YWCA Canada

Published purpose

Through this 24-month project, YWCA Canada will build its capacity to advance gender equality. Across the 29 member associations and national office, the project will address current challenges to accurately assess impact, identify and address gaps, orient membership, manage leadership shifts, engage new national donors, advocate on emerging issues, and scale/share evidence-informed practices. To address these challenges, YWCA will develop, test, deploy, and socialize a new co-designed National Theory of Change, National Data Model and federation standards. They will also build and launch a Dynamic Resource and Learning Hub to effectively socialize the frameworks and standards and ensure their continued relevance and flexibility for improvements. Project Reach, Rigor and Relevance is designed to strengthen and sustain the YWCA movement across Canada, ensuring alignment with the collective potential and working cohesively to end gender inequalities. This is a key step for the YWCA movement, helping to fortify their role as a leading voice and service-delivery organization for women and women’s issues in Canada. With the Supplemental funds and 6-month extension provided in early 2026, YWCA Canada will strengthen the national movement by uploading a series of tools, templates and training to the Resource Hub that address the gaps uncovered as part of YWCA's national standards program. This includes strengthening governance and succession planning, anti-racism and oppression, critical issues, and crisis communications management. In addition, YWCA will develop knowledge mobilization tools, visualizing data that comes forward from the national data collection and socialize the data and narrative of YWCA's collective impact at an annual members meeting. Through this, they will further advance Gender Equality.