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Archive for the ‘Special Holidays’ Category

National Day for Truth and Reconciliation at Nellie’s

Posted on: October 6th, 2023 by Nellie's No Comments

Every year, September 30 marks the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a day for all Canadians to recognize the ongoing trauma caused by residential schools, and honour the children who never returned home, the survivors, their families and communities.

As a community-based feminist organization, which operates within an anti-racist, anti-oppression framework, it’s an opportunity for us to commit to the process of truth, reconciliation and justice with First Nations, Inuit and Metis. At Nellie’s, we are dedicated to creating social change through education and advocacy to achieve social justice for all women and their children.

This year at Nellie’s, we commemorated the day with a special event for all of the women and their children currently staying at the shelter. All of our staff, as well as the shelter residents, wore orange shirts in honour of Orange Shirt Day, an Indigenous-led grassroots commemorative day that promotes the concept of “Every Child Matters”.

Orange Shirt Day was inspired by the story of residential school survivor Phyllis Jack Webstad, who was given a new orange shirt by her grandmother before being taken to a B.C. residential school. The shirt was confiscated and destroyed by her teacher on the first day of class. Wearing an orange shirt is a symbol of the stripping away of culture, freedom and self-esteem experienced by Indigenous children over generations.

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Nellie’s staff wore their orange shirts to commemorate Orange Shirt Day and worked to decorate the shelter for our event.

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Nellie’s counsellor Joanna Shawana opened the event with beautiful drumming and singing.

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Joanna led the group in a cultural ceremony practiced by many Indigenous Peoples in Canada called smudging. Smudging is the practice of burning various medicinal plants in a ceremony for purifying or cleansing the soul of negative thoughts of a person or place.

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Guest speaker Wanda Whitebird shared a bit of history of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, colonization, and residential schools. After Wanda’s talk, we all took part in sharing food and refreshments. Joanna presented Wanda with a gift of tobacco, and we presented her with an honorarium on behalf of Nellie’s.

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Thank you again to Wanda Whitebird for sharing your time and stories with us at Nellie’s. We appreciate the opportunity to learn from you.

This International Women’s Day, our empowerment self-defense work showcased at the UN

Posted on: March 7th, 2023 by Nellie's No Comments

 

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2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Nellie’s, and we’re extremely honoured to kick off this momentous year on an international stage. Just in time for International Women’s Day, Nellie’s has been selected to showcase our work at the 2023 NGO CSW67 Forum in New York City, an event that runs in parallel to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Here’s what executive director Jyoti Singh has to say about this incredible opportunity:

For many years, Nellie’s has been known foremost as a crisis organization for women escaping violence, but it’s our efforts in teaching empowerment self-defense that will help us become a leader in stemming the flow of violence on a systemic level. On March 9, alongside the team at PAVE Prevention (Proactive Anti-Violence Education), we’ll be sharing how Nellie’s is working to deliver prevention programs that disrupt the cycle of violence.

What’s especially incredible about empowerment self-defense is the role it can also play in helping women achieve transformative justice. For so many women who have been victims of violence, it can be impossible to attain restorative justice through traditional methods, such as mediation. For women who literally cannot be in the same room with their offender because that person tried to kill them, how do you restore the harm? How do you restore that sense of peace?

This is where empowerment self-defense comes in. These training sessions don’t only teach you how to protect yourself from violence, but for women who have been victims of domestic violence, they also teach you how to reignite your soul and tap into the power inherently within you. This is the message that we want to give to the world at the United Nations: women have the power to heal from within, and they can achieve their own transformative justice.

I believe we’re going to change lives with this program. I believe we’re going to save lives with this program.

This amazing opportunity continues to grow out of the work we’ve been doing on empowerment self-defense and ending gender-based violence, including training our staff to run PAVE Prevention for women and Rock and Water (a world-renowned violence prevention program) for children and youth. It’s because of your generous support that we’re able to implement violence prevention programs for women and their children, and we’re excited to share how this approach is crucial in ending gender-based violence.

To be celebrating our 50th anniversary by sharing our work on a global stage — and on the day after International Women’s Day, no less — it all feels truly serendipitous. We’re immensely proud to be able to represent the women and children that we serve, our funders and donors, and all of our staff through this amazing opportunity. It’s thanks to your continued support that we are able to lead the change. Thank you for believing in us and the work that we do.

4 ways to support families in need this holiday season

Posted on: October 26th, 2022 by Nellie's No Comments

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While the team at Nellie’s always works extra hard to make the holiday season a special one for our families, it’s truly the generosity of our donor community that helps to make such a difficult time a little bit easier. If you’d like to help us bring the magic of the holidays to families in need this year, here are four ways you can give back:

Donate gift cards: Gift cards are an amazing present for families in the Nellie’s community. These are families who don’t live in our shelter, but they use many of our community programs, such as our Food Program or our Housing supports. Frequently, these families are headed by a single mom doing everything she can to give her kids what they need. Grocery gift cards can help a mom stock their fridge with essentials, or make a nice holiday dinner. Gift cards for stores like Wal-Mart can also help her buy groceries, along with necessities like clothes, diapers, and toiletries.

 Donate cash: Your monetary donations help us continue to provide shelter, dignity, and hope to women and children leaving violence, poverty and homelessness. Here are some ways your gift can help us today:

  • $35 will help us pay for a taxi to transport a woman and her children away from a violent and life-threatening situation
  • $75 will pay for one day’s stay at the shelter, including food
  • $150 will provide counselling and support services for a woman and her children for one month, giving them a chance at a brighter tomorrow

 Sponsor a family: Every holiday season at Nellie’s, more than 50 families in our community join our “Sponsor a Family” program. As a sponsor, we ask you to purchase a small gift for each child, a small gift for the mom, and a grocery gift card to help her get a nice dinner on the table. This is approximately a $250 commitment per family of three (a mom and two kids). When donors are assigned a family, they’ll be given a list of likes, the age and gender of each child, as well as their clothing sizes, to help give them ideas of what to buy.

 Give a gift of securities: One of the most financially sound ways to support Nellie’s this holiday season is with a gift of securities (stocks, bonds, or mutual funds). By donating publicly traded securities, you eliminate the capital gains tax that you would have to pay if you instead sold the securities and then donated the proceeds. You’ll also receive a charitable tax receipt for your donation. Consult your financial advisor if you’d like to consider this donation option.

No matter how you choose to donate to Nellie’s this holiday season, you’ll help us spread joy and support to families when they need it the most. Thank you for your generous support, and happy holidays!

For more information on donating to Nellie’s, please visit our Donate page or email fundraising@nellies.org

 

 

Thank You!

Posted on: January 13th, 2017 by Nellie's No Comments

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We would like to thank all of you for you kindness and generosity in supporting us over the year. We had Sparks, Brownies and students creating shoeboxes and backpacks for our kids who still needed Back To School supplies. We received much needed non-perishable food items from food drives to top up our Food Bank for the holidays! We received donations of personal hygiene items & toiletries, pyjamas, warm coats and boots to help keep our families warm through the winter months and some of you even went without presents so that some of our families would get the desperately needed items they asked for over the holiday season.

You held toy drives and collected at Holiday parties at home and at work. You held raffles, concerts, pub nights, bake sales, a flamenco night, baby showers and contests and raised funds & collected items for our moms and their kids. You supported our Online Auction by donating, bidding on, and buying items and raised funds to help support our essential Programs for our Women & Kids in the New Year. Most of all you showed our families how much you care, so that even though it’s freezing outside, they know that they are part of a Community of Hope, helping them to a future free from violence!

From all of us at Nellie’s to all of you, Thank You! We wish you all the best for the Holiday Season and the New Year!

Chinese New Year 2015

Posted on: February 17th, 2015 by Nellie's No Comments

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Spring Festival, widely known as Chinese New Year in the West, is the most important traditional festival, and most important celebration for families in China. It is an official public holiday, during which most Chinese have 8 days off work.

Chinese New Year 2015 begins on Thursday 19 February, and end on 5 March. It is day one month one of the Chinese lunar calendar, and its date in January or February varies from year to year (always somewhere in the period January 21 to February 20).

Chinese New Year is a time for families to be together. Wherever they are, people come home to celebrate the festival with their families. The New Year’s Eve dinner is called Reunion Dinner, and is believed to be the most important meal of the year. Big families – families of several generations sit around round tables and enjoy the food and time together.

Like Christmas in the West, people exchange gifts during the Spring Festival. The most common gifts are red envelopes. Red envelopes have money in, and are given to children and (retired) seniors. It is not a customs to give red envelopes to (working) adults.

Every street, building, and house is decorated with red. “Red” is the main color for the festival, as it is believed to be an auspicious color. Red lanterns hang in streets; red couplets are pasted on doors; banks and official buildings are decorated with red New Year pictures depicting images of prosperity.

Fish is a must for Chinese New Year as the Chinese word for fish (鱼 yú /yoo/) sounds like the word for surplus (余 yú). Eating fish is believed to bring a surplus of money and good luck in the coming year.

Another traditional Chinese New Year food is Chinese dumplings. Because the shape of Chinese dumplings looks like  silver ingot – a kind of  ancient Chinese money, Chinese people believe eating dumplings during the New Year festival will bring more money and wealth for the coming year.

Read more here: http://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/special-report/chinese-new-year/

Love Shouldn’t Hurt

Posted on: February 10th, 2015 by Nellie's No Comments

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February 14th is Valentine’s Day, a day when traditionally we show our loved ones how much we care.  We buy flowers and chocolates, go out for romantic dinners or watch romantic movies and celebrate love to the best of our abilities.

For women caught in violent and abusive relationships however, love does not always mean romance, chocolates and roses.  There is a darker side of Valentine’s Day, where love hurts.

Figures from the Staffordshire police force show that “consistently, over the past three years, more acts of violence or abuse are committed in the home in the weeks around Valentine’s Day than in January. In the 20-day period between January 8 and January 28, there were 291 domestic incidents in 2011, 257 in 2012 and 263 in 2013.”

Reeva Steenkamp, the model and law graduate shot and killed by Oscar Pistorius, was statistically just one of three women killed on Valentine’s Day by an intimate partner, according to a study on violence against women that damns South Africa as having “the highest rate ever reported in research anywhere in the world.”

Police and domestic violence experts in the US have said that holidays can sometimes bring out the worst in partners and that violence increases during holiday periods which are also times of stress and disagreement. Valentine’s Day is no exception.

This Valentine’s Day, love shouldn’t hurt.

Read more: www.stokessentinel.co.uk
Read more: www.cbsnews.com
Read more: www.thestar.com

Mother’s Day at Nellies

Posted on: May 8th, 2014 by Nellie's No Comments

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Mother’s Day originally started with social activist Anne Marie Reeves Jarvis who died on the second Sun day in May, 1905.  Her daughter Anna vowed to make Mother’s day a holiday that would honour all mother’s as well as her own.

The first Mother’s Day was on May 10, 1905 in Jarvis’ hometown and several other cities and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day

At Nellie’s Shelter, the women celebrating Mother’s Day are not in their own homes, but they are somewhere safe, where they will not suffer abuse or violence of any kind.  Some have their children with them, babies in strollers, toddlers and even teens.

They are getting used to the freedom to just be, with no anger or violence haunting their every action.  They are learning about their rights to live with dignity and respect with the freedom to make their own choices about their lives.  They are learning that they are people of value to the world.

They learn things the rest of us take for granted like how to manage money, to cook meals, to live independently.  They earn how to defend themselves and their rights under the law.  They learn to access services and get the help they need to survive and grow.

They learn that as women, they are important and as Mothers they have the most important job in the world – raising the next generation!

So this Mother’s Day, celebrate the Mother s in your life, the ones who gave you the tools to be the person you are today.  The ones who were there to answer questions and watch you grow.

And if you have a moment, think of the women who are trying to do the best they can in less than ideal circumstances at our Shelter.  They are mothers too and they just need a hand to help them on their way.

Click here to donate and if you would like us to send a card in honour of Mother’s Day, please choose the Tribute option and we would be happy to do so.

Happy Earth Day from Nellie’s!

Posted on: April 22nd, 2014 by Nellie's No Comments

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Kung Hei Fat Choy

Posted on: January 30th, 2014 by Nellie's No Comments

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Chinese New Year is the longest and most important celebration in the Chinese calendar. The Chinese year 4712 begins on Jan. 31, 2014.  People dress in red and children receive gifts of “lucky money” contained in red envelopes. The colour red symbolizes fire to drive away bad luck.  Traditionally households thoroughly cleanse the house to sweep away ill fortune and make way for good luck, decorate windows and doors with red paper-cuts and light firecrackers.   Festivities often continue until the Lantern Festival, held on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. The highlight of this festival is often considered to be the dragon dance. Traditionally the dragon is held aloft by young men who dance as they guide the colorful beast through the streets.

This is the Year of the Horse and those born in this year are believed to be cheerful, skillful with money, perceptive and witty.