By Sheena Roszell

Reps from Odyssey House return from National Women’s Shelters Conference

Jun 18, 2018 | 4:31 PM

The Executive Director at Odyssey House in Grande Prairie says they learned of information, networked and built relationships at last week’s inaugural National Women’s Shelters Conference in Ottawa.

Ebony Rempel and two other local representatives travelled to Ontario for the conference.  She says the conference was based on practices and areas where shelters have had a lot of success, something they learned a lot from and they are looking forward to putting some of those practises in place here.

There were about 600 representatives there from other women’s shelters across Canada, many of them from Alberta.

“We were able to connect with colleagues that we don’t get to connect with often.  And as well because most of our funding comes from the provincial government, a lot of those things are sort of the same across Alberta, so it was nice to connect with them,” said Rempel.  “There was somebody there from every single province and territory.  I was able to connect with people from Yellowknife, people from the East coast, people from Ontario and a lot of people from Quebec.”

She says they connected with other people from across Canada that come from similar types of communities like Grande Prairie.

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While in Ottawa, she says they did not just connect with Status of Women or focus on connecting with ministries that were related specifically to the work they do, but they really wanted to connect with everybody across the government and she wanted to advocate for women as a whole.  

“Talking about women and women’s issues, I think needs to be something that’s on the table in every single one of the conversations and when there is any money, or a new budget being released, we are hoping that there’s going to be room for women’s shelters, and if not at least just (room for) women at that table.”

Some of the issues they learned about included safety when going online, and with mobile phones and stalking. They also took in sessions on supporting staff in terms of their health and wellness too.