North York Women's Shelter

Run with Team NYWS and help end Gender-Based Violence! 

Every night in Toronto 185 women and their 238 children sleep in shelters because it isn’t safe to sleep at home.

Since opening its doors in 1984, North York Women’s Shelter has provided a place of safety and support for women and children impacted by violence. In the 35 years since NYWS’s inception, over 11,000 residents have stayed at the shelter – determined to build lives free of violence and abuse.

In the first two months of the onset of COVID-19 pandemic, 1.5 million women lost their jobs in Canada. Women’s participation in the labour force has reached its lowest level in three decades. Domestic violence across the country is surging. The pandemic is disproportionately affecting Black, Indigenous, and women and children of colour, LGBTQ+, and gender diverse. The result of COVID's devastating gendered effects on women and female-identifying people has become so severe across the world, the U.N. had to officially declare the effects as a “shadow pandemic”. To put it simply, women are facing the brunt of two global pandemics with little to no support. 

Here in Toronto, NYWS is on the frontlines, offering a 17-bedroom, fully accessible emergency shelter with an emphasis on therapeutic design and a unique accessible community collective. We operate from a trauma-informed framework and provide critical anti-violence support to women in our community. With your support, we can continue to grow into our space and develop an innovative survivor-focused program to end gender-based violence. 

By joining, you will be supporting on new expanded programs at NYWS.

Trauma Mental Health counselling:

Clients work with our team to define the goals and outcomes they would like to achieve through therapy. The program is committed to transparency, accountability and informed consent in all decisions regarding the women and their children.

Expressive Arts Therapy program:

Expressive Arts Therapy uses an intermodal, approach to counseling by integrating all the artistic expressions such as music, theater, poetry, dance, writing, drawing or other artistic form that uses the individual’s innate creativity. Art is used as a therapeutic tool to help initiate change or self-reflection.

Food Justice & Food Security program:

The FJFS program’s primary objective is supporting residents towards accessing their right to nutritious, culturally competent foods, resource development and the knowledge transfer and exchange (KTE) that comes with the community development. This is a protective factor for food insecurity for residents when they leave the shelter. FJFS also creates cultural safety for Indigenous women and women of colour for whom a lack of culturally competent foods is a form of structural violence. 

To find out more about NYWS at www.nyws.ca, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.