Archives for January 2023

Archive for January, 2023

Thank you to our generous donors who supported us in 2022

Posted on: January 31st, 2023 by Nellie's No Comments

Here at Nellie’s, we are eternally grateful for our amazing community of generous donors. From hardworking businesses to selfless individuals, Nellie’s is stronger because of every single person who has supported us over the years.

2022 was a challenging year for us at Nellie’s, due to the continued effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as increasing inflation — and we know that so many of you felt these pressures, too. But even during these tough times, our donors continued to step up and come to our aid. We cannot express how appreciative we are of the many individual donors who still made giving to Nellie’s a priority during a challenging year. Thank you for your unwavering support!

Here are just a few of the organizations who helped us make a difference in 2022.

Miracle Toronto

This iconic pop-up bar has been a holiday tradition in Toronto since 2018, with $1 of every drink sold donated to Nellie’s. In 2022, Miracle Toronto raised an amazing $40,000 and we’re so incredibly thankful for their continued support! If you haven’t been to Miracle before, be sure to add it to your festive to-do list for the holiday season in 2023!

Atura Power

While the electricity that Atura Power generates is used across the entire province, last year we were so fortunate to be one of the local organizations they chose to support. Thank you, Atura, for your generous $3,000 donation, and your continued support of our work.

Parents Association at Bishop Strachan School

The Bishop Strachan School is Toronto’s oldest independent day and boarding school for girls in JK to grade 12, and we’ve been so thankful for the support of their incredible parent community. Throughout the year they raised funds in order to buy toys for the children at our shelter, as well as other essential in-kind donations. Thank you for making a difference for the families at Nellie’s!

One Fire Movement

Thank you to Tony Roost, founder of One Fire Movement, a growing arts collective that uses the power of social enterprise to create powerful change. One Fire Movement has been an amazing supporter of Nellie’s over the years, and in 2022 this included an incredible Back to School drive for the children living at Nellie’s, as well as sponsoring several families through our Sponsor a Family holiday program.

Park Yoga Toronto

Summer 2022 was Park Yoga Toronto’s 18th season of pay-what-you-can yoga classes in parks across Toronto, and its 12th season in which a portion of the proceeds were donated to Nellie’s. Each season runs from June through Thanksgiving, with classes every day throughout the summer. We’re so thankful to founder Beatrix Montanile and her continued support through this initiative! These donation-based classes have hugely supported our staff and residents over the past several years.

Rotary Toronto Eglinton

Rotary Toronto Eglinton is an amazing group of volunteers who share a passion for community service, and we’re very thankful for their continued support. Last year they donated $2,500 in support of our Food Program, which helps us fight food insecurity in our community. Thank you for your invaluable support!

The women and children in our community count on us to be there for them when they need us, and we thank every single individual, community organization, and corporation that helped us to do just that last year.

A message from Executive Director Jyoti Singh

Posted on: January 24th, 2023 by Nellie's No Comments

It’s been a year now since we moved into our new shelter building and being in this space has given us so many opportunities to enhance the work we do with the women and their children who need us.

We went from an 8,900 sq. ft shelter that had only nine bedrooms for 36 beds, to a 21,800 sq. ft building with 22 bedrooms for up to 40 beds. More than just more bedrooms, the new shelter gives us more program space, more living space, more dining space, more play space for kids, more quiet space, and more space to unify our staff under one roof, allowing us to better communicate needs and brainstorm new and innovative approaches to trauma support and violence prevention.

Through our Transitional Housing Program, we continue to focus on finding ways to move women and their children out of the shelter and into safe, affordable housing, faster. Because while we make every effort to ensure our shelter feels like home, it is, after all, still a temporary living arrangement and our goal is to continue reducing average stay times. Over the past year, the average stay was 76 days.

We also continue to focus on delivering prevention programs that disrupt the cycle of violence. Last year, some of our staff were trained to run PAVE Prevention for women and Rock and Water for children and youth. PAVE Prevention (Proactive Anti-Violence Education) is about empowerment and Rock and Water is a world-renowned violence prevention program.

Finding ways to do more and offer more in our new space is always our top priority despite the fact that our operating costs of being in a bigger shelter are greater, especially with rising inflation rates. It’s because of your generous support that in-shelter supportive programs and violence prevention programs for women and their children are possible. Their impact, however, go beyond our shelter walls.

If the pandemic has highlighted anything, it’s that gender-based violence is still prevalent in our society. Nellie’s has long been known as a crisis organization for women escaping violence but, as we become a formative force in addressing violence, we are becoming a leader in reducing it. PAVE Prevention teachings will soon be a part of all of our Community Outreach and Support programs for women living in our community, and a variation of Rock and Water is being introduced in four schools across the GTA. We hope that many more will soon be lining up for a chance to have Rock and Water taught to their students.

Bringing these ground-breaking programs beyond our shelter walls and into the community is how we will stem the flow of violence on a systemic level. As we celebrate our 50^th anniversary in 2023, the idea is that by the time Nellie’s celebrates 100 years, there will be less of a need for us as a crisis organization.

Thank you for your ongoing and continuing support; it is what makes everything we do possible.

Jyoti Singh
Executive Director

Meet Jeboah Miranda: One of Nellie’s newest board members

Posted on: January 9th, 2023 by Nellie's No Comments

Even when she was a teenager, Jeboah Miranda knew that one day, she would create her own non-profit to fight for women’s rights, and that she would be a keynote speaker in the mental health space — a cause close to her heart, after losing both of her brothers to suicide when she was 16 and 17 years old.

“It was something I always knew I wanted to do, and something I knew needed to be done for the advancement of women,” says Jeboah. “Somebody needed to take on the advocacy work and take action if we want to actually bridge the inequality gap. I always felt like it was my responsibility to be part of the movement for women and the women who will come after me.”

After working in brand marketing for many years, Jeboah left her corporate career to enter the entrepreneurial world, becoming a full-time keynote speaker, while also founding a non-profit and launching a mobile app. Her national non-profit, the Jeboah Miranda Foundation, helps women ages 16-24 build their mental grit through programs and technology. Last year, she also launched Blazer, a free mobile app that allows women ages 16-24 to make friends, find and connect with mentors, and receive peer-to-peer mental health support.

In an effort to continue her push for women’s rights and bridging the gender divide, Jeboah joined the Nellie’s board in September 2022. “I’ve been on boards before, and I wanted to find one that was really aligned with my core values. Nellie’s really fit the bill: it’s a feminist organization, it’s very involved in advocacy work for women, and it has a very strong team of women leaders that I ultimately wanted to be a part of,” explains Jeboah.

“I like that Nellie’s focuses on women and children, and not just from an operational standpoint. The advocacy work is really important to me. A lot of non-profits and charities focus on operations and delivery of services, but Nellie’s takes it a step further by being involved in advocacy work and determining how to effect systemic change as part of that. That can be rare to find.”

As an aboriginal woman, Jeboah’s also excited to provide a different perspective to the board by shedding more light on what aboriginal communities need. “I think it’s really important to have that perspective included, because a lot of people who live in dire poverty are aboriginal — especially aboriginal women and aboriginal single mothers,” explains Jeboah. “I think if we’re going to help society, we need to do a better job at helping aboriginal women get more resources and support. I want to bring the aboriginal lens to the table, to have them be included in conversations that they aren’t usually included in.” She also notes that there’s not a lot of aboriginal representation in leadership roles, and she hopes to help inspire more young aboriginal women to take on these types of roles.

When she’s not busy with her advocacy work and entrepreneurial projects, Jeboah loves to travel and learn about other cultures by staying in more rural areas of the places she visits. She’s obsessed with animals (including her own dog, a Border Collie – Labrador mix named Dolce), and has also founded Pawlistic Pals, a canine nutrition company focused on manufacturing species-appropriate supplements for dogs. For Jeboah, all of her work is connected by her passion for health and wellness: “Everything for me comes back to health and wellness, whether it’s physical health or mental health, and to supporting women.”

Thank you, Jeboah, for sharing your story and for your time and service to Nellie’s.

Website: https://jeboahmiranda.ca/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeboahmiranda/