For almost 50 years, Nellie’s has been providing shelter and support to women and their children fleeing violence, trauma and homelessness as they take steps toward accomplishing the next chapter in their lives. While we will always be here to provide these crisis services, we are just as committed to creating social change through education and advocacy.
“It can’t just be about Band-Aid solutions anymore,” says Jyoti Singh, Executive Director. “If this pandemic has highlighted anything, it is that we have not moved the needle one bit when it comes to violence prevention. Gender-based violence is very much alive around the world and here in Canada.”
And so, last month several Nellie’s staff members attended a two-day PAVE Prevention (Proactive Anti-Violence Education) workshop. This trauma-informed program dedicated to creating safer workplaces and communities around the world provides training to individuals and organizations on proactively preventing, responding and healing from violent events. PAVE is associated with ESD Global, which is dedicated to making empowerment self defense accessible around the world.
“Prevention starts with empowering yourself to set boundaries,” says Jyoti, adding that boundaries vary from individual to individual. “The feedback [from those who attended] was overwhelmingly positive. It was quite healing because we are often so busy helping others that we don’t often take stock of where boundaries are being crossed in our own lives.”
The learnings from this workshop will be integrated into our support programs, empowering women to set their own boundaries. But the goal is greater; later this year, up to a dozen Nellie’s staff members will become trained facilitators of the program so that we can teach effective prevention tools to our community partners to help them manage violence before they become crisis situations.
“Rather than dealing with crisis all the time, we want to stem the flow of the issue by providing more women with the knowledge and skills to set those boundaries. Because it all starts with micro-aggressions in the workplace, at home, or in the community. It hardly ever starts with someone suddenly being violent,” says Jyoti. “When we don’t have the power and skills to combat micro-aggressions, they grow and grow and we get devastating consequences.”
The learnings from PAVE Prevention training goes hand-in-hand with another new program we recently introduced at the shelter—Rock and Water, an internationally-recognized anti-bullying program for children.
“Our approach to violence is full-spectrum prevention. We’re starting with children all the way up to adulthood. If we could have a critical mass of people empowered to set boundaries, and to speak up when someone else is experiencing bullying, harassment or violence, it could be life changing on a systemic level.”
Help us create social change by supporting PAVE Prevention training and the Rock and Water program at Nellie’s. Email Ingrid Graham, Director of Development, at Ingrid@nellies.org, call 416-645-1419or click here to donate now!
