Women's Centre gaining in scope

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Native women working for and with other Native women for the empowerment of both Native women and the Aboriginal community as a whole.

This is the mandate of the Native Women's Resource Centre in Toronto, says acting executive director Nancy Cooper.

"Native women have specific needs and this is a space they can come and find where to have those needs met or to have them met here," said Cooper. "It's a place they can grow and learn from each other."

The Resource Centre is located in Toronto's downtown, and consists of three offices in a storefront block. With six staff, two summer students and numerous volunteers they offer an array of services, with everything from information and referral to a literacy program and beading and crafts group.

"We do not specialize in any one area," reads the centre's pamphlet. "But rather believe in a wholistic approach to the provision of support services for Native women."

The centre opened in 1985 after a group of Aboriginal women in Toronto expressed concern there weren't any specific services available for them in the city. The office opened in October of that year, run volunteers out of donated office space. Since then they have grown, with full time staff and computer services to offer their clients.

Nicole Tanguay is the Life Skills Trainer at the Centre. Every eight months, approximately ten women join up for the Grade 12 equivalency program offered there. The course is taught on computers, so as well as learning algebra and chemistry, the students become computer illiterate.

"The life skills training focuses on different aspects of their lives," said Tanguay outside one of the offices that houses the computer classroom. "We cover kids, communication, job skills - just who they are and how their lives are effected the outside world."

In the basement office there's a drop-in centre, a resource centre and lending library, as well as a job board and food bank.

Many of the people who use the Centre are from outside Toronto.

"There's a large amount of people coming from reserves," said Cooper. "It's a really good first stop for women from reserves because we're specifically geared to service Native organizations who serve the community as a whole."

The Centre received good news on the funding front this year. In the past they have survived on provincial grants and private donations, but last June the Ontario government announced core funding would be available for the Ontario Association of Women's Centres. That translates into $50,000 a year for two years starting in January 1994 for the Native Women's Centre.

The centre also offers healing, tradition and culture classes, but Cooper denies the need for these classes has anything to do with living in the city.

"I don't think it's because we specifically live anywhere," said Cooper, who graduated from Trent University in Ontario with a degree in Native Studies. "Because of the hundreds and hundreds of years of cultural genocide that we've been living under we all need it no matter where we are.

"We just happen to be living in the middle of all this concrete. We need as much healing and learning about culture as anywhere else."