DisAbled Women's Network Canada

Published purpose

This 29-month project will support a feminist response and recovery from the current impacts of COVID-19, through systemic change. DAWN Canada will achieve this by addressing discriminatory legislation, policies, and/or practices that prevent women and/or girls from fully participating in the social, political and economic spheres. This project will build relationships between equality seeking organizations and other stakeholders to collaborate across sectors to advance gender equality as well as convene and strengthen the feminist movement to collaboratively advance gender equality. At the end of the project, the organization will have contributed to addressing systemic barriers by advancing inclusive policies and practices and increasing networks and collaboration to accelerate systemic change to support women’s equality. This project will use a cross-disability, feminist and intersectional framework to center women with disabilities in a feminist recovery. This will be done by convening a broad cross section of stakeholders to identify, prioritize and respond in a unified voice to key policy and service delivery gaps that result in the exclusion of women with disabilities from Canada’s socio-economic life. The project will focus on economic inclusion in Ontario and Quebec, and Gender-Based Violence in the Atlantic and Prairie regions. As a result of this project, it is expected that women with disabilities will set the stage to map the future development of federal and provincial policy and program responses related to a feminist social and economic recovery, and that women with disabilities will be centered in the design of Canada’s National Action Plan on Gender Based Violence. This project will set the stage for the next decade of broad-based cross-sectoral collaboration to respond to the systemic exclusion of women living in Canada with disabilities.