Sylvie Paillard
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Abused women residing in four Howe Sound First Nations communities will soon have access to help much closer to home.
A new Howe Sound Women's Centre Safety Network program will hire one woman from each of the Squamish, Mount Currie, D'Arcy N'quatqua and Southern Stl'atl'imx nations to train and bring home awareness of violence toward women.
"We recognize the need out there and we want to do our part in meeting that need," said Melany Crowston who heads the centre. "We try to be as diverse as possible in our training but I'm not First Nations neither is my co-facilitator when we do our training. So we don't understand or live the life that's traditional, culture based. I think it'll reach out to those persons as well, help them to be able to move forward and do that work, just to bring that traditional belief system into it."
The new program was made possible through a provincial grant of $9,600. The funding is part of a province-wide, $1 million commitment to Community Action for Women's Safety grants. The grants will be used for domestic violence awareness and prevention projects, with priority given to those that address safety for women who are First Nations, immigrant and visible minority, older and with disabilities.
"There is no tolerance for domestic violence in British Columbia and we need to work on defeating this problem once and for all," said Joan McIntyre, MLA for West Vancouver-Garibaldi. "Community-based groups perform a great duty helping women realize they have the right to be safe and they can get the help they need in order to escape an abusive relationship."
A number of these projects will be showcased at a women's safety symposium later this year and published in a community workbook to be shared with communities around B.C.
