary present a summary of the detailed information in Appendix D and E. CHAPTER 2 23 TABLE II: YWCA Facilities Summary FACILITY TYPE VAW Emergency 2nd Stage Shelter/Residence Residence/Hotel Other Emergency Subsidized Housing Total: # VAW SPECIFIC 13 1 2 4 1 n/a 21 # NON-VAW SPECIFIC n/a n/a 6 2 4 12 24 # OF TOTAL FACILITIES 13 1 8 6 5 12 45 In all YWCA residences, even those without VAW specific beds, female residents often have a history affected by violence. When they access services at the non-VAW specific facilities, their presenting concern may not be fleeing violence in the present. Nevertheless, violence is often a familiar and recurring theme in their lives, a reality that was affirmed by all of the respondents interviewed in the context of this project. They were anxious that the broad scope of shelter services provided by the YWCA be reflected in the report, not simply those specific to women leaving abusive relationships. Violence is at the heart of everything; it’s all inter-related and so even though 30 to 40% of the women we see are still captured in the cycle of violence at the point of our intervention, the other 70% that are in shelter absolutely have a history which has seen some violence. Whether they know or admit that is irrelevant, because we approach them with the knowledge that [violence is] a part of their history that has to be addressed. (Quebec) It is also the case that many women who have accessed specific VAW shelter services leave emergency shelters to reside in other YWCA housing facilities. This is an additional rationale for including all YWCA shelter services in the table above. YWCA VAW SHELTERS AND BEDS Table III represents a summary of the 21 sites that provide VAW beds for women and children fleeing violence. The sites are coded by location and by facility type. The number of beds at each site is identified. 24 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 TABLE III: YWCA VAW Beds & Locations VAW Shelter VAW Shelter / Emergency 2nd Stage Residence Banff Brandon Calgary Durham Region Hamilton Kamloops Kitchener-Waterloo Lethbridge Peterborough* Prince Albert Québec City Regina Saskatoon Sudbury Thompson Toronto* Vancouver Yellowknife Total Beds 24 38 15 5 23 12 24 25 12 5 10 34 24 15 60 28 12 289 28 17 36 12 Residence / Other # of VAW Hotel Emergency Beds 6 10 6 24 48 15 5 23 12 24 25 12 5 10 34 24 15 60 28 12 382 * = Toronto & Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton each have 2 VAW shelters THE NUMBER OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN SERVED BY YWCA VAW SITES As can be seen in Table IV, thirteen YWCA VAW emergency shelters in Canada provide a total of 289 beds. These shelters provided a safe haven for 5,143 women and children fleeing abuse annually. The YWCA Munroe House in Vancouver is a second stage VAW shelter with 28 beds that provides shelter to 75 women and children for up to 8 months every year. An additional seven sites provide an additional 65 VAW beds across the country. These facilities shelter 1,320 women and children during the year. CHAPTER 2 25 TABLE IV: Number of Beds & Number of Women & Children Sheltered Total # # of # of Women # of Children Total # of of Facilities VAW Beds Women & Children VAW Shelter Emergency VAW Shelter 2nd Stage Shelter/ Residence Residence/ Hotel Other Emergency Total 13 1 2 4 1 21 289 28 17 36 12 382 2,648 27 83 800 41 3,599 2,495 48 65 300 31 2,939 5,143 75 148 1,100 72 6,538 Table V provides a summary of the estimated total number of women sheltered during the year in 45 YWCA facilities (See Appendix E for details). Of note is that in total it is estimated that 11,109 women were sheltered/housed in YWCA facilities in one year. TABLE V: YWCA Housing Facilities Summary Facility Type VAW Emergency 2nd Stage Shelter/Residence Residence/Hotel Other Emergency Subsidized Housing Total: # Total Facilities 13 1 6 8 5 12 45 #Women & Children Sheltered/Housed 5143 75 2299 1700 1590 302 1 1,109 Some YWCA VAW facilities provide services for women and children not accessing shelter services. Table VI provides a summary of the number of women and children served by seven of these sites- the sites that differentiated between women and children accessing shelter based services and those accessing non-residential services with respect to their funding and/or statistical tracking procedures. It is likely that the actual number of women and children accessing shelter non-residential services while still residing in the community beyond these identified sites is much higher than shown in the summary presented here. Nevertheless, the summary provides a useful 26 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 estimate of the number of women and children served across the country who do not access VAW shelter services. Non-residential services provided by the YWCA of Edmonton are also included in this summary. TABLE VI: Summary YWCA VAW Non-Residential Services Location Lethbridge Calgary Edmonton Toronto Kamloops Durham Vancouver Total # People Served 1,176* 1,900 women & children 600 men* 450 women, men & children ** 700 women & children** 100 children ** 250 women & children** 50 children** 5,226* *Actual number tracked yearly **Yearly estimate based on site/telephone interviews Graph I represents the total estimated number of women and children served in both VAW residential, non-residential services and other residential shelters across the country during the course of the year. YWCA VAW shelters, YWCA VAW non-residential services and other residential YWCA shelter/housing services provided service to 16,335 women and children over the period of one year. Included in this number are 600+ men, primarily involved in programs in Calgary for men who have been abusive towards their partners. Also included in this number are several men who are sheltered in co-educational shelter facilities in Kitchener-Waterloo and Brandon. GRAPH I: Total Individuals Sheltered/Served 20,000 VAW Residential- 6,538 VAW Non-residential*- 5,226 Total VAW- 1 1,764 Non-VAW Residential- 4,571 Total- 16,335 Sheltered/Served # of Women & Children 10,000 5,000 0 15,000 Mode of Service * Estimated 600+ men included in this number CHAPTER 2 27 THE FACES OF THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN SERVED The demographics of women and children served in ten of the YWCA VAW shelters are depicted in the bar graph below. In these sites, between 20% and 80% of women and children sheltered claim aboriginal heritage. Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary shelter a significantly high percentage of women from diverse cultural and language backgrounds. The challenges associated with the changing face of women in shelter will be discussed later in the report. GRAPH II: Faces of Women and Children Served 120% 100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% THOMPSON REGINA PRINCE ALBERT SASKATOON YELLOWKNIFE LETHBRIDGE BRANDON SUDBURY CALGARY VANCOUVER Aboriginal Other Visible Minority FUNDING FOR YWCA VAW SHELTERS AND NON-RESIDENTIAL PROGRAMMING YWCA organizations across Canada spend approximately 16% of their total operational budgets on emergency and second stage shelter for women and children fleeing abuse and on prevention and treatment programming for all family members affected by family violence. In Canada, the YWCA spends approximately 16% of its total budget of $65,186,139.00 annually on shelter operations and family violence intervention ($12,508,676.00). Graph III shows a breakdown of this spending by province and territory. TORONTO CALGARY VANCOUVER 28 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 GRAPH III: VAW Funding by Province/Territory AB - Banff, Calgary (2 facilities), Edmonton & Lethbridge 2% 5% BC - Kamloops & Vancouver 26% MB - Brandon & Thompson NT - Yellowknife 5% 52% 3% 7% ON - Durham Region, KitchenerWaterloo, Peterborough (2 facilities), Sudbury & Toronto (2 facilities) PQ - Québec City * Hamilton is not included in the funding analysis due to lack of information received. FUNDING VAW SHELTER BEDS The biggest challenge is funding: adequate funding to do a good job, to ensure residents and staff are safe, and that everybody is getting the service that they deserve. (Lethbridge) The largest contributors to operational funding for YWCA VAW shelter beds across the country are the provinces/territories, as illustrated in Graph IV. Two-thirds of operational funding comes from this source. In general, these dollars support the provision of basic essential shelter services as described in the internal programming section of this report. GRAPH IV: YWCA VAW Funding by Funder 6% 6% 11% 11% Provincial/ Territorial - $8,235,949 9% 9% United Way - $1,158,099 Fundraising/ Fees - $1,321,546 Project Funding - $750,847 8% 8% Municipal - $1,037,042 66% Provincial/territorial contributions to YWCA and YMCA-YWCA VAW shelters range from a low of 44% in Alberta to a high of 100% in the Northwest Territories. CHAPTER 2 29 GRAPHS V – XI: Funding Breakdown by Province/Territory1 BC 7% Municipal - $0.00 Provincial/Territorial - $703,4 United Way - $0.00 Fundraising/ Fees - $56,430 Project Funding - $0.00 93% 8% 19% 18% Alberta Municipal - $764,664 Provincial/Territorial - $1,647,00 United Way - $518,857 Fundraising/ Fees - $646,778 Saskatchewan 2% 13% 42% Project Funding - $320,339 8% Municipal - $17,000 Provincial/Territorial - $684,500 United Way - $0.00 Fundraising/ Fees - $59,600 90% Project Funding - $0.00 Manitoba Municipal $0.00 Provincial/Territorial - $554,426 United Way - $19,242 52% 40% Fundraising/ Fees - $66,253 6% 2% Project Funding - $417,877 1 Four the seven provinces that were included in the environmental scan. 30 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 Ontario 8% 6% 2% Municipal - $3,225,364 Provincial/Territorial - $3,372,277 41% United Way - $473,000 Fundraising/ Fees - $674,631 Project Funding - $197,513 43% Quebec 16% Municipal - $0.00 Provincial/Territorial - $59,42 United Way - $0.00 Fundraising/ Fees - $0.00 Project Funding - $150,000 84% Northwest Territories Municipal - $0.00 Provincial/Territorial - $530,000 United Way - $0.00 Fundraising/ Fees - $0.00 Project Funding - $0.00 100% CHAPTER 2 31 The local working relationships with provincial funders are reported as almost uniformly good: Our relationship with the Family Violence Prevention Program representative of the provincial government [is excellent]. We have a ‘one-of-a-kind relationship’ and some long-standing good history. (Thompson) On the other hand, some respondents expressed frustration at the lack of influence of sympathetic local contract managers in advocating for VAW services with their government employer. It is also sometimes the case that local contract managers do not understand or appreciate the challenges faced by VAW service providers. They don’t care what you do. They’re not really interested in whether or not you maintain a double staffing model. They’re not mandated to look at standards of practice. They tell you “We’ll give you X number of dollars to maintain emergency shelter services, including a crisis line, crisis shelter and transitional support workers (child and youth/social workers).” You, in turn, have to abide by the service contracts under these funding codes for the total allocated amounts. How you deliver the service within those funding constraints doesn’t matter. In other words, whether you don’t wax your floors for six years and double-staff instead is fine. Or you can choose to wax your floors and not double staff. They don’t fund you for FTE’s [Full Time Equivalents]; they fund the actual delivery of the service. (Sudbury) Generally speaking, the shelter respondents reported that provinces are cutting back or at least holding the line on operational funding as costs increase. The government seems not to pay for administrative support. In the words of one respondent from a shelter in Ontario: It was supposed to be 80-20 funding, they’d pay 80% of the cost and we’d pay 20%, but when they stopped approving new costs, the ratio shrank. I think they’re paying something around 65% now. During the cutbacks in 1995, they crunched down on administrative costs. Their standard for administrative is 10% of their funding, not 10% of the cost of running the shelter, which would be difficult enough. It’s 10% of their funding, which is only 65% of the funding for the service. It’s hard because people don’t want to pay for the administrative support it takes to run a good program. A shelter does not run by itself. It does not run with counsellors alone, you’ve got to have a manager, someone to do payroll and someone to answer the phones. (Lethbridge) One of the biggest contributors to increasing operational costs across the country is the attempt by YWCA shelters to implement pay equity: One of the major increases in operational costs is pay equity, which is mandatory in Ontario. The province actually cut the whole program. Then there was a court challenge saying [pay equity] was discriminating against women-only organizations. The challenge was successful, so the province paid the back payments. Then basically they said ‘yes, it’s the law 32 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 but we’re not paying anymore’. So we’re now required to make very modest pay equity adjustments every year for our staff – it’s 1% of the previous year’s payroll every year until pay equity is achieved. I’d say we’re about 40 years from pay equity. (Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton) For the majority of shelter operations, garnering adequate funding to ensure the safety of residents and staff is an ever- increasing burden: Seven years ago, our housekeeper was assaulted. She was down in the lobby and was assaulted by an individual who was delusional. You cannot operate without staff, it’s just not safe. (Saskatoon) Securing adequate funding is especially difficult for those shelter/residences that have specific VAW beds but do not receive provincial funding. We don’t have core funding. That’s one of the differences in Ontario between the shelters and us. United Way supports a third of our programming, billing regional social services for people who are staying here supports a third, and a third represents donations and room rentals. Because there’s no affordable housing in the city, we have a number of people living here who are working in the community who can’t afford first and last month’s rent or the rent is so high or they’ve just lost their housing. (Kitchener- Waterloo) If we don’t get the sustainable dollars, we close. The motion’s been made; it’s on the floor. If we don’t get sustainable funding, we close the emergency services and we rent out the rooms, we let go of the staff and we don’t do anything where we require a 24-hour staffing model. Certainly not emergency services, you have to have staff. (Saskatoon) There are some hopeful signs on the horizon with respect to provincial funding. Under consideration in Alberta is increasing core-funding levels that have not been changed since 1986. YWCA of Saskatoon’s Crisis Shelter received word in January 2003 that they will finally receive core funding for their 34 crisis VAW beds. YWCA of Toronto is opening a new 30-bed VAW emergency shelter in early 2003, as is Durham, Ontario that opened a 15-bed facility in January 2003. The Ontario government is funding both of the new shelters. Significant assistance is available to YWCA shelters in Manitoba and the Northwest Territories, as the YWCA shelter buildings are owned by the respective government bodies. This ensures that all infrastructure costs are covered in addition to basic shelter service costs. Our building is owned by the government and infrastructure costs are paid by Public Works. Their job is to make sure that the building is running. A downside to not owning the buildings is that once every 4 or 5 years the government decides they’re going to play musical buildings and they move people around. This has happened twice in the 6 years I have been here. It’s never really come to be because the community groups say, “You aren’t moving us anywhere!” (Yellowknife) CHAPTER 2 33 Elsewhere in the country, shelters have historically relied upon funding grants from Canada Mortgage and Housing and more recently the Federal Government’s Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative (SCPI) Homelessness Initiative to augment their fundraising efforts to maintain and renovate their facilities. In Manitoba, in addition to receiving block funding and total funding for facility costs, shelters receive a per diem that ensures they are required to do little additional fundraising to cover their costs. You have some fundraising that kind of falls in the door, we don’t actively go out and do it. Like last year, Safeway decided we were their cause and they raised in the area of $9,000. (Brandon) Everywhere else in Canada, shelters creatively scramble to generate more funds for shelter operations. Some YWCAs are able to keep shelter operations going because the “friends of the YW are so supportive.” How we keep our shelter operations going is by different things that friends of the Y do. For example, small fundraising activities, the downtown thrift store and, of course, the money we receive for rent. (Prince Albert) We are at a point where we’re looking at fundraising a half million a year in a highly competitive environment. This is all the more reason why we have to put huge amounts of time and energy into making Y’s Choice (catering business) succeed. (Durham) Boards of Directors are being expected to play an increasing role in fund raising activities. We have a 4-hour training session to train our board members to do requests for major gifts. We’re going to try to move more significantly into major gift fundraising. (Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton) FUNDING FOR VAW NON-RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT AND PREVENTION PROGRAMMING In addition to core shelter services, YWCAs often provide family violence treatment services and preventative programming for women, children and sometimes men who are affected by family violence. These programs are frequently run in partnership with other community agencies. They are often supported through local United Way funding and, in Alberta particularly, through municipal funding. In many locations, they are dependent on one-time grants and special project funding. We’re grant dependent or fundraising dependent or just sheer perseverance dependent. In terms of our Season Without Violence work, we haven’t got core funding for that and I don’t know where I’d go for it. (Thompson) 34 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 Table VII presents an initial picture of the funding devoted to these additional services across the country. It is most likely a significant underestimate of the funding associated with extra-shelter activities for two reasons. First, Edmonton is the only site included in this environmental scan that does not have shelter-based services. One may assume that other YWCAs that do not have shelter based services do in fact provide non-residential VAW services. Second, shelter based services (VAW and Non-VAW) do not always track non-residential services separately from residential services either in terms of funding or numbers of women and children served. TABLE VII: Funding for YWCA VAW Non-Residential Services Location Lethbridge Calgary Edmonton Toronto Kamloops Durham Vancouver Total Budget (Included in VAW residential budget) $1,410,987 $254,664 $396,000 $44,796 $122,000 $24,000 $2,252,447 SHELTER STAFFING Table VIII provides a summary of the staffing of the YWCA shelter/residence sites with VAW beds. In 47% of the shelters, at least some staff members are unionized. Ninety-five percent of the shelters provide staff coverage 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Almost four-fifths (79%) of shelters require staff who provide direct services to women and children to have a university degree or diploma. In 53% of the shelters, a counsellor or support/advocate worker is available to women 24 hours per day, seven days a week. Almost a third (32%) of the shelters focus primarily on support and advocacy in their work with women. A little more than two-thirds (68%) have a dual focus that includes both support/advocacy and general counseling. Not represented in the table are kitchen, housekeeping and facility maintenance functions. The staffing of these essential support positions varies across the country. Several of the larger shelters employ a full time cook. Those that do not require residents and/or front line counsellor/advocates to prepare the meals. A similar pattern is true of housekeeping. All shelters employ maintenance support staff, often shared with the larger YWCA. CHAPTER 2 35 TABLE VIII: Staffing Summary # of VAW Beds Banff Brandon Calgary – Sheriff King Home Calgary – Mary Dover House Durham Region Hamilton Kamloops KitchenerWaterloo Lethbridge Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton Prince Albert Québec City Regina Saskatoon Sudbury Thompson Toronto Vancouver Yellowknife 6 24 Unionized Degree/ 24/7 Double Single Focus: Focus: Diploma cover- Staffed** Staffed*** Support/ Support & Required age* 24/7 24/7 Advocacy Counselling • • • • • • • • 38 • • • • 10 15 5 23 12 24 25 12 24 10 34 24 15 60 28 12 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • * = 24/7 coverage means that a staff person is onsite 24/7 (includes reception/housekeeping) ** = Double staffed means that there are 2 counsellor/support advocacy workers available 24/7 *** = Single staffed means that there is 1 counsellor/support advocacy worker available 24/7 36 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 THE QUALIFICATIONS OF FRONT LINE COUNSELLORS/ADVOCATES Since the early days of shelters, expectations have changed dramatically with respect to staff qualifications. In the words of one YWCA shelter director: One of the other shifts in this shelter in the last 5-6 years is that we’re moving from [a] peer helper process to having staff who have the academic preparation as well. More of our staff here have degrees or are working towards their degree. (Lethbridge) Another emerging issue is the need to employ staff who are representative and sensitive to the specific and unique cultural/ethnic needs of the women and children accessing shelter. This is particularly the case in the larger urban centres (See Graph II): The YWCA continues to seek input from culturally and ethnically diverse groups and organizations to ensure that our programming is appropriate and that our staff and volunteer complement represents the diversity in our community. (Durham) It is critical, as demonstrated by our analysis of the number of aboriginal women and children served in shelters across the country (see Graph II), to employ staff of aboriginal heritage. Seven of the twenty-four sites visited/interviewed, provided demographic information with respect to race/ethnicity. Of those, 50% of the women and children accessing services are of aboriginal heritage: When we did training and education for our staff about aboriginal culture and issues, many of our own staff identified that in fact they were aboriginal or Métis. Many had been conditioned throughout their childhood that being aboriginal was not acceptable. Several women literally had it beaten out of them. As a result of the training we did, they reclaimed a pride in their heritage. So we actually had more diversity internally than we thought we had. (Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton) I have three part-time/casual staff who are aboriginal. The rest are of other ethnic backgrounds. Our staff complement does not reflect the percentage of women accessing our service who are of aboriginal heritage, however, in the influence of the positions it certainly does. That’s something we need to keep in mind. (Brandon) STAFF GENDER The majority of shelters employ only women as staff members. Two locations, Calgary and Vancouver, have male counsellor/advocates who actually work within the shelter. Several locations employ maintenance staff onsite who are male. Men working in shelter environments require special vigilance with respect to how they present and ‘fill the space’, a factor about which women shelter staff generally need not be concerned: He was always conscious of how he moved in shelter, where he looked and how he interacted with both residents and other staff. Even though he is a big person, he moved as a very little person. There has never been any problem with his presence in the shelter that I am aware of. (Calgary) CHAPTER 2 37 ATTRACTION AND RETENTION OF STAFF As described in the preceding section, shelters are finding it challenging to attract qualified staff members who represent the cultural and ethnic diversity of the women and children accessing shelter. In rural and more remote areas, it is particularly challenging: We have a relatively homogeneous staff, which is not what we wanted, and we are serving a more multi-ethnic group of women and children with this homogeneous staff. It creates a real dichotomy in terms of who we want to be as a YWCA providing services to women and children and the reality of what we can be based upon what we have available and what we have to work with. (Durham) Wages for front-line counsellors/advocates range from $13.00/hour to $20.00/hour across the country. These salaries are generally not competitive in local environs, especially in the North where service industry jobs (e.g. Tim Horton’s) are highly paid. In addition, in rural and remote areas: There’s a lot of pirating among the social service sector. I mean we share staff. We have staff who work for two different agencies because it costs so much money to live here that if you can work more than 40 hours in a week, all the better. Because the skill shortage is so great, you can have three jobs, if you have a background in an area. (Yellowknife) Pay equity is a significant challenge in Ontario where shelters have been required to make modest pay equity adjustments for staff on a yearly basis without increases to their provincial funding. Recently in Alberta, the government substantially increased front-line counsellor/advocate wages as a result of successful lobbying by the Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters. The average wage rose from $16.41 per hour to $18.00 per hour. In both provinces, these increases have greatly assisted in the attraction and retention of staff. Some creative solutions to this issue are illustrated in the following. In Saskatoon, the YWCA has participated in creating a ‘village of service’, with a number of community agencies sharing space on the YWCA site: We are trying to develop a benefits package that all the village agencies can buy into. Reducing the rates and trying to find packages that people can pick and choose pieces from that will be most beneficial to all. One benefit that most shelters can offer staff is a free membership in the YWCA fitness centre that is experienced by many staff as a “positive opportunity for self-care”. (Saskatoon) The other thing that impacts the differences in salary dollars amongst shelter workers is whether they are unionized or non-unionized. (Regina) A creative way in which many shelters augment their staffing complements and recruit future staff is offering practicum placements for students. Students can bring an abundance of new questioning energy that serves to revive and rejuvenate long-term staff members: 38 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 We find offering placements to students very valuable. We often hire those students later. Students help to keep the feminist questioning of how we are doing our work stay alive. I think it’s very hard to do when you don’t have any eager new people, fresh out of Women’s Studies challenging the group. (Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton) Shelters are often a training ground for new graduates who stay for one to two years before moving on. Child Welfare is a frequent destination for recently-trained shelter staff: They go to child welfare. We are losing a lot of staff that way. (Lethbridge) By far, the greatest challenge faced by shelters in recruiting and retaining staff is the fact that they operate 24 hours per day, seven days a week: The staff and management pull their hair out over the front line turnover. One area that is particularly difficult is our relief pool. There’s a very high turnover because people accept working part-time hours on weekends and statutory holidays and then after three months move on to something else. (Lethbridge) Many shelter respondents described creative schedules that provide the continuity of programming for women and children throughout the week and minimize the disruption that a 24/7 schedule reeks on the lives of staff and their families: We used to be on a 12-hour shift system, which we changed last year. We were getting a lot of complaints about health, well-being and fatigue. They were doing 2 days, 2 nights, 5 off and it was just too hard. (Sudbury) Successful shelters often have a strong complement of staff who have worked in the shelter for many years. The following example speaks to this: Previously, we had only three shifts and staff did not rotate. This was problematic in that good skills were getting rusty working the midnight shift all the time. In 1992, another FTE position was added and so we were able to do some creative scheduling. This is how the 1-9 shift came about. We wanted staff with rotating shifts to be able to plan their lives as much as possible, so as a group we decided that weekends and stats off was a must for full-time shift workers. We also recognized the benefit of utilizing the new position to be of the most benefit to staff and residents alike. We created the 1-9 shift so that we had double coverage between the hours of 9am and 9pm seven days a week. The other benefit is, if the staff person is sick or on vacation she does not necessarily need to be replaced; this depends on house occupancy of course. This can save a few dollars on the salary line. This extra full-time position added a full-time support worker to the day shift on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and brought some continuity from the week into the weekend. Weekend staff often feel isolated from the mainstream stuff going on so this was an opportunity to have a full-time nonrotating position provide that continuity. It is a very staff/management friendly way of scheduling. We have very little staff turn over for shifts other than the absolute relief position. The last time we filled a full-time position other than the program co-ordinator position due CHAPTER 2 39 to retirement was over 10 years ago. We have great working conditions and being a YMCA/YWCA, we have a good benefit package and some perks like full membership privileges for the use of their facility and programs. Our salary is not the best in the province but we are a pretty happy group in this house in spite of that. (Kamloops) In summary, despite the variety of locations, distinctive populations and size of YWCA agencies, there are a number of common staffing circumstances and creative solutions that may be of interest to other shelter organizations. YWCA VAW SHELTER INTERNAL PROGRAMMING VAW shelter programs and services are designed and delivered in a manner that promotes the self-confidence, independence and individual decision-making of abused women and their children. Shelter programs also promote community autonomy, responsibility, and accountability. Shelters ensure that 24-hour phone coverage is maintained so that women in crisis can access the shelter’s services whenever needed. Collect calls can typically be accepted for abused clients in crisis. Shelters ensure that adequate security measures are in place to protect residents in the facility and restrict access to residential areas. For security, protection and support purposes, volunteers may supplement but not replace the shelter staff (See Appendix F (i) for a complete listing of the definitions for internal program services). Appendix G (i), (ii), and (iii) contains a complete Compendium of Services and provides a comprehensive analysis of all internal services provided by VAW shelters. CORE VAW SHELTER SERVICES Although shelters offer a wide range of programs and services, most provide, at minimum, crisis intervention, emotional support and information to residents and non-resident members of the community who are experiencing family violence. One key mechanism for this is a 24-hour crisis line that is toll free to the client in some locations. Shelters importantly also provide safe accommodation for abused women and their children and other women in crisis, as needs and space dictate. The length of stay in shelters ranges from 21 days to 3 months. Alberta and Manitoba are the only provincial funders that mandate length of stay. Vancouver’s Munroe House, the only YWCA second stage shelter in the country, shelters women and children for up to 8 months. That’s the reality of crisis work. Women phone 5 minutes after you are full, and 3 hours later, you have a space for her. (Yellowknife) Shelters offer the following basic essential services: • supportive counselling • practical assistance and information • food • personal incidentals 40 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 • individual case management • including assessment and individual referral • non-prescription drugs • referral and transportation to emergency medical and dental care A woman comes in to our shelter and an entry-level intake is completed. We have to determine why she’s there, because that will define the length of time she can stay. If she is fleeing violence, we question her about safety and ensure that she has a safety plan. We also ensure that she’s informed about medical care and that she can stay with us for six weeks. The first twenty-four hours, women are just introduced to the routine of the house. They are connected with a social worker within that first twenty-four hours. (Sudbury) We operate on the bare minimum of staff. It’s difficult with the different shifts to provide women with a primary counsellor, but we try hard to do that. Staff hold case management meetings every morning. They review each client’s progress, decide which pieces need follow up and ensure any paperwork related to applications, like housing, is completed. Then, who will follow up with counselling and what issues need to be addressed. For example, at what point do we bring in the children’s counsellor if there are children involved. (Brandon) Child Support Programs can include trained workers, supportive counselling for children, limited childcare, age-appropriate play equipment and age-appropriate information on violence. We have children’s programming; we don’t have childcare. (Sudbury) Our child support worker’s role is fairly narrowly defined because we don’t want the mothers to come into shelter and not continue to be involved with their children. If you’re in trauma, it’s hard to keep thinking about the kids, but they need their moms. So, being dumped with some strange lady in a room with the doors closed is not okay. We will provide child-care for very specific reasons: mothers have gone to support group; having an individual counseling session with one of the staff; they have to go to the doctor or hospital because they’ve been injured; they have to see a lawyer or an officer of the court; they have to go to the welfare office; or they are doing the last bits before they move out. Or, from time to time, somebody’s having just a really awful day and they just need a break and so the child support worker is available. She’s really wonderful at working with the moms and the children. [If] the kids are acting up, she will often intervene and invite mom to come with the kids into the playroom to play a game together. So she can model parenting and they can talk about parenting issues. She really encourages mothers to be involved with their children. (Brandon) Trade-offs are usually arranged between residents. Choose a responsible person whom your children like and make staff aware of the arrangement. The child and youth worker is not a babysitter but may be approached for short-term child minding for special circumstances. She will do childcare if you are attending our support group. (Kamloops) Our children’s advocates work with the children. When a new family comes in they do an intake. They meet with the women in their capacity as mothers, and they also meet with the CHAPTER 2 41 children. They meet with the children regularly each week, organize programming for the children, and assist the mothers with childcare, daycare, schools and any legal custody issues. (Toronto) What’s happening with childcare has improved dramatically so now we actually do assessments with children when they come in as to the impact that trauma has had. Our childcare staff are also working with mothers. We’ve just got funding, which is so exciting, from the early intervention monies, for a child counsellor. So we are in the process of hiring a play therapist. (Calgary) Specialized client programming for aboriginal women and women of colour can include trained staff, supportive counselling, support groups or healing circles and interpretive services. Our human sharing circles reflect a specific aboriginal focus. Our group programming on Wednesday afternoons is shared, so that one week it is what we consider your traditional support group and then the next week it is a sharing circle. It alternates between the two. (Brandon) ADDITIONAL INTERNAL PROGRAMMING In addition to these core-programming areas, most shelters provide additional services for women and children, either directly by the shelter staff or in partnership with other community organizations. One common example is support groups for women and/or in-house residents’ meetings: The Pathway, or the New Beginnings Group is looking at what you need when you’re exiting the shelter. There is a series of about 8 different modules that the women can choose from: a self-esteem module or budgeting. We created a Landlord Tenant module because we had some reports that our women were failing miserably in the community. Many had not rented before. They didn’t know how to take care of business: for example, the rent’s due at the beginning of the month not on the 15th. The module addresses all sorts of issues that led to being either evicted or getting notices. (Lethbridge) We’re not as good with residence meetings: I still haven’t gotten to the heart of that, but it’s an issue for us. I think that because our staff are so long-term, there’s probably too much of a sense of their ownership of the house. My goal with the staff is to have clinical supervision for them. (Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton) Woman may present with specialized needs that require staff to be sensitive and innovative in supporting them: We had a woman with significant mental health issues. She hadn’t been in stable housing for at least a decade. She had 2 kids with her and unresolved immigration issues. We committed ourselves to keeping her as long as it took to get her into stable housing and get her immigra- 42 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 tion issues settled and we did. We actually got her transferred to Pape into stable housing. If we had been following rigid rules she would have been gone in 2 months, no question. But we realized the most important thing in this woman’s life was she needed supported housing for herself and her 2 teenage daughters. Her screw-ups were more about her mental health issues than the fact that she wouldn’t do chores. We knew what was going on with her and we decided as a team that we would take that on. (Toronto) We have had not a large number, but a significant number of requests from trans-gendered individuals, to come into our shelters. The municipal government is now requiring that all shelters serve trans-gendered women. We were certainly ahead of the times. So I guess we’ll need to play a pro-active role in assisting the city to implement the policy, because I think we have a lot of experience to offer. (Toronto) We’re seeing more and more women stay longer for a variety of issues. I think that has complexities around programming issues. Such as what are we going to do for in-house programming. (Toronto) Some shelters have developed innovative ways of both providing meals and assisting residents to learn to cook. How does the community kitchen work? It’s once a month and all the women in the house get together and devise a menu. We have a few criteria for the menu and staff are available to help out. It must be healthful and vegetarian so that everybody in the house can eat it. It has to be relatively economical so the women will be able to afford to make it on their own afterwards. We pay for the food. Then they get together and cook it. They make extra batches so that they have food to take back to their apartment. (Munroe House, Vancouver) Shelter staff, or sometimes out-reach or follow-up staff, may accompany women to court for emotional support, advocate on their behalf to agencies such as social assistance and housing authorities, or assist them in making housing applications. The community workers provide support around ongoing immigration, housing applications, welfare and other legal issues that the women may have, as well as health issues and other formal issues like employment, school, registration, English as a second language. (Toronto) Some shelters have special arrangements to provide schooling for the children in residence at the shelters. The Lethbridge on-site school is unique. I think we are the only ones with a schoolroom on site, which provides extra security and safety. If there is a risk of abduction or risk of further violence, the kids don’t leave the shelter to continue their schooling, which is a great benefit. She’s more than a teacher, she’s a counsellor too. She often helps the staff with behaviors. She may identify something that staff have not seen yet because they haven’t spent as much time with the children. It’s a wonderful partnership. She is a great resource on the floor and the staff look to her for advice and for support. If we had to fund it internally, we would never be able afford to do it. We would never be able to provide that if we didn’t have the partnership with the school district. We CHAPTER 2 43 provide the space and the district provides the teacher and the computers and the teaching materials. Through donations and fundraising, we’re able to get more resource materials. The school district has been an incredible supporter. We like them, we like them a lot. (Lethbridge) Several shelter respondents noted that they have nurses who routinely visit the shelters: We have a nurse practitioner who comes in once a week. She provides basic medical care and referrals to physicians in the community. (Vancouver) Most shelters train and utilize volunteers for a variety of roles: We have a cultural interpreter’s committee, a group of volunteers, women of different cultures who speak various languages who are available to be a bridge for us with women who have come to the shelter and are completely out of their home environment with respect to culture and language. It’s not just language issues for these women. It’s identifying what we can do from a cultural perspective to create comfort. It’s the kind of thing that comes naturally in a shelter in Toronto, for instance, but it’s more difficult in a city that is much less diverse. (Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton) Another focus for some shelters is providing not just child programs and child-care, but clinical intervention for children affected by the trauma of the violence in their lives. It depends on the child and the issues. They’re up in the playroom playing and it’s a chance for children to talk about their feelings. If there are specific issues, then the counsellor might work with them. (Vancouver) Other shelters provide in-house parenting programs or joint filial therapy or mother-child interventions: [Does the child counsellor also work with mom?] Yes. That’s what Theraplay does. It’s very intensive with mom. (Brandon) An exciting development in our parenting programming last year was work by a Ph.D. graduate student who investigated the efficacy of ‘filial therapy’ with several moms in the shelter. Filial therapy sees the mom being the ‘therapist’ and the child counsellor acting as coach. It involves three sessions where mothers learn how to play appropriately with their children. The sessions are videotaped. The counsellor and the moms review the videotape together while the child plays with another child counsellor in the playroom. The results of the study were very promising in terms of mother’s improved interaction and emotional connection with their children. (Calgary) The following quote summarizes some of the many additional features offered in YWCA VAW specific shelters: 44 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 Things have changed in 30 years. There is a special department at public housing; at the school board; at daycare [that] specifically recognize[s] women and children fleeing violence. All of them prioritize women and children fleeing violence over other applicants. So as much as there are flaws in the system and we complain about them, when you look at it from a broader perspective, what is there is really impressive. So a woman fleeing violence who doesn’t access a shelter may not get the same level of service because counsellors in the community may not know these special departments exist. She might get assistance in finding housing but it might be market rate, she might get assistance finding daycare but not be put on the subsidy list. She might not know, when she moves to this new area, about enrolling her child so that the file is confined and sent to this special department that protects the whereabouts of that child. (Toronto) YWCA SHELTER/RESIDENCES WITH SPECIFIED VAW BEDS YWCA shelter/residences with VAW specified beds generally provide less comprehensive services to women and children fleeing abuse than do VAW shelters. Please see Appendix F (ii) for a complete listing of the definitions for VAW non-residential program services. Appendix G (iv) contains a complete Compendium of Services and a comprehensive analysis of all non-residential services provided by VAW shelters. We do quite a bit, the more I think about what we do here. We have people on staff 24/7. They do the day-to-day emergency support, crisis intervention. We have what we call Community Support Coordinators who provide additional support in finding housing and connecting people with the community. We don’t really run ongoing programs because we’re trying to really connect people to the community. We don’t want people to think that they have to go to programs in order to have housing, which we see as a basic need. We have a half-time outreach worker from our Grand River Hospital, and he provides case management and support to people who are seriously mentally ill. He works with the Community Support Coordinators in terms of case planning. We have a Chaplain who’s here one morning a week and we have a dog through the Dog Therapy program of St. John Ambulance. It is amazing how much it helps to have a dog come in once a week. Residents, especially the children, just love this dog. (Kitchener Waterloo) In summary, the YWCA VAW shelters and non-specific VAW shelters and organizations offer an impressive range of services for the women and children who reside therein. CHAPTER 3 45 CHAPTER 3 YWCA Shelter External Programs and Beyond This chapter provides further details from the environmental scan focusing on programs for abused women and their children that extend the shelter out into the community for ex-residents, non-residents and members of the general public. We examine the unique structures of YWCA shelters as existing within the larger YWCA organization, and the advantages and challenges that this creates for shelter, board and other services. We also present an overview of the context in which the YWCA shelters exist, community-wise, provincially and nationally. YWCA SHELTER EXTERNAL PROGRAMS As can be seen in Appendix G (iv) (the Compendium of Non-Residential Services), YWCA shelters and one YWCA without a shelter in Edmonton offer an array of programs for those affected by violence against women beyond those available to shelter residents. The most commonly described external activity is public speaking, with most shelters responding to multiple requests each year. The YWCA’s Week Without Violence National Campaign is a springboard in many communities to speak out against violence against women. During one week, typically in October, individuals are encouraged to connect with friends, family and neighbours to build safer communities across Canada. In 2002, more than 45,000 people in more than 600 schools, workplaces and community organizations across Canada participated. YWCA shelters are often instrumental in organizing innovative activities. About five years ago, the YWCA of Canada established Week Without Violence. We shifted into a Season Without Violence from September through December. We do a walk against male violence and there’s a fair number of public presentations. The walk itself, in the rain (this year), one hundred and seventy walked; Stress Management workshop educational awareness, fifteen; She Inspires Me, Contest, twenty-nine, Family Violence Substance Abuse Presentation, fifteen attended; Suicide Prevention, seventeen attended; on-going Women’s Sharing Circle, Community Building Youth Involvement Non Violence, in partnership with the school, eighty kids attended and one hundred and forty attended the community presentation, so those kinds of numbers. (Thompson) We’re doing a lot of education in the community, and now somebody knows the service is there, they may actually be sending their cousin or their sister because all of a sudden, “Oh I 46 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 didn’t realize this is what Harbour House did.” So our public, our community work has certainly increased the number of people that we’re seeing. (Lethbridge) The YWCA does speaking presentations at all of the schools during the “Week Without Violence.” There will be displays in the university and the community college. The media are wonderful to us; in September, I think I was on TV twice for interviews around the shelter and kinds of programs that we’re doing. (Brandon) The YWCA Week Without Violence will end with a “Swim Against the Tide of Violence” at the Kamloops Community YMCA-YWCA. We urge you to come alone, bring a friend or come as a family to show support for non-violence in our world. Make every day a day without violence in your world. Sign and bring the pledge coupon below and your swim will be free. (Kamloops) Other prevention efforts include more formalized prevention programs for schools or are available for the general public. The following are some examples: We took the approach of creating a community steering group, and one year we did a one day conference called “Counting the Cost of Violence,” and there was a call for creating a coalition to build the notion of a peaceful community. A bunch of us met and decided that part of what united us was our determination about reducing violence but also our ignorance about how to do it. We had a 2-day conference, funded by the Trillium Foundation last fall called “Peaceful Communities: Wouldn’t That Be Amazing?” We combined inspirational speakers and workshops about existing programs. It was a resounding success. There’s a website that we created called www.peacefulcommunities.ca. (Peterborough) Through the Apple project and with the Ajax-Pickering Social Development Council, we received funding from the Ontario Women’s Directorate to do little wallet size information pieces. We did that in various languages based upon what the population demographics looked like at that time and [then] printed in English and Spanish and Punjabi and Hindi, Polish, Cantonese, German. (Durham) The YWCA Week without Violence was a really big thing for us. We’re also doing work in the schools from two or three school boards with kids around dating relationships, bullying, peace issues within the schools but also issues within new relationships and we’ve created some quite valuable resources for that, including the “Are You Cool” brochure. (Peterborough) Also commonly offered are programs for children exposed to woman abuse or, in some cases, programs for children who have experienced other crises. Most are group programs, although some YWs, such as Regina and Kamloops, also offer individual counselling. The Children Who Witness Violence groups for children and teens are coordinated by one particular shelter staff who also co-facilitates them: group and individual counselling for children outside of the shelter. (Regina) CHAPTER 3 47 Usually I get referrals from the Ministry of Children and Families school psychologist and other helping fields that say, “We have a kid, he’s really in trouble, there’s a history of violence in the family, will you see him?” For the most part, the kids can’t fit in to a group; nobody else wants to work with [them]. I like that. I like the fact that I’ve got kids that I think are neat but other people say “there’s no way I’m touching that, that’s too awful.” By the time they come my way, their behaviour is really out of control, they’re not in school anymore or they are in a modified program or working one-on-one with a behaviour specialist at school. So they need to come to me for a little more after school work. I like to see them individually and move them into groups when they are ready. (Kamloops) We have the children in the witness abuse groups which run twice a year: they’re thirteen weeks long and that’s open to the community as well. The ideal group is eight. (We have) different age groups too, depending on when we get applications and depending on the majority. Say the majority of applicants are eight to ten, that would be the group. [Is it the program that BC Transition House Association developed?] Yes. (Vancouver) Some unique ways of offering children’s programs include the following: We use the camp as part of our Children’s Witness program. The kids go to camp before the group starts: out on Friday and back Sunday, and the idea is they do team building, as well as personal challenge things as a group, so that they learn to trust each other and create a sense of family amongst the group. So when they come back and start having some difficult conversations around what’s gone on in the family, they already have a sense of trust with each other because they spent all of this time together -the facilitators and all the kids. (Edmonton) We just got funding from Calgary Rocky View Early Intervention to fund a part-time child support outreach position which will follow children out of the shelter into the community and help moms to continue what changes they’ve identified wanting to make. We also got some money from an anonymous donor, through the United Way in partnership with the Humane Society, to do a project in the spring. We’re going to do equine therapy for adolescent girls. (Calgary) We run a program called Rainbows designed for children and adults but our focus is children who have experienced crisis in their lives: divorce, the death of a parent, an abusive situation. We run this program for several hundred children through the Y, through schools, community centres and churches. (Saint John) We had a little girl here, and it’s really neat to see [Spinoza Bear] in action. It talks or it sings song. This little girl was having a really hard time. She was just really, really sad. She missed her daddy. She was about 5, and they gave her Spinoza and it just flipped her right around. She understood that this was a special bear, it wasn’t a toy and that it was her special bear. And when she was done with it, she turned it back in again. There are 12 separate tapes, each of them has a lesson like about being afraid and the importance of breathing through your tough stuff. (Kamloops) 48 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 Another unique program is the “Girls Kick Ass” or GKA Club in Kamloops: This is an ongoing group – the only one that runs all year. It came out of necessity. So this is a combination of follow-up and immediate needs. Some of them have never been in the “children who witness” [group] and some of them have been [in] individual [counselling]. We’re always very careful that this is their group; they make the decisions around that. They actually got to go for a weekend camp this year too. Camp “Chino”. (Kamloops) A number of those offering groups for children exposed to woman abuse also offer parenting programs either in groups or individually: We have a program called Here to Help for counselling for children who have witnessed violence and their mothers: 4 groups per year; 12 week cycles; 83 children and 84 adults. Playing with Rainbows is another program that we do when we have the money. It was an initiative of the National YWCA, pioneered by someone from the Ottawa YM/YW. The groups work for immigrant children who have come from areas where they’ve been exposed to war and torture. (Toronto). The Parenting Centre for separation or divorce provides support and guidance for families experiencing separation: workshops, community referrals and resources. They help with parenting skills, communication with your child, family relationships, appropriate discipline, stress management, self-esteem, co-parenting, goal setting, your child’s special needs, problem solving, personal safety, coping. They have particular workshops for custodial parents as well as non-custodial parents and for parents who are dealing with ongoing conflict, parents who are co-parenting, who after a year of separation are still dealing with difficulties in coparenting. They provide free child minding. (Hamilton) Staff partnered with Catholic Family Services to offer "Parenting after Abuse" groups for mothers and concurrent groups for their children who have witnessed domestic violence. Provided more than 1000 hours of counselling and support to over 100 women in the AjaxPickering and surrounding rural areas. (Durham) FOLLOW-UP, OUTREACH AND SUPPORT GROUPS A number of the VAW shelters provide services to women who were former shelter residents (follow-up programs) or for women who have not accessed shelter services (outreach programs). There is some overlap since both former residents and non-residents may also access support groups for abused women. Support groups are commonly offered by the YWCA VAW shelters, but not exclusively. We usually have about twelve women who start Phase I. About ten finish per session and we offer three during the year. We’ll usually get about five women that did Phase I that will move into Phase II. Phase II is self-awareness, self-esteem, looking more inwardly. Our Phase III Program looks at anger management, conflict resolution and it probably runs maybe once a year. What we’ve found is that it’s not that the women don’t want to do the whole piece it’s CHAPTER 3 49 just that other things get in the way, like they’re required to get back to work, they’ve got kids. We do an exit interview at the end of each piece. If there’s lots of things happening for the woman at this time, we really encourage her to think seriously about is this the right time to try to take on (the next phase). (Edmonton) For many years, we have had the Breakthrough Program, a group support program for women who have experienced violence including incest, torture and that kind of thing. Four groups run at a time, and 12-week cycles, three groups a year. And they’re about 15 to 20 in a group session, it also includes sort of individual crisis counselling for the women who are in the group. They meet weekly, but they can, they often phone their workers. (Toronto) Outreach and follow-up programs have become increasingly important as communities realize that shelters can typically offer only short-term crisis assistance and that the needs of women and children affected by violence continue long beyond shelter. Further, although only a relatively small number of abused women actually stay in shelters, shelters are perceived as a major resource for all women and often receive requests for information and/or education. The outreach program is really allowing people in the community to see that the shelter has more to offer than just women running away from an abusive relationship. [Your programming reflects specific aboriginal focus in your human sharing circles?] In our human sharing circles. Our group programming, sort of our outreach or our open group is a support group which is offered on Wednesday afternoons, is shared so that one week it is what we consider to be sort of traditional support group process and then the next week it is a sharing circle. It alternates between the two. (Brandon) It’s follow-up here. Because we only have 2 staff on, if someone has to go to court or has some other need that takes her out of the shelter, outreach would also do that, so they may be involved with some shelter clients while they’re here. Actually I think the majority of them have had no contact with the shelter when we look at their numbers, but they do do followup and they do do shelter support offsite. They also do the callbacks during the Wednesday nights batterer's group; they call the partners during that time. (Lethbridge) Currently, our after-care consists of community workers in the shelter, holding meetings with ex-residents once a month. When they need food, clothing, a shoulder, assistance going to court, whatever, they call us and we try to provide whatever we can. So, there’s more of an informal network of support with the former residents. (Toronto) In 1997 or so [YW] Sheriff King [was], I think, the first shelter in the city to really do outreach out in the community. We’ve been in the Resource Centres, in Health Centres. The role of the outreach worker is to raise consciousness with their community colleagues about family violence and to consult as well as to see people individually. The usefulness of having someone in a community resource centre is that it’s pretty scary for women in abusive relationships and it’s non-threatening to abusive partners for them to go to the resource centre, or the health centre rather than to a shelter or to a counselling centre per se. She can go to 50 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 the resource centre to get a resume done or she could go to the doctor’s office for a check-up and, in the meantime, she can be seeing the outreach worker. (Calgary) Once they leave here or also if they’re living here and, say, they have to get to a doctor’s appointment or court date, then our outreach person (follow-up) would take them and stay with them in court while they went to a hearing, especially with custody of her children. If they have to go to a doctor’s appointment, they would take them, wait for them and take them back because transportation between here and St. Catherines is almost non-existent. (Niagara Falls) We started this rural outreach, the Women’s Safety Network, in 3 counties. An outreach counsellor could meet with people at our office, talk by 1-800 lines connected between the 3 counties (that) ring at those individual offices, at our main office here or the shelters. Each one was situated a little differently, and we could go and meet with women in their homes if that was safe or meet with them at a third place. Part of that early program was a lot of community development and information spreading about woman abuse. (Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton) Innovative programs for women include the following: We have a counsellor who does specialized work with trauma in the shelter. Her position’s changed now, but she was able then to do more in-depth counselling with women shortterm, not only using the eye movement desensitization and re-processing and thought field therapy but also more general therapy and some follow-up. We brought this postion out of the shelter totally and created an integrated trauma position just in this last budget so that she will get referrals from all of our programs now, including the shelter. (Calgary) PROGRAMS FOR ABUSIVE MEN Several YWCAs also provide counselling or programs to men who abuse intimate partners, in the form of group therapy. While this may be regarded with scepticism or concern by some, others are of the opinion that those who have worked closely with abused women and have an accurate grasp of the serious and degrading nature of much of the violence are in an especially strong position to direct and oversee the treatment of male perpetrators. We see about six hundred men a year. We have a Phase I program that is six sessions that’s basically an introduction to group: about how we behave in group; setting the stage for how we talk with one another; basic psycho-educational information about family violence; establishing kind of protocols and having people get comfortable with being here. Our Phase II is twelve sessions and it’s a closed group. So Phase I is open, Phase II is closed. Our retention rate since we started: I think we’re probably at about seventy per cent. [What proportion of the men is mandated?] I would guess probably about sixty (percent). And clinically, we’re doing the follow-up that needs to happen now. (Calgary) We also provide services for men. We have had men from same sex couples who are abused that have come. We’ve also done a limited amount of work with males who are offenders. (Edmonton) CHAPTER 3 51 Depending on the needs and support of the community, some YW shelters and organizations have developed programs for unique populations: We’re putting an application in for concurrent anger management, family violence prevention groups for couples: one group for men and a concurrent group for women. So, for anybody where anger’s an issue in the relationship. So working on developing that in the community but it’s not here now. (Banff) The YW offers the couples counselling programs, Peaceful Futures, a contract with Family Violence Prevention Program, to provide couple therapy for non-mandated couples where they have had abuse in the background, like it’s been a part of their relationship but it isn’t current. (Brandon) Gypsy is a mix of an Australian Kelpie and whatever else was in the neighbourhood. She was an abused dog. She came here for assistance. We went through all the proper channels and adopted her. Now she works with kids. It is the strangest thing; she knows when she’s here to work. She’s very serious. The kids can talk to us through Gypsy. The other gift she has, she’s a drug sniffer. If people are coming in under the influence of drugs or alcohol, she won’t let them past the front door. She stands and barks. (Kamloops) We’re doing one group that is more focused for women who have self-identified as abusive. (Calgary) In summary across Canada, YWCAs are offering an impressive number of programs that extend beyond VAW shelters to meet community needs for prevention and intervention in woman abuse. DATABASES AND EVALUATION Most of the VAW shelters are required to submit statistics with respect to the number of residents to their provincial government funders. For some, this is well organized and provides useful information: We’re going through a process of computerizing our provincial intake forms for shelters and we’re being used as a pilot. They’re (provincial government) going to give funds for each of our shelters to get a new computer and a printer. The research folks, their IT people, have developed the program through the Internet. We will be putting all of our intake information on electronically and then within hours or days we will have access to statistics for our shelter, our city, our province, and we can access other people’s stats. (Regina) We’re in between 2 systems and one was just really laborious hand counting and inputting it onto the computer. But we had started a database with ACCESS, that’s sort of stuck in the middle. It’s not complete, it’s easier now in terms of inputting data but its still hand counting, it’s not that we’re directly going into the computer and only having to count once. So we got an estimate from one of the local computer companies and the government is looking at 52 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 perhaps implanting it through shelters across the North which would be great if they could help take the cost and we were all under the same database system. But then that begs the question in terms of what information they have access to. (Yellowknife) There are quarterly reports, including financial and statistical reporting. There’s an annual larger report and proposal, which is part of the negotiation, none of which really happens, but the paperwork is done. And then, every woman who leaves the shelter has a questionnaire that is optional but they do get on us when they are not getting enough of them. So asking the women for their impression of the service and what has occurred during their stay and what help did they get. All the VAW shelters in Toronto have a huge issue with this collection. Everyone said that this performance evaluation system basically doesn’t work. It wasn’t online for months and months and then you’re supposed to generate a number of women responding to it and if you don’t, you have to explain why you haven’t gotten it. So there’s a lot of problems with the system. (Toronto) Essentially the ministry asks us each quarter to respond on questions such as how many women access the shelter? Of those women, how many were provided with the transitional support plan which ensures that information about what, what resources are available in the community and what their next steps are. Of those women, how many had children? How many services would you have provided to the children? So they ask you some very generic types of questions about the services that they fund but in a very broad fashion. It’s anonymous and then we input the data on the internet and then they use that for their stats collection and producing reporting. (Sudbury) However, several respondents mentioned that they do not have access to these statistics in a way that is useful to them. We have a data base that collects information from the ministry and the information for the outcome measurements system is directly logged into. It doesn’t go into the data base, it goes into the website but we do have a data base that collects the information on demographics: number of women served, statistical reporting from various areas such as the social worker’s number of hours service. It’s not very sophisticated. It was developed on a Macintosh system and it needs an upgrade and it’s not user friendly. We are going to have a central database when we co-locate; we’ll have a central database on a server. (Sudbury) There’s two sources; their application form for the program and the second one when they come in. It’s more general, asking what sort of things they’re interested in from us. For example, are they interested in life skills; parenting skills; returning to school; pre-employment programs or employment programs? [Do you put all that information into a computer data base]? No, we haven’t done that yet. That’s something we could look at in the future. On the computer, all we keep is when women move out, we put them into our address book. (Vancouver) I keep stats, my own stats. Talking about a database, we don’t have anything. With the residents I just keep the statistics in the files. (St. Thomas-Elgin) CHAPTER 3 53 Some have developed their own data bases applying for funding or utilizing community connections. Others have utilized already-existing databases: Between 1998 and now, we implemented an integrated database and we chose the HOMES model because (a) it was developed; (b) it was cheap and, there would be on-going developments that we wouldn’t have to pay for. (Calgary) We have data maintained and tracked in Excel. We purchased a locally developed database that was developed for the Distress Centre. We’re only at Stage I in terms of the fact that, for obvious reasons, the first piece we needed to get in place and operable was the fundraising piece and the tracking and mailing and what have you, so we’re pretty close to having that piece manageable. (Durham) We keep really bizarre statistics; when people leave, we count their ages and how long they stayed here. In terms of the other, we can find it, but it takes forever. We’re working right now on, I think it’s called HIFIS (Homeless Individual and Families Information System); they’re trying to get that established here. We’ve been waiting for about 2 years for this database, so that we didn’t have to change all of our statistical process. They’re terrible because they are all manually collected at this point. So we can find it, but it takes a long time. (Kitchener Waterloo) Several spoke of the complexities of providing outcome measurements to a number of different funders: Of course we have outcome measures that are related to our end statements that we do for the board for organizational performance. We have outcome measures for Sun Country, I think. And I send a similar report to United Way, and then for the other funders it’s usually stats, they haven’t asked for outcome measures. But looking organizationally, the challenge is this one has to have this for this funder, and this has got to have, and then we need this for this. So it gets very confusing. We’ve got outcome measures and end statements all going in different directions. We’re trying to figure out how to pull them all in. Oh and for SCPI , we have another set of measures’ cause there’s things they want to measure with regards to impact on homelessness. So, we spend an awful lot of time doing paperwork. (Lethbridge) Others mentioned the need for updated computers to run such data base programs: We had a grant a few years ago and at that time my computer was relatively new, so I didn’t get an upgraded computer. So I probably have now the worst computer in the building, cause you can’t even get HOMES on my computer. (Lethbridge) PROGRAM EVALUATIONS AND OTHER RESEARCH Each YWCA shelter/organization was asked whether they had conducted any program evaluations or other types of research. A number have conducted needs assessments in their communities: 54 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 The Room to Grow program which we did with Crime Prevention money four years ago really set the tone for us: it was a research project specifically about the women in our community and what their needs were, and it really highlighted some of the housing issues, some of the, the spiralling problems people have when they’re evicted from A, from B, from C. When they’re from another community and they don’t trust and, therefore, don’t make friends. It’s made us make some programming decisions that are quite significant. (Thompson) One of the things we were talking about was the whole issue of women who are fleeing violence and have mental health issues. It’s a really predominant thread running through all our shelters, be it Woodlawn, Stop or the Women’s Shelters. We hired three wonderful women (Brown, Gallant & Junaid, 2002) who did a needs assessment. The women have a long history in working in various housing programs. They interviewed staff, other service providers, the women who use our system and who are actually in our permanent housing or in our shelters and came out with a very good proposal about what to do next. So now we’re investigating what it’s going to look like. (Toronto) Part of what united us was our determination about reducing violence but also our ignorance about what our current situation is, what current attitudes are. So we’ve done a year of research now, an opinion survey of our region of the general population and of high school students, and then we complemented that with some other research, trying to eventually build a benchmark to monitor whether our community was becoming more peaceful or less. (Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton) As a sector, we’ve been really frustrated with Calgary Housing. We really worked over the last several months to develop a closer working relationship with Calgary Housing and I think we’ve made some strides there. At least women are being treated more respectfully. We did a little pilot study and with women’s written consent, we followed their (housing) applications and only about thirteen per cent of women who applied between February and May of last year, got housing at the time we ended the study. So, it’s not good. In our outreach program, we’ve been doing analysis of the pre and post (tests) for about three years now for our yearly reporting of outcomes for FCSS. This year, we implemented a needs assessment with all of our outreach clients and it’s in HOMES. The needs assessment is divided into different factors: basic needs, safety, stress, community resources. When the outreach counsellor meets initially with a woman or a man, they rate that person needing assistance in each of these areas and then, when they’ve finished, they do another rating. (Calgary) We are involved in a small study. The researcher got a small amount of money and he has a student who does interviews with the children and the mom, first she meets with the mom and then gets her permission, and then she meets with the little guys. And it’s to look at what their experience in shelter has been like. (Brandon) In 1992, the YWCA of Durham and our Housing Committee of the Board of Directors for APPLE House retained the services of a university research student to conduct a study in the Ajax/Pickering area of Durham Region. The research was to determine the need for an CHAPTER 3 55 abused women’s shelter in Ajax/Pickering. The work of many groups including the YWCA has resulted in a 25-bed shelter, which should be open in 2003. (Durham) Some, such as Kamloops, routinely collect information as residents exit the shelter with respect to client satisfaction with their shelter stay, the staff and facilities. Some shelters are mandated to do so, not always happily. Other shelters that also collect exit data made the following comments: Clients complete an anonymous departure evaluation form that measures satisfaction with the facility and the counselling program. We keep statistics regarding usage. “Without longterm follow-up research, it’s not known what the impact of the education and support is on our clients. We only asked for individual feedback on the facility and the services. We don’t currently do research around change in attitude or behaviour.” But what (the funder is) saying is that’s what they’re moving to. (Regina) The program is evaluated on an on-going basis using client evaluation forms and exit interviews. The staff responsible for specific programs meet with the Manager on an on-going basis and evaluate programming directions. Six times a year, all staff participate in a daylong team meeting. The team has also engaged in team-building with an outside facilitator to address on-going issues and create a common understanding of conduct. (Toronto) Other YWCA organizations are conducting outcome evaluations on at least some of the programs that they offer: When the United Way decided to do outcome measures I [asked myself], “How can I present this to my staff in a way that doesn’t look like this is something our funders want. How can it benefit the clients we’re working with and what we do?” So I found a really good model on the Internet that talked about using this information for program growth and staff development versus dissatisfied funders. We do the Trauma Symptom Inventories, in Phase I (women’s groups) and, through some research, we identified the key components of those that are considered consistent with women who’ve been in abusive relationships. So we track those pieces for our Funding Report. We use the Multi-Dimensional Self-Esteem scale in Phase II and we use an anger scale in Phase III so that we have a scale specific to those programs, like a standardized scale and we use the information gathered to help the client look at what is this for them. (Edmonton). With this integrated HOMES database, we’re going be able to do research and integrated programming for family violence. We’ve got outcomes on all of our programming. (Calgary) SHELTERS WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE LARGER YWCA ORGANIZATION Many of the YW shelter respondents noted advantages in being a program/department within the larger YWCA organization. Being a ‘part of the whole’ shields YW shelters from the ever-present and challenging tasks of direct fundraising and supporting the activities of a non-profit board 56 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 of directors. Although both are essential in non-profit organizations, these tasks often require a large commitment of time and energy on the part of the Executive Director. Administration support such as accounting services and IT are also usually provided for YW shelters by the larger organization, resulting in savings of both operational expenses and time. There’s other things that are great. The fitness department does fundraisers that benefit the shelter. They do a Y Bo Marathon every once and a while -- Y Bo is a version of Tai-Bo, it’s sort of kickboxing. They also do marathons to raise money for the shelter. At Christmas time, they collect food items for hampers from fitness members. Hampers, when full, are donated to the shelter. (Saskatoon) Being a ‘part of the whole’ also creates inevitable stresses and tensions. These often relate to funding and to the perception, in the community and including YWCA shelter staff, that the shelter is not a part of the YWCA. When we did our business plan, we started talking publicly more about what was going on. I don’t think a lot of members even knew that we had a shelter here. (Saskatoon) Technically the United Way does not support the YWCA. It funds specific programs. This supports the perception in the community that Harbour House is an entity of its own. So it’s one of those grey areas that does cause confusion. (Lethbridge) Respondents from three of the sites included in the project currently have or have had a longstanding relationship with the YMCA. The YWCA of St. John was the first YWCA established in Canada in 1870. In 1987, it merged with the local YMCA as the result of financial difficulties. Unfortunately, we learned recently that the residence closed in January 2003, shortly after our telephone interview. The history of the YWCA in St. Catharines is a fascinating one. The St. Catharines YWCA was established in 1928. It currently does not have a specific VAW shelter, however it does provide general emergency crisis shelter and subsidized housing for women. The YWCA and YMCA of St. Catharines shared the same building, including sharing a swimming pool, from the early 1900s until the early 1980s when the building was deemed beyond repair and was demolished. The two organizations then found separate accommodation. The city of Kamloops opened a YWCA in 1965. In 1975, the YWCA invited the YMCA, who were not yet established in Kamloops, to partner with the YW in providing YM/YW services to the Kamloops community. The “Y” Women’s and Children’s shelter, officially established the year prior to the YWCA becoming a YM/YW, remains strong today. It’s been an interesting sort of marriage. For many years the shelter was really the only visible YWCA program. The atmosphere and everything was more YMCA, the thinking. So the shelter has kind of hung onto the principles of the YWCA. And now, it’s definitely spreading into the organization. (Kamloops) YWCAs work diligently to integrate services across the variety of their local programming in CHAPTER 3 57 order to enhance service to women generally and to women fleeing abuse specifically. Often this means that services not provided by the shelter can be provided within the larger context of the YWCA. This includes, among other programming, day care, fitness facilities, education/employment services, English as a Second Language services, and other housing options. The YWCA has 12 subsidized housing developments across the country. Examples include Toronto, Vancouver, Yellowknife, Durham and Sudbury. Where subsidized housing exists, it is often possible for a woman and her children to move from a YWCA VAW shelter into a YWCA subsidized apartment. If they have appointments that they have to attend, and they have little ones and they don‘t want to be dragging them around, they can access the day care. We don’t have staff in the shelter who provide child care but we can support women by suggesting women access our YW Daycare services. (Regina) The lovely thing about Pape Avenue, which is permanent housing, is a lot of women have come either from the women’s shelter or through other housing programs at the YWCA, be it Humewood or Woodlawn. Pape provides one-bedroom private apartments. Women really appreciate that and also that there is support staff onsite if they need some help around going to court, filling out forms etc. The staff are there for those concrete issues for informal counselling or group work that the women decide to pursue. It’s a nice flowing of what happens at the YWCA. (Toronto) There was ultimately no question in the minds of those interviewed – together we are stronger. This research project is a prime example of our strength together. YWCA SHELTER BOARDS Coming from a wide-range of communities, the YWCA boards vary in size from 8 to 19 members. A unique feature of YWCA shelters for abused women is that their boards almost entirely represent the broader YWCA organization as compared to most transition houses that have a board specific to the shelter. One implication of this structure is that the shelter director does not typically report directly to the board, but through the Executive Director of the YWCA. As the shelter director I have no direct relationship with anyone on the board. Any concerns I would have to send through the Executive Director. (Banff) At one time, Harbour House had an advisory board separate from the YW board. I believe that was dismantled sometime in the late 80s, early 90s. That caused a lot of bad feelings in the community because there were people who were totally committed to Harbour House and felt very put out that they weren’t allowed to have their own board. (Lethbridge) The shelter directors described most of the boards as using the Carver model, although some used a “modified” Carver, some labelled their boards as policy or governance boards and some simply as “working” boards. While some respondents appeared to understand the different board models, other did not. This is perhaps a reflection of the additional distance, since most shelter directors do not report directly to the board. The following were comments specific to the roles and responsibilities of several YWCA boards: 58 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 I believe that the Board should be a policy making board with fiduciary responsibility and they hire me, and it’s my job to hire the other people who make the place work. And we report to them, we give them information, we answer their questions about operations, but they ought not to be in operations. (Durham; “variation on Carver”) It used to be much larger, but they cut that back last year. They struggled for quite a while, trying to figure out how they could know stuff but not know too much. I think that that’s with any organization. It’s always an ongoing battle: that you don’t want to be making the day-to-day decisions but you do want to know some of that stuff. (Kitchener, an “adapted” Carver) They have not been overly hands on. They’re very, very good. They’re really easy to work with. Financial Committee, a Personnel Committee and they look at the policies and structure with that and they set policy and then I’m obligated to carry that policy out. (St Thomas-Elgin, a “working board”) Most respondents described the boards as working well, such as in the following quote: It’s working much better than it was a little while ago and that’s a function of boards. I was first a member of the YW Board, we had a group of women who were really good at policy decisions but not real good at the “let’s get in there and make it work” thing. Now we have a group of women who are quite willing to do this; they’re not interested in sitting back and just talking about, they want to make it happen. They’re younger. There’s a better balance of age ranges and enthusiasm levels. So I’m really thinking that the board at the moment is quite, is quite wonderful. And it still takes a lot of work to manage. (Brandon) THE IMPACT OF CULTURE ON SERVICE DELIVERY Services that are delivered with compassion, caring and respect characterize all the respondents’ descriptions of their sites. Even though each local YWCA and shelter has created their own unique cultures, we think that the YM/YWCA of Kamloops Women’s Emergency Shelter Mission Statement captures the essence of service delivery in YWCA VAW shelters in Canada. It states, as follows: We are dedicated in assisting women to achieve equal rights in terms of all opportunities available in our culture; the right to work, to become educated, to participate equally in the business world, to gain respect from one’s associates and most importantly, to enter into a love relationship without the fear of humiliation or intimidation. We advocate the right to love without fear, with dignity and equality. (Kamloops) In contrast to early years in shelters, when women were shunned if they chose to return to an abusive partner, VAW shelters today, most particularly YWCA VAW shelters, affirm women’s choices, whatever they may be, understanding that choosing to leave an abusive relationship is a complex, multi-faceted process. Her philosophy is about trying to create autonomy in and for women. When she began, she was the only person to work with the residents and she started with 35 residents. She was the CHAPTER 3 59 social worker, the one-on-one counsellor. She first began to work with them in groups. As the women gained strength and her position was firmed up, she now is working more to instil her philosophy in newly-hired colleagues, so that new YWCA staff understand that women must make choices for themselves. The philosophy is very much a feminist philosophy of empowerment, of helping women become autonomous, confident, self-determining and enabled to make their own choices. Particularly in cases of women who choose to go back to their partner, she is very careful to use a non-judgmental approach. She affirms women’s choices and then ensures women know that they can come back for more resources or referral elsewhere. (Québec City) We operate from the feminist perspective. It’s based on that when women come here we don’t make assumptions about what they want or need. We find out what they identify as their needs and then we work from there. So there are no mandated programs for women that live in the house. We refer to appropriate programs based on what women are telling us and, definitely, always respect their choices. Even if a woman chooses to go back to her abusive partner, that’s her choice. We would sit down and we’d talk about it. If she really wants to do that, even after having been given some information about the cycle of violence, statistics about women going back and abuse happening again, we will support her choice. We do what we can to ensure that she has a safety plan for herself and her children and assure her that she is always welcome to call us again. (Vancouver) In many locations across the country, YWCAs are facing the challenge of working with women from a plethora of diverse cultural and language backgrounds, especially women of Aboriginal heritage. The following quotation reflects the sentiments of all participants in the study: We are striving for an inclusive, woman-focused, non-judgmental orientation that reflects the diverse racial, ethnic, economic make-up of our region. Our staff do not reflect the diversity we strive for. As a result, we have to work harder to ensure that our services are perceived as open and inclusive. (Durham) For the most part, YWCA VAW shelters operate within many constraints including most importantly inadequate funding that impacts all daily operations, including new program development. Without exception, all participants interviewed in the project manifested a “can do attitude”. This is reflected in the following quotations: Don’t tell me I can’t do something, tell me how am I going to do it. That’s our philosophy about how we do things here, and maybe that’s why we’ve been successful to move things as quickly as we have. (St. Catharines) Where did we get the money for it? There is no money for it! (Kamloops) Perseverance is also a strong characteristic reflected in the work of the YWCA VAW shelters. After 15 years of advocacy work with the Ontario government, the YWCA of Durham was successful in garnering capital and operational funds for a new 15-bed shelter. On April 28th, 2003, ‘Y’s WISH’ opened its doors. We just simply did not have the resources. A lot of times we tend to see ourselves as ‘David and Goliath’. (Durham) 60 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 Typically, the work culture of YW’s is oriented to supporting staff members, the majority of whom are women, in the varied roles that they play in their lives, particularly as relates to mothering. We have a standing policy here, if your children are sick, family has to come first, so there’s no hassle with, “Oh my kids are sick and I’m not going to make it today.” We try very hard to be oriented to the problems that a woman faces in the work place. If one of the women gets a call from school that says, your child is sick or your child is throwing snowballs, it’s quite all right for them to leave and go do whatever has to be done. (Niagara Falls) The work culture is also one that tends to be non-hierarchical in application, which many claim is important in serving women fleeing violence. This part of the Y is a feminist part. The staff working in this house all subscribe to a certain philosophy of life. You can’t have somebody working in this house who is all business. That’s why I don’t think we could share staff between the two buildings because they work differently there. This place is humbling in so many ways because everybody does everything. And so, if I have a Master’s degree, I unload the dishwasher, I clean up the baby vomit. It’s like a large family, where everybody is responsible for everything. Just because somebody is working with the adult doesn’t mean that they’re not going to take the time to spend with the children when they need it. It’s not uncommon to see Sheila, who has a big fancy title, unclogging the toilet because nobody else can do it and fishing out a toy that’s been stuck down it. That’s the nature of the work; it is not getting caught up in the ego pieces – “Oh, I’m very important because I have this or I’m the Coordinator of the Children who Witness program.” It breaks down barriers. It makes it much easier to work with the women in the house. (Kamloops) We heard several historical incidents about the abuse of power within the context of shelters by both management and staff from several locations including Vancouver, Calgary, Sudbury, Yellowknife and Peterborough. These incidents involved both residents and staff. Without question, it is our impression that YWCAs have moved to a more professional level in acknowledging and addressing these concerns. The irony, of course, is that issues of abuse have lingered and still linger within our walls. The following lengthy quotation captures the essence of the willingness to risk, courage and openness to change reflected in many local YWCA VAW shelters. We hope, it will serve as an inspiration to all readers who face similar challenges within their organizations. In 1990, we had major external problems and complaints that came out of our shelter service. A former client and a former shelter supervisor that we had fired engaged in a huge public campaign to discredit us. They took us to the Human Rights Commission and launched a lawsuit. The client launched a lawsuit about breach of confidentiality. It was a very complex set of circumstances that every lawyer or human resource person we ever talked to it about said, “It’s got every difficult element to try and manage.” We originally tried to manage it in CHAPTER 3 61 a way that doesn’t work: we said we’re not going to talk about this because it’s before the courts. The two women were using the newspapers and launching a word of mouth campaign in the community that was causing us a lot of grief. It was something we had to go through and our “no comment” approach just avoided all of the issues. They were basically saying that we were racist and heterosexist, that we were a very inaccessible organization, and at that time, we were a very white YWCA in a fairly white community. There was lots of truth in the suggestion that we hadn’t done enough learning in relation to many of these issues. But, we weren’t being creative about addressing the issues. So our provincial funder gave us money to do an internal review. We did a very arms-length review. We invited a group of volunteers who represented the interests of women who might be having difficulty accessing our organization: aboriginal women, racial minority and immigrant women, lesbians and women with disabilities. We mandated the committee to be the guardians of the study. They chose the consultant, we had a role in voicing our opinion but they made the decision, and we accepted it, and all the access to the study was through them. So the YWCA was never to know who had participated. We also committed to publishing the study. When we got the results in early 1993, it was brutally critical, much worse than we’d even imagined. We called a press conference and we released it. We sent it out to all the agencies in town, to groups that had been particularly critical and we attended public meetings about it. Once we got over reeling from the shock of what women were saying about our services and how they felt, it couldn’t get any worse after that. We were almost at this point of being selfaccusatory, there wasn’t anything else anybody else could really accuse us of that was any worse. The report included recommendations that were very helpful. We then embarked on a process of renewal to change our approach to our work. There was some immediate change on the board. We had board members who were very disheartened and who left and new board members who were really excited that an organization would have done something like this. Lots of people were astonished that we had taken this approach, that we’d made ourselves this vulnerable. It began to be sort of a benchmark for other organizations who looked at the report and said, “Oh my God, this could be us too”. So there was a lot of change and rethinking going on in agencies as a result. We started an Anti-racism Committee, an Aboriginal Advisory Committee for the board, and we continued the work we had already started doing with disability groups, particularly with the deaf. There were programs available for funding and we pursued those with great energy. It seemed at that time the awareness of racism was peaking and we had a government in the province that was trying to do things about it. Suddenly there was funding to help groups struggle with these issues and because we’d done this study and we’d already recognized that we were part of the problem, we were in a very strong position to get a lot of grants and to do a lot of good work. Eventually, a couple of years later, the original client who had brought the issue forward came and spoke to our annual meeting and commended the organization for the work that we’d done. (Peterborough) Many YWCA VAW shelters, like other women’s shelters across the country, have expanded their basic services of sheltering and support and advocacy to include interventions that are more “therapeutic”. There are differences across the country in what emphasis is placed on support and advocacy work versus more therapeutically focused counselling. Thirteen of the YWCA VAW shelter/services interviewed stated that counselling is an important aspect of their intervention with 62 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 women, in addition to support and advocacy work. Six respondents from VAW shelters interviewed stated categorically that their work was only directed towards support and advocacy work with women. In these shelters, the women accessing services are never referred to as “clients.” This represents a significant dichotomy in the way that we approach work across the country. The impact of this difference on women accessing shelter may be significant. The possible negative implications of the language of therapy being applied to women fleeing abusive relationships must not be underestimated. So, too, must the potential benefits of a more therapeutic orientation with women not be underestimated. The fact remains that all YWCA VAW shelter services evolved over the latter part of the nineteenth century and all of the twentieth century within the context of sheltering women in need. Our common origins will no doubt serve to support us in any future dialogue that we might have with respect to the identification of ‘best practices’. The following quotations speak to the dilemmas outlined above: It’s very much the history that we know. It began as a residence, a place of safety for women looking for refuge or a place to stay while they found work or a transition place. The rest developed: the focus on the philosophy of serving women. The professionalization of services all came later. (Québec City) They’re not clients: I never use that word. One of the things that I make sure staff understand is that you do not become dependent on them, in being needed by them. You have to make sure that you keep that clear in the sense that you don’t get dependent on them and they can’t get dependent on you. You have to be able to remove that; you have to be that source of support and direction and sometimes you take them by the hand and walk them. (St. Catharines) We don’t call ourselves counsellors; we call ourselves support workers. We don’t want to pathologize the experience of having been abused. Women may need counselling but certainly not all do. We are there to support women in their choices, help them find the appropriate services and advocate on their behalf with government and community agencies and be someone who’s there to listen. (Vancouver) THE COMMUNITY CONTEXT As may already be apparent from the foregoing narratives, the YWCA shelters and programs, whether specific to woman abuse or not, have strong working relationships within their respective communities. A couple of years ago, the Board wanted to know about our partnerships in the community and who we were linked up with. I sent out a memo to all of the senior staff and management, and senior staff routed it to their own staff and said, you know, “Just give me a list of ”. No, actually United Way asked for that and then the Board got involved. “Give me a list of all the people that we collaborate with, with whom we have partnerships at some level or other” and when we got to, like seventy-five, I stopped typing. (Durham) CHAPTER 3 63 She sits on what sounds like a sector table of representatives from all of the shelters plus police plus services for men, the purpose of which is to share knowledge, to develop common resources, to effect better referrals. Her view is that we’re all there to serve women and we need to understand each other’s specific resources. When she’s working with a woman and making referrals, she always gives her more than one choice: call 2 or 3 of these different places and make your own choice, and therefore it’s her philosophy of working with the group. It’s very collaborative and a good group and a lot of referrals, conversations and telephone calls come from that formal table. (Québec City) The Week Without Violence is a real collaborative initiative for us. We have a community partnership against violence committee in Regina that’s basically all of the agencies that have anything to do with violence or domestic violence. (Regina) We have Hestia House, which is a safe haven for abused women, but we do have a shortage of beds for abused women, especially abused women with children. We have one other small facility that’s been in a start-up process, I believe it has a handful of beds. We similarly have another centre called First Steps and this is for teens and what we do is we work with these folks so that we don’t reinvent. There are such limited resources here in Saint John that we tend to work collaboratively rather than try to create duplicates of the same. (Saint John) I sit on the Women Abuse Working Group in our city. (All the family violence shelters?) Yes, they’re all at the table, the police, community association police. There are a number of players at the table and unfortunately, they sometimes change too often but, certainly any of the providers of services for women in our community, counselling services, support services for children. (Hamilton) These community collaborations often include justice services including the police, Crown prosecutors, probation: There’s a community team and there’s one lead officer who’s responsible for all of the domestic violence liaison with all of the agencies including Genevra House. If there’s any issues to be addressed, we put it through her and then she addresses it as a matter of policy internally. She sits on the Coalition for the Prevention of Violence and she also sits on the Protocol Committee with the police force. She ensures routine visits from new trainees to Genevra House so they don’t show up at Genevra House for the first time in a crisis. (Sudbury) Police. We have a working relationship with the police and it’s good. We have our moments, but in general, they’re good. (Saskatoon) The Domestic Violence Action Team has been around about 7 years and that was a community-driven initiative, probably mostly between the police service and Harbour House to develop a unified response to domestic violence. Then as that grew, more partners were brought to the table: Lethbridge Family Services, the Crown prosecutor’s office and the hospital. We’re all working towards the same goal, that no matter where a woman or a family enters a system, they will get the assistance that they need to deal with domestic violence. (Lethbridge) 64 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 The introduction of “zero tolerance” has had a huge impact on how domestic violence is viewed, and we have an excellent relationship with our City Police. And for the most part, the RCMP, who are involved in rural areas because we don’t just service the City of Brandon, are really excellent at dealing with it. (Brandon) Others identified some problems with respect to the justice system: We have been working at holding the police accountable when they are inappropriate but at the same time inviting them to come in and learn more about the shelter. My goal with the staff is to sort of win the police over and develop relationships Constable by Constable and it’s been very difficult. There’s one thing that’s been said – we’re going to bring the police in, we’re going to do some relationship building, but they’re not coming in. (Yellowknife) THE PROVINCIAL CONTEXT Virtually all of the YW shelters specific to violence against women are members of their provincial transition house associations, with the exception of Yellowknife, which did not have a functional association at the time of the interview. In most cases, the relationship is working well. The following are comments with respect to the provincial associations: The YWCA has been a member of OAITH (Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses) for approximately 10 years. This has been a very successful and beneficial relationship. (Durham) The new Provincial Coordinator’s been there just over a year and what’s happened in the course of a year is spectacular. (Calgary) The Transition House Society is not publicly loud, but it’s there and it’s present and it has always been present at the higher level. I think that the government understands that we would never go down as quietly as we run our business day-to-day. (Kamloops) Only one of the YWCA shelters not funded specifically for violence against women belonged to their respective provincial transition house association, a recent change. This is perhaps not surprising. However, considering that a significant proportion of YWCA shelter residents have been affected by either historical or current violence, it might be interesting to explore whether such membership could be beneficial in any way. Statistics Canada’s Transition House Survey does include non-specific shelters in their research. Most of the non-VAW specific shelters are in the most recent listing in Transition Houses and Shelters For Abused Women In Canada (2002, National Clearinghouse on Family Violence), so the federal government clearly recognizes the importance of non-specialized shelters as resources for women affected by violence. CHAPTER 3 65 THE NATIONAL CONTEXT Several respondents commented on the lack of a forum for VAW shelters to share information and network across Canada and the benefits of developing such a forum (such as a National Association of Transition Houses). To be able to bring together representatives from across Canada and talk about what we’re doing and the struggles. It’s a kind of exhilaration you can’t get by meeting with other shelter directors in Manitoba. We’re all under the same organization, the same funding model. We all struggle with the same issues. Whereas if you come from across Canada, you’re talking about us as compared to Vancouver or Calgary or Halifax and thinking, “We’re not doing too badly but we could do all these other things, so how do we make them work?” (Brandon) I was keen about it more from a sheltering perspective across the country. I knew what was happening in Alberta… I never really understood why there hasn’t been more of a shelter national presence. (Calgary) I think the fact that we’re funded by provinces tends to divide us, because frankly it’s just such a critical relationship that you know the shelters will tend to group around that. It’s such a huge factor in the environment that you’re operating in, that it’s hard to establish what are the similarities with somebody who has a completely different funding environment to cope with. (Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton) Several respondents identified advantages of the YWCA being a national organization and ways that the YWCA Canada could take the lead in addressing some key issues in sheltering and improving opportunities for sharing information and expertise across the country. The YW is a national and international organization. Behind that comes a whole lot of expertise, credibility, experience, thousands of years collectively of being front and centre. Doing the work, saying the things that nobody wanted to hear. Sticking in there when times got tough, not sort of, “Here’s some money- we can do family violence programs,” and then when the money dries up you leave. The YW has stuck it out and made it work regardless. You can say things as the Y that you can’t say in other ways because you speak on behalf of a greater number of women than simply the women involved in family violence. (Brandon) The National YWCA having some kind of forum, or some form of shelters communicating, developing that other network throughout the country… I don’t know what that would be, but we would like to see something like that. (Regina) Given that [the YWCA] is a national and international organization, they could set up some sort of apprenticeship program so that staff who wanted to experience working in the North could come up and work for a year in the shelter. There could be some sort of exchange of staff, a real sharing of the resources and experiences… The [YW] is probably the only women’s organization in Canada that could have that kind of infrastructure. That’s pretty far fetched, but it could happen. (Yellowknife) 66 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 With the backlash against the violence against women movement for the last decade, organizations that are more middle of the road, like the YW, [are] more acceptable women’s organizations. Probably we’re going to have to lean on the YW to take us forward through this backlash period, because many women-centered organizations, which are equally as valid in the work they are doing, will be seen as radical or advocating or self-serving. That’s how it’s playing out. It’s easy to divide and conquer the women’s movement. So, I think that we have to see it in a different paradigm: we have to be very strategic in the women’s movement because there’s just so much work to do. (Yellowknife) We need to begin to foster that connectiveness and use as many different forums as we can. Now Internet -- if somebody can set up a bulletin board for the YW shelters, just for the shelters, so you can ask questions, connect with people. Most shelters have some access to Internet. Do some training over that. It doesn’t have to be national; it could be a regional meeting, but to foster that sense of being part of something bigger, to give them an opportunity to talk about national problems versus local problems. To share success stories. (Brandon) Several YWCA directors of VAW shelters raised the need for minimum shelter standards across Canada and the possibility that the YWCA could be instrumental in developing these. I think it would be great to have a peer support review system where we go into each other’s associations and have a YW standard for shelters. Then, let’s try to hold the other shelters in our province to that standard. That may be presumptuous for us to be setting the standard, but if we’re the largest provider of women’s shelters in the country, then why don’t we set the standard and then tell everybody else, “You want to run a women’s shelter: this is how it’s done, and this is the minimum requirement.” It’s not running them the same way, but having some basic minimum criteria: that we all agree that this is not a marriage counselling issue; this is a power/over issue and set the standards accordingly. And, that every woman who comes into a shelter must have a safety plan. Children over the age of 5 must have a safety plan. Those are minimum things that we could do to ensure that the clients that we come in contact with are getting the best possible care. (Lethbridge) It’s the intervention pieces that we continue to lack and that has to come in terms of standards: standards to run shelters, to run community counselling programs. Those standards aren’t there. We have best practice standards in medical models. What type of physical plant do you need as a minimum standard? How do you staff that, and, once you staff them, what is the minimum qualifications and the content of that qualification for your staff? What does the programming look like? They did a similar thing in Ontario, with addictions. (Sudbury) CHAPTER 3 67 In summary, the YWCA shelters and organizations involved in the national environmental scan provide many services and perspectives beyond what many typically perceive as the mandate of shelters, to keep women and children feeling safe from abuse. We believe these activities go far to preventing violence in future and educating our children and youth about abuse, so that if they encounter it, they can recognize it for what it is. Given the lack of a national forum for the collective VAW shelters across Canada to share resources, successes and challenges, the YWCA Canada organization may have the capacity to take some leadership in this regard. The sharing that took place among members of the project advisory committee and the responses to Carolyn Goard’s interviews across Canada, speak strongly to the need to more proactively share knowledge, struggles and best practices, not just among YWCA shelters, but with shelters across the country. 68 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 CHAPTER 4 69 CHAPTER 4 Challenges, Successes and Recommendations This chapter essentially summarizes the information from the environmental scan by highlighting what respondents from YWCA shelters identified as their greatest challenges and successes in providing services across Canada to women and children fleeing abuse. The recommendations section reflects our ideas about how the information from the environmental scan might be used to further the work of all shelters for abused women across the country. It includes suggestions for future research and further disseminating ideas about best practices in sheltering. CHALLENGES The greatest challenge identified by most YWCA project participants is ensuring excellent service provision in the face of severe funding constraints. Funding for the shelter has been frozen for 5 years. It was a very rich program, but over a very short period of time, it is no longer rich. We just settled with the union for a three-year contract with increases of 3, 3, and 2. That’s huge and it really cuts into the amount that the funded programs can contribute to running the YWCA at large. We cut programs and our own overhead and try not to cut staff, but all the funding is going to staff and makes it difficult on the program and our support for administration, so that’s certainly a problem. (Toronto) Funding. Not in the bottom line but in the consistency of funding across this province. We are expected to match performance with our sister agencies with no match in funding. Every year, you have to come up with another twelve thousand dollars out of your budget. There is no base allocated, there’s no base increases. What are you going to do? Eventually you are going to start having to cut person power because you’re not going to be able to get it anywhere else. (Sudbury) Money/funding is one of the critical chunks. Literally we’re at the point we’re going to have to decide what to cut because we’re not sustainable the way we are. (Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton) None of the YWCA residence/shelters that provide a few designated VAW beds are core funded. These facilities particularly struggle with a lack of adequate funding to provide shelter for women and children fleeing abuse. 70 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 We’re not core funded. The shelters are core funded, so everything that the women need in terms of eating and keeping clean are looked after. When they come here, they have to provide their own groceries, their own hygiene. We’re providing that for them without being paid back, because they’re coming from a First Nation that won’t pay or Social Services won’t pay because they have a band that should be looking after them. So, it’s not working for us. We provide an excellent service to women when they come in, but it’s not working. (Prince Albert) In the face of such funding adversity, it is particularly important to develop and foster positive working relationships with funders. Critical to the success of anything is building relationships with funders who understand and support the work we do. That makes all the difference in the world. I can get on the phone and say, “I’ve got this idea; what do you think of it?” They’re truly, genuinely interested in trying to make a difference. Then we have some bureaucrats whose mindset is not that way, and I think that’s been our struggle with the hostel agreement in particular. (St. Catharines) Directly related to the lack of funding is the fact that shelters frequently turn women and children away because of the lack of available beds. The challenge is that we don’t have enough beds, emergency beds, in the city. So we have a tremendous challenge with turnaways. (Calgary) We don’t have enough shelter beds, so they’re being accommodated in these dreadful motels. (Toronto) The lack of safe, affordable housing across Canada is a serious crisis. Women leaving VAW emergency shelters face long waiting lists for second stage or subsidized housing. Inadequate levels of social assistance and a lack of subsidized daycare further compromise women’s ability to successfully leave abusive relationships. In our province, an issue is that they cut second stage shelter funding. (Regina) We don’t have enough affordable housing in the city and we don’t have enough second stage beds. (Calgary) The lack of affordable housing, reduction of social assistance, Ontario Works, lack of subsidized day care spaces and community programs for women and children survivors of violence continues to erode their ability to achieve stability. (Toronto) There’s no new housing being built. It’s been funnelled through the municipality and federal money goes through the municipality. We’ve received and made great use of it in renovations to shelters and that kind of thing. But, anything for new affordable housing that has to go through the province, the province is stalling. Basically, our provincial government is not cooperating with the federal government. (Toronto) CHAPTER 4 71 Another major challenge facing shelters is attracting and retaining qualified, committed staff and volunteers who are sensitive to the unique cultural/ethnic and other special needs of women and children accessing shelter. There’s not much that stops us except staffing, staffing, staffing, but that’s on a bad day! (Thompson) A related challenge is attracting board members and other volunteers to the YWCA who reflect the cultural and linguistic characteristics of the community. My own perspective is that for so many years the YWCA has been perceived as the old white girls club where aboriginal women didn’t fit in. That’s something that we have to work at in our community and nationally. We must ensure that we are inclusive and that aboriginal women feel comfortable sitting on a board for the YWCA and doing work with and for the YWCA. I think that we need to have more visible native women on our staffs and on our boards. (Prince Albert) Burnout among staff is a common phenomenon related to a variety of factors including the intensity of the work, low wages, and, at times, organizational dysfunction. For me, the obstacles have been at the micro level where you have women coming to the shelter who are experiencing greater and greater barriers in terms of immigration, health status, housing. In the face of this, some staff are burnt out and probably need to move on, but where do they go? (Toronto) They’re not doing anything compared to what they could be, compared to their talent, compared to their skills. They are crippled by the history of this organization. That takes some time because you can’t just say “OK, let’s fix the organization,” and the staff will automatically change and feel better about their work, thus enabling them to improve their work performance. (Sudbury) Several shelter directors identified the lack of service standards as a serious problem in ensuring that a common frame of reference exists, requiring funders to meet their obligation to ensure that safe accountable services are available to women fleeing violence. A challenge has to do with service standards. This is not a field that’s respected, where the government is pumping resources in to ensure that people with good hearts can’t just open up a shelter in their backyard. This needs to be further professionalized and standards that specify across the board what is minimally acceptable in this province with respect to staffing numbers and qualifications. The ones in existence right now are nonsense. The Alberta Association of Services for Children and Families, who used to have a wonderful accreditation and peer review process and really good standards, had to water down their standards because the province is saying, “We’re not going to pay for them anymore.” (Lethbridge) 72 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 There are no consistent standards being imposed on how shelters should be run. Who should staff a shelter, with what qualifications? There are no safety standards. These are safety shelters and we have no safety standards. You can run a shelter with twenty-four women and children in two separate buildings and have people with mental illness because they’re being downloaded from the psychiatric hospitals and have all of these really high-risk situations and you’re expected to do it with one person, with one body in the building at any given time. (Sudbury) Some participants linked the lack of standards to the fact that shelters today are often not grounded in a feminist analysis of woman abuse. This does not bode well for ensuring that women are supported in leaving relationships in which they are being abused. What are the services that I can expect if I’m going from shelter to shelter? The services, the model, or the philosophy in one community is not the same as in another. If I’m a woman leaving domestic violence and I’m not even sure that that’s what it is and I think I’m partly to blame, the minute I get one shelter, one piece of information, one worker telling me something different from the worker before, then I’m questioning myself all over again and I’m back to where I was. Often staff don’t get it. I mean that’s their job, their profession, and even they don’t know what it’s all about. Ministries in this province that fund shelters have never said, “You will operate from the feminist perspective. You will not tell women that it’s because their partners are under a lot of stress that they are abusing them.” There are shelters in this province that are doing that. There are shelters doing that everywhere because there’s no system in place in this country that says this is how we define violence against women as an absolute. This is how you will provide service to women. These are the best practices in the field. As long as ‘best practice’ standards don’t exist there will be people who do couple counselling with a couple where physical violence is still actively occurring. These counsellors will righteously stand there and tell you that they know what they’re doing. Any one of us would tell you that it’s dangerous, it’s reckless but we’re the only ones that know and we have become a very small group, the group that has worked with shelters. But, the educational system doesn’t know. (Sudbury) Another increasing challenge is the complexity of the mental health issues with which women are presenting on entering shelters. This phenomenon was a recurrent theme across the country and is raising many questions for shelter directors as to how best to address the issue. We’ve talked about mental health being a challenge. It’s a huge, huge issue and the YWCA is really determined (by receiving monies through the United Way) to hire a mental health worker and look at the fact that women fleeing violence and (who) have mental health issues need to be served within our system. Currently, we’re not adequately serving them, and the YW can be a real pioneer in determining how to ensure everyone feels safe and that women are served the best that we can. (Toronto) That whole issue of dual diagnosis and the complexity of the issues we’re dealing with and the involvement of way more agencies puts a great deal of stress on the staff who don’t have an academic background. (Brandon) CHAPTER 4 73 We see a big escalation in women with serious mental health issues. It is hugely problematic in the collective setting of the shelter. This has become our most difficult issue to manage. It’s partly accessing the training for staff so they will be less intimidated in dealing with it. But also, how do you create a helpful environment for the families that don’t have mental health issues as well as being supportive of the staff who are managing these other issues, when to the rest of the women, it may seem that she’s just obnoxious. (Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton) Facility maintenance and renovation were often mentioned as sources of challenge. The past five years involved fundraising for, planning and implementing an extensive renovation/expansion project. We added 14,400 sq. ft. to our existing facility. (Calgary) Upgrading the facility was probably the biggest challenge we’ve managed to meet. The next challenge is the expansion of the YW. I’ve now got the YW in a position where we don’t have one empty room at three levels. (Niagara Falls) Community relationships with other agencies, the police (municipal and/or RCMP), child welfare/children’s aid, health care providers, lawyers, victims assistance units, for example, were mentioned frequently as representing ever-present demands on shelter directors’ time and energy. Not infrequently, participants related that there had been much work to do to repair relationships that had been damaged in the past. The isolationist posture of the YWCA traditionally meant much energy was needed by the new ED to express her philosophy of community connectedness and partnership building. (Yellowknife) It was repairing the damage that had been done in the community with respect to our working relationships. (Calgary) All YWCA VAW shelters face similar challenges. All of the respondents recognized and acknowledged the limited role shelters can play in fundamentally addressing the reality of violence in the lives of women and children. There is much “big work” to be done. At the macro level, what are we doing, why are we even in existence? We can’t look at shelters as the answer; they are a solution to the problem that has been chosen deliberately but it’s not the answer. There are bigger fundamental root causes why all this is happening, other such societal issues as poverty and housing and violence. These issues must always be part of the discussion around violence against women and the role that shelters play. (Toronto) 74 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 SUCCESSES The successes celebrated in the context of the interviews were many and impressive. Of most import is the fact that the YWCA provides safe, accessible and welcoming environments for women and children seeking shelter, often in life threatening circumstances. We’re well known as a safe environment for women. It’s about a fifteen thousand person community; there are probably twenty-five neighbouring communities that would be flying or road accessible and, everybody knows where the YWCA is. (Thompson) It’s always stressed amongst the staff here that we treat these women with respect and dignity. (Prince Albert) A grounded focus and solid service delivery with high occupancy: the shelter is truly a woman-centered, child-friendly environment. (Yellowknife) YWCA VAW services across the country are actively working to improve service delivery while addressing the increasingly complex needs of the women and children accessing their own and other VAW services. We have achieved a significant enhancement of services to children who witness violence, including a skilled child worker in the shelter and an additional funded program for children who witness violence in the community. (Yellowknife) In 2001, 80% of women at the shelter were visible minorities. The shelter continues to develop programming and services that are accessible for all women. Over the past year, staff have continued to identify programming and community relationship areas that require more concentrated effort to improve service delivery. For example, the shelter seeks a more inclusive referral list of lawyers, doctors and other professionals. This has allowed the shelter to refer women to professionals who are culturally and linguistically capable of serving women. The shelter will continue to seek out relationships with communities underrepresented in the shelter population. Currently, we believe lesbian, Jewish and aboriginal women are underrepresented in our service. (Toronto) She did a tremendous amount in raising the bar with respect to services being provided by crisis counsellors in the shelter by doing staff training in areas like documentation and recognizing post-traumatic stress symptoms with women in shelter. We have been involved in a study looking at the use of a specialized post-traumatic stress intervention with women in the shelter. This is an innovative idea and approach in the context of a 21-day shelter stay. Our initial results are promising; some women appear to, as a result of the intervention, be better able ‘to get on with the practical challenges’ involved in leaving an abusive partner. (Calgary) Several things are working well. The outreach program is really allowing people in the community to see that the shelter has a lot more to offer than just women running away from an abusive relationship and all the stereotypes that go along with that. The Week Without CHAPTER 4 75 Violence is a great example and we’re doing all kinds of stuff with schools and community groups. (Brandon) The respondents reported that integration and the breadth of YWCA services go a long way to support women and children as they struggle to attain autonomy. The other thing that works really well is the integration of the different departments. That’s something we’re very proud of. We are fortunate to have a gym, to have a pool for these kids and moms to have some physical activity to work out all that stress in their bodies. We have a computer lab where they can do resumé workshops or look for jobs or other things on the computers. They can get some employment counselling or just get some support from other services when they’re ready to do that. (Saskatoon) Staffing, while always a challenge, was also identified as a great success. The participants reported success with implementing hard-won salary raises that served to increase staff morale. Several discussed making strategic staffing changes designed to ensure that the right people with the right skills were in the right job to affect quality service delivery. Implementation of job evaluation and salary increases, which resulted in significant salary improvements for shelter staff. This has helped stabilize our staffing. Allocating staff resources so that we have a shelter manager with appropriate skills, with administrative and clinical support. (Yellowknife) It was not uncommon, even in the face of the prevalent theme of frequent staff turnover, to hear about individuals who were long-time committed, excellent employees. In the words of one shelter director, “anywhere I go in Canada I can always recognize a YW person.” I think the fact that people just keep working here is a really good indication of their dedication to the work. One person who retired in our finance department last year had been here 34 years. (Kitchener-Waterloo) YWCAs are reorganizing and ‘bringing their shelters into the fold’. The potential to enhance services for individuals accessing YWCA services is incalculable. This is especially true for women struggling to gain autonomy after leaving an abusive relationship. The following quotation speaks to the process that today echoes across Canada: When I arrived, I did have a shelter manager and a Y’s Choice Program Manager. Y’s Choice is our support for independent living program for youth. We had two managers, and supervisors and front line staff for the programs. When the shelter manager resigned, I saw an opportunity to do some reorganizing, and we created a Human Services Programs Manager. Then the Human Services Program, which happens to be Y’s Choice and Harbour House, fell under her jurisdiction and we created real supervisor positions because, when we had managers, we didn’t have real supervisor positions, just quasi-supervisory positions. So, we created a real supervisor position with just one manager. It created a change in organizational structure plus a change in attitude, because the Y’s Choice program manager, is now the Human Services Program Manager. She is very much more a YW person, so then she 76 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 was able to now work with the staff with the message, “you are a YW program.” It took a lot of presentations where we encouraged staff that, when out in the community, to identify themselves as YWCA Harbour House employees and when answering the phone to say “YWCA Harbour House.” Little things like that were subtle changes, but for the staff, who were never ever thinking YW, all of a sudden it was in their vocabulary every time they said where they worked. It took five years and a lot of staff turnover, but the culture has changed. Something else that we did were joint management meetings. We started every two weeks having a joint management meeting where everybody gets together and updates each other on what our respective programs are doing. Then we look at some “big picture” stuff for the whole organization. That got the managers on side, thinking “big picture” and of course [this] filters down [to] the staff. Twice a year, we get all available staff together for a day, and it’ll be program planning, updates [and] some training. There were times when people didn’t know who was who, let alone that they worked for the same organization. So by bringing them together a minimum of twice a year they actually get to meet their peers. We had effectively two different organizations here five years ago. (Lethbridge) Building and renovating is a hopeful theme of success in bringing on desperately needed VAW shelter beds and subsidized housing units across the country. Durham, Toronto, Yellowknife, Vancouver, Kamloops and Calgary provide examples of this. Moving the shelter into its own, specifically renovated facility, with a yard, was an unbelievably positive experience for staff and residents alike. (Yellowknife) The participants identified successes in working collaboratively in the community that often resulted in their gaining increased respect and recognition for the work of the YWCA. The shelter is really working hard at building a lot of bridges into the community. I think that’s successful, that we are slowly becoming more respected. The shelter was always a wellrespected and useful program, but I think people are becoming more aware of exactly what we are doing. It’s now open enough that people who may not normally come inside the shelter have seen the shelter and are really impressed. Many bridges have been built in the community, especially with other agencies serving women. (Yellowknife) The respondents acknowledged the tremendous support of their boards and the general community for the work being accomplished in VAW shelters and other VAW services. We’ve had a good strong board able to provide rock-solid end statements and leave us to our work of interpreting them. (Peterborough, Victoria & Haliburton) I think we have great support for our programs from the community and from the board. (Kitchener-Waterloo) This section has served to highlight some of the successes documented throughout the report. To conclude, the accomplishments of the YWCA VAW shelters and associated VAW services significantly contribute to the advancement of woman abuse services across Canada. CHAPTER 4 77 SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS Conducting this environmental scan offered a unique opportunity to hear the voices of directors and staff members from a number of YWCA and YMCA/YWCA shelters and services for women across Canada. We asked about the scope of their services, their history, what they do well, what remains challenging and how well they are connected within their communities and beyond. Gathering in-depth information on a subset of 24 YWCA organizations from the more than 500 Canadian transition houses and VAW shelters provided a glimpse of the realities of working in this service sector. Since the common thread was their affiliation with the YWCA Canada, we cannot say with certainty that these issues equally affect other shelters for abused women. However, we suspect that they do. Similar research on the day-to-day issues of working in shelters has not been readily available. As such, though, this report may well be a valuable resource to staff and management in other Canadian shelters. It is time once again to listen to the voices of women. The needs and stories of women propelled the first transition houses into existence. With the expansion of shelters across Canada, the growth and development of innovative programs, extensions of the shelter into the community, and the shift to professionalized shelters in most locales, we suggest that it is once again time to go to the source. We must ask the women who use our services what they find helpful, what they require to live their lives free from violence. Several of the studies cited in the literature review about the efficacy of shelters (Grasley, Richardson & Harris, 2000; Tutty, Rothery, Cox & Richardson, 1995) did conduct in-depth interviews with women shelter residents, but the final reports have not been disseminated widely, and thus, the women remain invisible and unheard. This report represents Phase I of this project. The prospectus for Phase II proposes talking to women residents, ex-residents and participants in shelter and non-residential VAW programs, and asking them what they need (or needed), what they think about the services they received and whether the two are congruent. In reflecting on the results of the environmental scan and the questions that always emerge when one is conducting such research, we fully support this direction. For example, women might be asked about their perceptions of the scope of services offered while in VAW shelter residence; whether they felt the need for and/or received counselling or advocacy; whether their stay allowed them to do what they needed to protect themselves and their children; whether the services were culturally appropriate; whether staffing levels were adequate; whether services for their children were available and appropriate. This will provide the women’s views of what constitutes best practices. Assessing the goodness of fit between the service provider’s visions (from the environmental scan) and those of our consumers (from Phase II) will be both intriguing and potentially groundbreaking. The program descriptions collected for the environmental scan showcased a broad range of innovative ideas and unique service deliveries. Phase II will provide further information with respect to best practices. A further project to develop a document/website that more fully assesses commonalities across similar programs (i.e. for children exposed to violence against women), reviews research on such programs and also highlights useful innovations could be valuable to practitioners across the country both within shelters and other community agencies. Health 78 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 Canada has created several very helpful compendia of shelters and programs for abusive men; however, these provide mostly contact information and brief overviews, as was their intent. Phase II of this project could begin the process of collecting program materials and manuals with the goal of eventually securing other funding to develop a critical analysis of what options are available and what works best in, for example, support groups for women. Another aspect of Phase II could be preparing a document utilizing information collected in Phase I. This document would celebrate the unique history and development of sheltering and non-residential VAW services in each of the 24 YWCA and YMCA/YWCA sites interviewed. YWCAs are united in their common goals and purpose in delivering VAW services. All YWs bring to VAW work the perspective that violence against women occurs within the context of the abuse of power within a patriarchal culture. Local and provincial realities, however, affect how we frame the services that we deliver. They also affect opportunities for developing and delivering these services within our local communities. While acknowledging the threads that bind us together in our shared VAW work, it is important also to admit that some of the unique services that we are delivering create tensions among us. Examples of these “questionable services” captured in the report include “therapeutic counselling” and providing services for perpetrators. We suggest that it is critically important to facilitate an open, respectful dialogue about these different perspectives, similar to that begun at the Advisory Committee meeting in Calgary in April 2003. While many of the respondents mentioned strong community connections, a number commented that being YWCA shelters sometimes works to their disadvantage, given misperceptions of the YWCA as elite or middle-class women, primarily Caucasian. Some shelters in the past have distanced themselves from identifying with the YWCA, which has furthered reinforced the stereotype. YWCA shelters might be encouraged to make the YWCA affiliation much more apparent, perhaps using a re-organizational process similar to the one undertaken by the Lethbridge YWCA. While virtually all of the VAW YWCA shelters belong to their provincial transition house association, only one of the non-specialized shelters did, not surprisingly. Given the overlap in clientele, would there be advantages even for non-VAW shelters to become members, since a significant proportion of the “regular” shelter residents will have histories or be experiencing current abuse? The range of valuable services available in YWCA non-VAW shelters such as residences for women who are homeless or other-wise at risk, job-training, counselling resources, English as a Second Language courses, YWCA sponsored community kitchens, and YWCA fitness facilities, are easily ignored with a too-narrow focus on the importance of emergency shelters for abused women. As noted in the environmental scan, women and children leaving violent relationships often need and make use of resources available from non-VAW-specific YWCAs. Broadening our view of how to assist women compels us to look beyond defining them by their relationship to an abusive partner, and to view the person that they are and now wish to reclaim. An issue that emerged on the national level was the question of whether the YWCA Canada could take the lead in developing national minimum standards for its own VAW shelters. This then would be available for consideration by other Canadian shelters and transition houses. CHAPTER 4 79 A final national issue that emerged from the environmental scan was the lack of a National Transition House Association that could become a forum to share best practices, challenges and successes, and to plan how to lobby their respective provincial governments on issues impacting women and children. 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Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. 86 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 APPENDICES 87 Appendix A ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN INTERVIEW HISTORY: What is the history of your shelter/family violence program? What were the highlights/major shifts in its development? Who are you mandated to serve? What is currently working well in offering services to abused women in your shelter/family violence program? Are there any special/unique problems in offering shelter or other services to abused women in your province/region? In your community? What is the culture (philosophical orientation) in your shelter/fv program? What impact does this have on your provision of services? How does this position you in your community? FOR SHELTERS Is your shelter specific to abused women? What is the allowed length of stay? How many admissions did you have last year? # women? # children? How many turnaways last year? How do you define “turnaways”? How many beds does your shelter have? What is the annual number of admissions to your shelter (use last year’s statistics)? What is the average length of stay in shelter? Please describe your physical facility. Do you have a profile of your clients’ demographics? Do you provide the following services for shelter residents? crisis telephone lines; (# of clients served, funding?) in house counselling for women (group or individual); programming for children and/or child care; assistance in accessing medical/legal services; housing, income assistance advocacy for women, for example with social assistance, housing agencies specialized services for women over 55, specialized services for culturally diverse residents or clients of Aboriginal origin; FV program accessibility for clients with disabilities; in-home or outreach services, follow-up program for previous shelter residents other? 88 Y W C A S H E LT E R R E P O RT / P H A S E 1 FAMILY VIOLENCE PROGRAMS AND ADDITIONAL SHELTER PROGRAMS What services/programming do you provide? These might include: group/individual counselling for women; (# of clients per year? Funding?) group/individual counselling for children; (# of clients per year? Funding?) group/instruction with parenting; (# of clients per year? Funding?) group/individual counselling for men; (# of clients per year? Funding?) prevention programs such as in schools; (# of clients per year? Funding?) public speaking on violence; (# of clients per year? Funding?) any others? have you developed any unique programs or service delivery models? Please describe. do you offer practicum placements for students? INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND RESEARCH Do you routinely collect information on your clients? For whom and why? Do you have a functional computer data base developed? Is this information available to you to use in making decisions on programming? How well are your programs working? Has your shelter/family violence program been evaluated or participated in research with respect to abused women? ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION How is the shelter/FV program funded? What is the total budget? How is the shelter /FV programs structured organizationally? (i.e. as in a flow chart) How well is the structure working? What are the staffing patterns? (i.e. hours of shifts, number of part-time staff, gender of staff) Is the staff unionized? What is the organizational structure of your local YW and how does the shelter fit into this? How is the board structured? Does it utilize a particular model of governance (i.e. Carver model?) Size of board? Are there policies re. Length of membership? Relationship of shelter director/manager to the board? COMMUNITY CONTEXT How is your shelter/family violence program perceived in your community? What do you see as the role of YW shelter/ FV programs in the domestic violence serving community? Is the YW shelter involved in any collaborative initiatives in the community? How well connected is the shelter/FV program with other FV and non-FV service providers in the APPENDICES 89 community? How does the shelter/FV program work with the justice system including the police and crown prosecutors? Are there provincial policies or systems that impact your shelter/FV program? Is there a provincial government department that oversees the delivery of your services? How is that relationship? What is the relationship of your shelter/FV program with respect to the provincial/regional association of shelters? What is happening nationally? What could happen to support shelters better? CHALLENGES AND SUCCESSES What have been the three greatest challenges faced by the organization in the past year? In the past five years? What have been the shelter’s three greatest successes in the past year? The past five years? What do you see as the major challenges for your shelter/family violence program in the next ten years?