(File photo/northeastNOW Staff)

By Ben Tompkins

International Women's Day

North East Outreach and Support Services continuing to raise awareness, spread messages of hope

Mar 8, 2023 | 5:13 PM

North East Outreach and Support Services (NEOSS) are honouring International Women’s Day, by raising awareness about women’s equality and celebrating the achievements that women have made over the years.

NEOSS has a women’s shelter that women go to when their fleeing domestic violence, where Emily McGillivray is a shelter worker. She told northeastNOW about the responsibility they have, as women, to help other women.

“As the staff, it is our job to provide support by helping our clients find housing, financial support, counselling, connecting them to community resources, as well as doing our best at helping them stay connected with their cultures. Since they’re coming from such difficult situations, we want to help them realize their independence and strength,” McGillivray said.

#EmbraceEquity is the overarching theme for International Women’s Day this year, as it’s a call to create a more inclusive and diverse world for everyone.

“We just really like to remind our women that come here on a daily basis, that they can be independent, and do things on their own and start over, especially coming out of domestic violence relationships,” McGillivray explained.

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“(On International Women’s Day), we just want to give extra love and support and work together with each other, giving our clients hope and everything, so that they can succeed.”

A big factor in this is having those women-to-women conversations, as when dealing with these issues, it’s typically women who are talking to those who have fled from domestic violence.

“It’s very important because we want to obviously be very welcoming to them and make them feel extremely comfortable, and we just want to work on being able to help them gain trust back with individuals.”

The entire province was also working on this, as Saskatchewan’s “Face the Issue” campaign to end gender-based violence was presented at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women Conference this week, which was a lead-up to International Women’s Day on March 8 (today).

McGillivray added this can be a little tougher to do on the rural level, however, NEOSS is trying their best.

“Within our shelter, we really like to try to raise the awareness of what equality means and remind our clients what their rights are and that they don’t deserve to be treated that way,” she said. “Definitely a little bit more difficult sometimes in rural locations, but I think that slowly, we’re working towards kind of spreading that awareness and knowledge. I think over time, we’ll eventually get there, hopefully.”

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