Uncertainty over federal funding for the 12-year-old Prairie Women’s Health Centre of Excellence has forced the end of a rural women’s project.
The Rural Women’s Issues Committee of Saskatchewan (RWICS) will stop its work next month, said Lil Sabiston.
Sabiston, a farmer from Kelliher, Sask., and chair of the board of the Prairie Women’s Health Centre, said RWICS members met in Davidson, Sask., Feb. 7-8 to discuss their committee and determine a future course of action.
She said the meeting ended with the decision to form a new six-woman committee that will continue working on women’s issues.
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She said the new committee wants to start a new Saskatchewan organization that will include rural and urban women.
“I was really encouraged,” she said.
“I think rural women will get ahead by working with urban women. The clout will be stronger.”
Leadership was the issue that floated to the top of the weekend meeting.
Sabiston noted that rural women are “so busy trying to survive on their farms” that they don’t have the energy to make a difference in their communities, society or government.
Even when farm commodity prices rose last year, inputs quickly followed.
“In some areas, it’s not Saskaboom,” she said.
Margaret Haworth-Brockman, executive director of the Prairie Women’s Health Centre, said funding for the centre had been uncertain since late summer.
She said that as of Feb. 9, funding renewal looked like a possibility.
Haworth-Brockman said she remains optimistic that Health Canada will fund the prairie centre and three others dedicated to women’s health, although on a scaled back, “repurposed” vision.
A 2003 report on the health of women living in rural, remote and northern areas of Canada commissioned by the centres of excellence for women’s health led to the formation of RWICS.
Women involved in the report wanted follow-up work done in their communities and Sabiston said Saskatchewan was the only province where that happened because of RWICS.
It was formed in November 2004 with assistance from the centre to bring together farm women to talk about the issues facing them and their visions for the future.
