The Alberta Women’s Institutes is not letting one of its resolutions die without a response.
In 2006 the AWI passed a resolution at its annual meeting urging the provincial government to provide more stable funding for second-stage women’s shelters.
Abused women and their children can only stay in emergency shelters for a month. Then they move to second-stage shelters where they can live for up to a year. These shelters provide programs on parenting and relationship skills and referrals to agencies for legal advice and job training.
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Alberta’s eight second-stage shelters need more financial support to pay for staff and programs because the only rent they receive is from the women’s welfare housing allowance and public donations.
AWI president Darlene Wicks said the group has written to the provincial government about the need for better shelter funding but has received no reply.
“Most of our members already donate in small ways to the shelters,” Wicks said.
Phone fundraiser
The rural women’s group is now organizing a fundraising campaign that allows members to recycle their cellphones through a special AWI program. Phones can be taken to the AWI convention in June in Camrose for a mass donation.
Information will be provided at that meeting “to make our AWI members more aware of the shelters and their needs,” Wicks said.
She said the group has also collected boxes of clothing for families in shelters, and the Peace area WIs have donated to help the recreational needs of the children.
Wicks said the shelters “do an awful lot of good. These ladies need a grounding, which they get at the shelters. The women in the shelters could be rural.”
The AWI is not the only WI working on helping others. As a followup to a five-year-old project called Into the North, each provincial WI was to raise money or clothing donations for two Labrador communities hit hard by poverty and addiction problems. The collective efforts amounted to about $20,000, said Valerie Watt, a Manitoba WI member and executive member of the Federated Women’s Institutes of Canada who is in charge of the project.
Watt said the next phase allows each provincial branch to choose where to direct its fundraising. Alberta has chosen the second-stage shelters while Saskatchewan and Manitoba are focusing on northern communities. Among the items going north are books and clothing. British Columbia is collecting for communities in the Northwest Territories and has sent quilts, towels, toys, toques and scarves.
Contacts for distribution in the north include schools, ministers and the RCMP.
