rebekah

The SJSWC has been awarded funds by the Investment Readiness Program to help with preparing a marketing and business plan for our new social enterprise.

Our mission for this project is to help build a safer and stronger community and foster positive social change by enhancing the skills, knowledge, and confidence of individuals and groups of all genders through a variety of training sessions, facilitated by our in-house staff members.

These funds will be used for the following activities.

• Activity 1: To assess the market for existing community training and identify opportunities and strategies for us to create a sustainable social enterprise.
• Activity 2: To develop a marketing and business plan that provides a roadmap for training as a social enterprise.
• Activity 3: To prepare for the social enterprise by developing and implementing improved internal administration systems.
• Activity 4: To prepare for the social enterprise by recruiting and training more facilitators. 

This RFP is exclusively for activities 1 and 2. Activities 3 and 4 will be informed by activities 1 and 2 in the future.

Timeline
RFP Released: April 10, 2023
Responses Due: May 1, 2023
Finalist consultants selected and contacted for interview: May 5, 2023
Chosen consultant selected and contacted: May 18, 2023
Project Kick-off: Latest, June 1, 2023

Proposal Submission
Proposals will be accepted until 5:00pm (NDT) on May 1, 2023. Please use the subject line:
“RFP Business Plan – NAME OF YOUR COMPANY”.
Any questions on this RFP and all proposals must be submitted by email to: hiring@sjwomenscentre.ca.

Full Request for Proposals document:

Reflections from the outgoing leader of our Managed Alcohol Program team, Becky Fleming

It has been no small task to develop, launch, and lead the province’s first managed alcohol program (MAP), but Becky Fleming never flinched in leading her team in this vital harm reduction work. The next leader of this team will benefit from the amazing tools and systems that Becky has built for the program, but will also take over on the important work that has been done to bring the St. John’s Status of Women Council closer to ensuring that all of our programs are based on the harm reduction approach.

Becky will be making a move within the organization, joining our counselling team, but before she makes the shift we wanted to check in with her to find out what it means to be the Managed Alcohol Program Coordinator!

If you had to describe your job in just 3 words, what would they be? 
Inventive, empowering, diverse 

What is the hardest part of your job?
Struggling with different ideas of harm reduction and what that support looks like. With MAP, we have the privilege of thinking deeply about harm reduction, taking a radical approach, and expecting nothing less. However, we find in our work every day that people hold different definitions of this lens depending on their own values, biases, and experiences, and what they think people should be. Finding common ground is tough and constant- but it’s so rewarding when you find that place with people where you understand each other in support of people who use substances.

What is the part of your job that you like the most?
MAP’s participants are incredible people. Their drive, independence, and remarkable ability to take charge of their lives are what gets me to work every day. I love any chance I can get to chit-chat about their weekend, hear about their successes from Outreach staff, listen to them when things are tough, and just remember that they are why we are all here- the service is for them.

It’s also really cool to work in a place that shares my values and to work alongside such a supportive group of other coordinators, coworkers, and people on my team. It’s fascinating how this sort of environment fosters personal growth, reflexivity, and community care. The coolest thing about working with them is a rare opportunity unique to this program. With MAP, you are lucky to be able to listen to people, hear what they need, and to the best of your ability, give them just that. There are so many limitations in other community work with marginalized individuals, and so many systems that create barriers to making this happen. It’s special, and it’s effective.

What type of personality do you think the new Harm Reduction Coordinator should have? 
Honestly, someone with a lot of fire and energy who can stay positive and productive while facing systems failure on the daily. This is the reality for so many community leadership roles, but especially in MAP where harm reduction remains a misunderstood concept for so many. These parts of my own character served me so well in my time as Harm Reduction Coordinator, and I think were essential for progress and innovation.

This job balances a lot of competing priorities- most importantly, a lot of relationships and partnerships. It needs someone who can see issues from different sides, acknowledge these, and still bring people into the harm reduction fold. This work is critical and has the potential to do some real change-making in our province. It’s an undeniably worthwhile effort.

I can’t wait to see the passion the next coordinator will bring to their role.

What types of career development or learning opportunities were important for you in this position?
Most importantly, in this role, I’ve had the absolute honour to learn from so many people with lived expertise in our community and across Canada. I’ve learned so much about what people want from health and community services, and how they feel these often leave them out, or fail to meet their needs. I’ve also been privileged to hear from people who have felt non-judgmental services have impacted their lives in positive ways. Seeking this knowledge, and listening to people that hold it, never gets old for me.

Secondly, this role has a surprising amount of fund development, finance, and reporting work. this was all so new to me coming into the job, and the mentorship I’ve had from others in these areas has been invaluable. This is a fulsome program, with its own funders, its own group of incredible staff to supervise, its own partners, evaluation, and monitoring, and more. Consider yourself a “miniature ED,” but with a wonderful group of other coordinators and an actual ED to support you through! It might sound kinda boring, but the administrative and leadership skills I’ve had access to here will always be invaluable to me, wherever I end up in my career.

What is the next big thing for the Managed Alcohol Program here at the SJSWC?
Expansion!! We have laid all of the important groundwork in the pilot phase for how MAP can function well. Now it’s up to not only our own organization, but those serving different regions and populations all over NL, to decide what we do collectively with this knowledge. How do we make MAP an accepted and readily available resource across our province? Who can we support to pick up this work alongside us and run with it? How can we make this happen sustainably under precarious funding across the sector? This will be the exciting new work of the incoming coordinator.

I can’t wait to see MAP grow and solidify, even from a backseat.

The mission of the SJSWC is to work to achieve equality and justice through political activism, community collaboration and the creation of a safe and inclusive space for all women and non-binary people in the St. John’s area. Can you tell me about a time when you felt that mission in your work? 
Every. Single. Day. This organization lives through these values. Sometimes they feel tough, leaving us some room for good ol’ transformative feminist conflict, bringing growth and strength to our collective. Sometimes, the beautiful culture we’ve set up for each other makes this mission feel easy.

I feel these values the most when we show up together for women and nonbinary people and do the absolute best we can. We organize, we lift up, and we empower. 

Is there anything else that you would like to share?
To anyone that is interested in the position, even if it feels like a leap, I want to convey that anyone can get involved in this work if they prioritize the dignity of all people and their right to self-determination. It’s not astrophysics, it’s a passionate exercise in empathy. If these values feel good to you, I encourage you to jump in. You will be so lucky to be this close to transformational work.

It was a very hard decision to step away, but I’m so proud of everything our team and participants have built and worked for. Congratulations to the next harm reductionist that has the good fortune of steering MAP with the SJSWC.

The St. John’s Status of Women Council wants to thank Becky for her leadership, her consistent smile in the hallways, her critical thinking, and her readiness to challenge, to laugh, and to listen. Her commitment to harm reduction make us all better community workers and people everyday.

Marguerite’s Place, a program within the St. John’s Status of Women Council’s portfolio of work, is a supportive housing program. It is an eight-unit program in which residents live in their own apartments, with the options for community and support from a 24/7 single-staffed model. Women and nonbinary folks are welcome to stay for up to three years in a safer and stable environment. They can work toward their goals, identified by the resident themselves in regular conversation with Marguerite’s Place staff, with varying levels of support from both the staff and community.

Project Scope

The program review should:

• Provide feedback and suggestions on current and potential programming.
• Provide feedback and suggestions on safety and security protocols.
• Provide feedback and suggestions regarding current documentation practices.
• Provide feedback and suggestions on staffing levels, job descriptions, positions and scheduling.
• Provide feedback and suggestions on policies, including the staff handbook and the resident handbook.
• Provide a critical review of harm reduction and trauma informed care as they could be better reflected in Marguerite’s Place ways of working.
• Provide feedback and suggestions on the potential to scale up or increase housing offerings beyond Marguerite’s Place.
• Suggest potential indicators for tracking the impact of the housing program going forward.

Proposal Submission

Proposals will be accepted until 17 February 2023, 5:00pm (NDT). Please use the subject line: “MPHS Program Review – NAME OF YOUR COMPANY OR RESEARCHer” in the subject line.

Any questions on this RFP and all proposals must be submitted by email to hiring@sjwomenscentre.ca.

Lisa Faye, Executive Director of the St. John’s Status of Women Council and Women’s Centre, was invited to giving the keynote address at the Memorial University of Newfoundland December 6th vigil for 2022. You can find her full speech below.

Good evening everyone. Thank you to the Memorial University Sexual Harassment Office for inviting me to speak tonight. 

Wow, 33 years since this awful event. And here we are, yet another national day of remembrance and action on violence against women. Another day to remember those who have been lost, to encourage those who are living with violence, to take action to change the systems that allow this to go on. 33 years. It sounds like a long time and yet we have so much farther to go in ending gender based violence. 

Remembrance and action. 

It’s hard to focus on remembering as we live with ongoing violence. Violence in our homes. Violence on George Street. Violence when taking a cab home in the evening. Violence when we decide to leave our partners. Violence by police officers. Violence when speaking up for our rights. Violence when we’re doing nothing but going about our everyday lives. But it is important to remember. 

I imagine these 14 young women telling their families that they were going to university to study engineering and I imagine mixed reactions. Pride, wonder, uncertainty. Myself, I grew up in a home impacted by violence and, when I said I was going to head off to university my own mother had two feelings – sadness and hope. With only a grade 10 education, she saw no safe way to leave. With a university education though, she truly believed I would always have the financial independence to make the best choices for myself.  

To leave if I had to. 

Tonight I’m thinking about Indigenous women and 2 spirit people in our country. I’m thinking about the families of the victims in Manitoba. I’m thinking about the people I heard remembered during First Light’s Sisters in Spirit event. I’m thinking of the stolen land we are all standing on right now and the violence that was part of taking that land. I’m thinking of the calls to action that came from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and the need for these to be implemented. 

Tonight I’m thinking about the women and gender diverse people affected by incarceration. I think of the people sitting in prisons right now, while there is little effort to look at other models of justice that might be available. I think about transformative justice – a form of justice that allows us to respond to violence without inflicting further violence, a way of “making things right,” getting in “right relation,” a way of creating justice together. 

Tonight I’m thinking about sex workers in our community and the violence they face as a results of a justice system that refuses to see the value in decriminalizing their work. I think about the laws that leave sex workers unable to speak up about the violence they face, the laws that leave them unable to screen clients fully, the laws that criminalize their work. I think about the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act – an act that protects no one, an act that makes sex workers less safe every day. 

Tonight I‘m thinking of the mothers, friends, and community members that I heard speak at the Sisters in Spirit event hosted by First Light recently. I think about the story shared, at Confederation Building for the purple ribbons ceremony, a story of a mother whose daughter was murdered by her ex partner. I think about the stories that I heard at the Trans Day of Remembrance, about people who were murdered or who died by suicide due to the daily violence they faced. I think about those 14 young women killed in Montreal that day. 

Tonight I’m also thinking of the people sitting here with us, living with violence. You are seen and you are not alone. 

With this platform and this short amount of time, I want to focus on the second piece of what this day is for – a call to action.

I call on the University to make change. I want to see a University where my transgender friends can decide to transition and be supported to change their name and ID cards the very next day. This is a safety issue, it is an issue of respect, and, the truth is, it is a clerical issue that shouldn’t be hard to remedy. I want to see a University where people can afford to go to school and to get that education that is so precious when it comes to having the financial ability to make decisions about your own life in the future. I want this for international students as well, a group of students who face barriers to working in the province and incredibly high tuition fees. I want to see a University where students are empowered to protest, but also one where students know they have an open door to share their concerns and to voice the changes that are needed.. I want to see a University where both students and faculty have access to domestic violence leave – giving them the time needed to build a safety plan and to take the steps they need to take to leave violent relationships. I want to see a University that empowers people to speak out about sexual violence and doesn’t leave them to fill out a million pieces of paperwork and navigate a challenging bureaucracy. There is a need for change in this university and I am here calling for that change to happen. 

I call on our government’s department of Women and Gender Equality to make change. For years the SJSWC has been calling for a gender based violence task force and I’m here tonight to ask for it again. There are laws on our books right now that do not make it possible for women and gender diverse people in our community to keep themselves safe. Earlier this year we heard about a woman whose violent ex partner had changed his name and so she struggled to keep track of him – an important part of her safety plan. I spoke to a woman earlier this year who could not take her violent ex-partner’s name off of her mortgage. Being unable to make this change left her vulnerable to financial abuse on an ongoing basis.. Everyday, the system gets in the way of people making brave choices, leaving violent relationships, and so we need to change the system altogether and, while we are ready to be partners in making this happen, it will take government to lead the way in establishing a gender based violence task force in our province to coordinate and oversee all of these systemic and legal changes we so desperately need. 

I call on the Department of Justice and Public Safety to start now in building change and investing in new ways of looking at “justice.” Every year we invest more money in police services and every year we hear about violence inflicted by police in our communities. If we start today to look at forms of transformative and restorative justice, we can put in place the systems and structures needed to make that a reality. If we invest in in housing, in mental health supports, in supports for people who use substances – if we invest in building a community that works for people – then we can decrease funding to police services. I challenge everyone here today, to read the First Voice report – Building Trust, Restoring Confidence, a report that focuses on strengthening police oversight in Newfoundland and Labrador. Consider the recommendations outlined there, and to call your elected representative to advocate for these changes. Just search First Voice and policing and you can learn all about the calls to action. And, while you and I need to know what Indigenous people are demanding in our province, it is up to the Department of Justice and Public safety to make that happen. 

I call on each person in this room to be part of ending gender based violence. The truth is, violence is everywhere around us. You know people affected by it. I know people affected by it. And so, it is going to take every single person here today in order to make change. I am calling on every person here tonight to take the SJSWC Empowering Them e-course and to encourage one other person in their lives to take it. It is free and it only takes 2 hours, but it will empower you to know how to safely check in with the people around you about gender based violence. You can find cards on our table in the lobby so you can find the course online. I challenge the government and the university to make this course mandatory for all employees. I encourage university professors to utilize it as part of their class work.

And to those of you facing violence, I encourage you to reach out. We are all ready to hear you and support you. I see you and I’m hoping for you. 

So here we are. I think I have a few moments left. I want to ask us all to stop and think about our next step. Our next step in being part of the solution. I’ll give you time now and I ask you to make a promise to take action, be specific in that action. Whether it be to take the Empowering Them course or read the First Voice report on police oversight or to write to your local elected official about the importance of decriminalizing sex work or if it is to begin the hard work of setting up a gender based violence task force – what ever it is This promise is to yourself. It is to our community. It is to those 14 women who died. 

Thank you. Thank you for being part of the solution.