Local women’s shelter goes to Ottawa
MHWSS attends the first national conference
The Medicine Hat Women’s Shelter Society shared some of its successes on the national stage last week as part of the first-ever Women’s Shelters Canada national conference in Ottawa.
“The conference brought together shelters from all over Canada — from Newfoundland to Vancouver and all over,” said MHWSS executive director Natasha Carvalho of the three-day event with approximately 600 participants in the nation’s capital.
While there are many provincial conferences for shelters, this is the first time MHWSS staff have attended on a national level, she explained.
“(It was a) great opportunity to take frontline staff, they don’t usually get to go to a national conference,” she said, with a Status of Women Alberta grant helping to offset travel costs for the seven MHWSS attendees.
Medicine Hat gave a presentation during the conference on building community partnerships.
“We focused specifically on our partnership with Medicine Hat Community Housing with regards to delivering Housing First, as well as our Safe Families Intervention Team that we have with the police service,” said Carvalho. “Two really big ones we’ve developed in the past couple years — how we came about that, and how well it’s worked for us, and specifically how much it’s enhanced services for clients.”
Few other shelters have these sort of programs, she said, so MHWSS received “really great feedback” from people who have been wanting to try similar programming in their community but weren’t sure where to start.
The conference also gave MHWSS staff the chance to network and hear what other sheltering organizations are doing.
“Things are always relative to your communities; it’s not always a cookie-cutter approach. But sometimes you don’t want to re-invent the wheel,” Carvalho said.
And they hope to attend the conference again, and share more of the programs and work being done in Medicine Hat.
“It made us feel proud of the work we are managing to do here in Medicine Hat, and our great community partnerships, and I think it was really great to highlight that.”