Once again, the Victoria Foundation has been invited to participate in the Fund for Gender Equality, a collaboration between Community Foundations of Canada and Equality Fund, supported by the Government of Canada. The program is composed of an educational component, granting component, and an impact investment component. The Victoria Foundation has been part of the Equality Fund’s commitment since 2019, beginning with a pilot grant program and leading to the first cohort of Communities for Gender Equality in 2021.
In 2021-2022, the Foundation delivered $300,000 locally to advance gender equality, and in 2023-2024, this has been increased to $320,000. Eleven grants for 2023 are empowering marginalized Indigenous women, providing access to gender-affirming apparel, and supporting victims of sexualized and intimate partner violence.
Building Capacity for Restorative Justice
One of the recipients of the 2023 Fund for Gender Equality was Restorative Justice Victoria (RJV), for a project aimed at improving capacity for restorative and transformative justice services for cases of sexual harm.
The Canadian Women’s Foundation published that 30% of all women, age 15 or older, report experiencing sexual assault at least once. Reports of domestic, intimate partner violence rose during the pandemic, with the vast majority of victims being female. This year’s Vital Signs report shared that, locally, sexual assault was up 135% from 2011. Since Victoria is the most gender-diverse urban centre in Canada, providing resources to support women, girls, Two-Spirit, and gender-diverse individuals is essential.
The United Nations Working Group on Restorative Justice defines it as “a process whereby parties with a stake in a particular offence resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the offence and its implications for the future.”
Gillian Lindquist, Executive Director for Restorative Justice Victoria (RJV), provided her perspective, “Restorative justice is a response to a crime or wrongdoing. It’s typically a unilateral wrongdoing, where one person or a group of people have engaged in harmful behaviour against another individual or group of people. We focus on who has been harmed, their needs, and how we can work to repair that harm in the best way possible.”
“Restorative justice focuses on harms, not on laws that have been broken.”
– Gillian Lindquist, Executive Director, Restorative Justice Victoria
When people think about restorative justice, they often think about the victim and offender talking it out in the same room, and that can happen in appropriate situations, but in some cases, especially around sexualized violence, survivors don’t want to meet face-to-face with their perpetrator. To facilitate this, organizations like RJV provide opportunities for indirect information sharing through letter writing, video sharing, and the use of surrogates, taking a victim-centred approach to each situation and focusing on the person most directly harmed by the offender’s actions. “At the end of the day,” said Gillian, “we want to have tangible conversations about the harm, the impacts, and what needs to be done to make things as right as possible.”
RJV is using the Gender Equality grant to develop and train additional support personnel to ensure they’re adequately equipped to work within the context of sexualized violence and the harm it has caused. The grant will enable RJV to pay an honorarium for completing 24 hours of training over six weeks, followed by ten months of participating in a community of practice, with monthly meetings to review articles, discuss strategies, and provide case consultation.
Investing for the Inclusion of All Genders
Working with Community Foundations of Canada, Rally Assets has led a number of workshops with cohort members to help them learn how to invest for gender equity.
“The definition of gender inclusion has changed and transitioned over the years,” shared Kelly Gauthier, president of Rally Investments. “It used to focus on the inclusion of women specifically. Now we talk about gender in a much more intersectional way, thinking about all genders and places where inclusion is required across the spectrum of genders.”
Socially responsible investing, often referred to as environmental, social, and governance investing, typically features investments aligned with the current political or social concerns, like global warming, tobacco, alcohol, and alternative energy efforts. Gender-lens investing (GLI) builds on the concept, looking at gender-based factors for the investments, such as choosing women-owned or women led-companies or companies that offer services or products intended to significantly improve the lives of women and girls. But it goes beyond that.
“Gender-lens investing means thinking about the people and organizations handling investments on your behalf,” shared Kelly. “To benefit from a gender-lens investing perspective, community foundations need to look at the asset and fund management industries to see what their teams look like because, historically, the money goes to people that look like them. If the asset managers are all white CIS males, too often, the money flows towards white male investees. By creating gender and diversity-based inclusion in the system, the outcome can be changed, and more people can be serviced. The idea is to invest for the inclusion of all genders and to think about placing capital specifically for gender inclusion.”
“Gender-lens investing is not an either/or situation. You can invest with your values — choosing not to support things that are bad for the planet and people — and you can still earn a return. It’s not a zero-sum game.”
– Kelly Gautier, President, Rally Assets
Is there a return on gender-lens investing? “These are still investments,” said Kelly, “and they should still follow the same approach you would take in other investments. They might look and feel slightly different from a risk perspective, but it’s still an investment. It’s about thinking about who is at the table and what types of outcomes are being generated.
“Within gender-lens investing, you have investments across asset classes. These are funds focused on investing in public equity entities with more aggressive, gender-based targets looking at inclusion in their employees, their board and senior leadership, and throughout their supply chain, building products and services targeted at gender inclusion. That could be anything from financial products structured specifically for gender inclusion to consumer-based products that are gender inclusive. There are many ways to think about that end product component, not just the process. But whether they’re public equities, startups, or venture capital, they’re all still investments.”
As part of Victoria Foundation’s participation in the cohort, it is committed to investing a portion of its portfolio with a gender lens and supporting organizations showing a sustained dedication to empowering women, girls, Two-Spirit, and gender-diverse individuals through their mission, activities, or partnerships. The funding encompasses various objectives, such as launching new initiatives, addressing long-standing community needs, or aiding recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.