THUNDER BAY - An initiative aimed at providing women with a stepping stone for creating a balanced and sustainable life is looking for input from the community.
Women Walking with Women, a program developed by the Blue Sky Community Healing Centre, held the first of four public sessions on Thursday, inviting women from the community to share what kind of programming they think is needed most in the city.
“This particular group of focus sessions is to gather women together from all realms, all sectors, all ages, all cultural backgrounds, and see what the interests are out there, what would be useful for women to move forward in their lives,” explained Cindy Crowe, executive director of the Blue Sky Community Healing Centre. “It would be what we normally call life skills, or balanced living.”
The Women Walking with Women program was developed in partnership with Fay Peterson House, Beendigen, Biidaejiwin, and Paro Centre as a way of pooling all the resources and expertise of the partnering organizations and develop programming to assist women.
Initially it was created to help women facing a crisis or who are in a transition state to achieve a sustainable livelihood, such as starting a new career or business or simply identifying with who they are and taking care of themselves.
“As women, as mothers, grandmothers, we tend to always be worried about and take care of everybody else, and we tend not to take care of ourselves as much,” Crowe said. “So the focus is always less on what we’re about.”
Julie Harmer, an educator and facilitator with NAADMAAD, explained that the community partners had a long discussion about the different programming available in the community and where gaps exist.
“I think that there is a huge diversity of programming in Thunder Bay, but a lot of community agencies tend to operate as silos, they kind of operate on their own,” Harmer said. “We were looking at how we can bring together all those amazing resources and share them and make the most of the programming that is offered and make it available to as many people as possible.”
One of the gaps that exists in available programing concerns life skills and cultural identity. According to Crowe, while there are organizations that touch on issues of cultural identity, there are no services available that specifically address the issue.
“Once we have a sense of who we are, it makes it easier to figure out how we can move forward with our lives, but we have to know who we are first,” she said.
Raylah Moonias attended the first meeting on Thursday. Moonias said that it is good that women are here to identify services that are lacking in the city, because the next step will be finding a way to fill those gaps.
“We can’t do it alone,” Moonias said. “When we find each other, we bring a common goal to work with. There are a lot of things that are broken. If we see that they are broken, we can see how we can repair them. Not just a band aid solution, but actually mend things.”
This series of meetings is the first step in the Women Walking with Women program. Crowe explained that a funding application has been submitted to the Ontario Trillium Foundation and they will use the information gathered this month to build on the program based on the needs raised by the women in the community. Crowe added that the program will continue regardless of funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.
According to Harmer, it is about creating a program that will benefit everybody, where women are not directed what to do from the top down, but rather supporting each other.
“We’ve lost that social networking,” Crowe added. “We are on social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, etc, but we’ve lost that ability to gather together in person and socialize.”
Three additional sessions will be held this month on August 11, 18, and 25. All sessions run from 11:00AM to 1:00PM at the Blue Sky Community Healing Centre. Everyone is welcome. Visit www.blueskychc.ca for more information.
