OUR STORY
Feminist Shift is an advocacy capacity building collaborative between YW Kitchener-Waterloo and YWCA Cambridge that started in 2019. Together, with partnerships in the community, we are taking on gender-based violence in Waterloo Region and working to improve the lives women and gender-diverse people. Our mission is to build a region that acknowledges and rejects gender-based violence. We will do this through engaging in thoughtful conversations, challenging engrained local issues with other feminist organizations, hosting knowledge sharing and training opportunities and through pointed and strategic advocacy projects.
This project is funded through Women and Gender Equality Canada’s capacity building grant, which is allowing us to increase our community’s understanding of gender-based issues and build policy and preventative solutions to tackle these issues. Our understanding of feminism is from an inclusive, strengths-based, intersectional lens and we focus on smart advocacy that promotes systemic progress and change.
OUR WORK
Advocacy
Our advocacy is reflexive and intersectional. We are always working on new initiatives, campaigns, and events to encourage knowledge sharing and social change for Waterloo Region.
Podcast
Our Podcast highlights important and informed voices in our community working to help us all better understand and respond to gender-based violence and its contributing issues.
Writing
Our blog is about discovering and diving into issues in our community from a gendered lens and exploring the advocacy efforts and interventions impacting gender-based violence.
Lead Agencies
Feminist Shift is powered by the enthusiasm, talent, and tenacity of members from both the YW Kitchener-Waterloo and the YWCA Cambridge. These organizations make up the committee behind Feminist Shift and provide leadership for this initiative with the support and guidance of other feminist organizations in Waterloo Region.
YW Kitchener-Waterloo was established in 1905 and is the longest standing women serving organization in Waterloo Region. The organization is known for its work in homelessness and housing as well as employment and entrepreneurship programming.
YWCA Cambridge has a 65 plus year legacy in our region. The organization is well known for its childcare services, youth programming, their community programming centre called ‘The W’ and their social enterprise- Women’s International Gift & Gallery
Land Acknowledgment/Commitment of Work
Waterloo Region is situated on the unceded land of the Haldimand Tract and is within the territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples. On October 25, 1784, after the American Revolutionary War of Independence, the Haldimand Tract was returned to the Six Nations of the Grand River and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation by the British as compensation for their role in the war. Of the 950,000 acres returned, less than 5.1% remains under Indigenous ownership today.
To do anti-violence work on this land, we must acknowledge how colonialism continues to feed violence in our region, and to affirm our commitment to decolonization in our work and in our lives as settlers on this land.
Allyship is a continuous process; it is not a designation that one can earn and hold forever or a label one can give themselves. Allyship is earned through actions. We have a responsibility, as beneficiaries of this land, to acknowledge and understand its history and the current experiences of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples and to be accountable to the violence they continue to face. We must use this understanding to inform our work to ensure we do not perpetuate the harms of colonization and to begin to repair them.
Members of Feminist Shift hold ourselves and our community accountable in the continuous work of decolonizing. We join in the feminist calls country wide to end systemic oppression and address gender-based violence due to colonization, including immediate actions to end the epidemic of Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit individuals going missing or being murdered.