If you’re feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders lately, you’re not alone. Here at Nellie’s, we’re all feeling the financial pressures of rising grocery prices and housing costs, while also managing our emotions around ongoing wars and climate change concerns. It’s not easy being a human in this world right now, and yet every day, I still manage to feel encouraged, thanks to the incredible generosity of our community.

Despite everything, our donors still continue to support the women and children at Nellie’s. We know that making the choice to donate your hard-earned dollars to charity is not an easy thing to do at this time, and yet here you are, choosing Nellie’s. I think it speaks to the importance of the work that we’re doing, and also to the phenomenal generosity of the people who support us. It leaves me kind of speechless to see our community continuing to show up for our women and children. We’re so incredibly thankful to all of you.

Because again, due to rising costs and inflation, it’s become harder and harder for us to operate our shelter at our standards. To purchase enough food for the women and their children living in our shelter, along with the 120 families in our community who rely on our food bank every week. To buy enough supplies to support the 81 women and their 61 children who stayed with us in 2022/2023.

Fortunately, some good financial news came along recently though: in November, the federal government announced that they will be investing $162 million over four years to support the implementation of the National Action Plan to End Gender-based Violence in Ontario. The plan is focused on three priority areas: increasing prevention efforts; reaching underserved and at-risk populations; and stabilizing the GBV sector. As we move into the new year, we’re looking forward to how this funding will help us stabilize our finances here at Nellie’s.

As we move into 2024, we will continue to honour 50 years since Nellie’s first opened its doors. This fall, we held our annual general meeting in person for the first time since COVID — being able to celebrate and mark our achievements with our staff, board members, and volunteers all in one place was very special for us. We are currently working on planning a few more small, tasteful events to mark our 50th anniversary and celebrate the dedication of our staff and supporters over the last half of a century. In the new year, we’ll also be updating our logo, mission, and vision statements, and we can’t wait to show you our rebranded look later in 2024, which will better reflect our current vision for our organization.

Over the past five decades, Nellie’s has primarily been known for the shelter and support we provide to women and their children fleeing violence, trauma, and homelessness — and while our crisis services will always be a core priority for our organization, we’re excited to also be shifting our focus to delivering empowerment and prevention programs that disrupt the cycle of violence.

Because across the GBV sector, one troubling fact we’re hearing about is that the next generation of our clients are now starting to come through our doors — the children who first came to our shelter with their moms, are now coming through as adults. This solidifies to us the need to be doing more as a system to break the cycle and to focus more on prevention. We hope that the story 50 years from now is very different. While we may not be able to completely eradicate gender-based violence in the next 50 years, we can definitely lessen the impact by breaking the cycle for future generations.

Thank you for your continued, generous support — it’s because of you that everything we do is possible.