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International Day of the Girl Child
October 11, 2012
Event Name: International Day of the Girl Child
Event Description: The theme for the first-ever observance of the Day will be "Ending Child Marriage," chosen because child marriage is a phenomenon that violates millions of girls' rights, disrupts their education, jeopardizes their health, and denies them their childhood, limiting their opportunities and impacting all aspects of a girl's life.
UN Sponsor: Department of Public Information (DPI)
http://www.un.org/events/calendar/Edetail.asp?EventID=2191&BeginDate=10/11/2012
The first International Day of the Girl Child is on Oct 11/12.
Here are a couple of links for more information:
http://plancanada.ca/page.aspx?pid=4953
http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/dates/idg-jif/index-eng.html
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An Important Community Event to mark Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month in
September!
Living with Ovarian Cancer
A one day forum for survivors in Ontario, their family, friends, allies!
"Information, Hope, Strength, Community"
Sunday September 23rd, 9:30-5pm
YMCA Central
20 Grosvenor St.
Toronto, Ontario
M4Y 2V5
Registration by: Friday September 14, 2012
Registration Cost: $20.00
Includes: Refreshments, Lunch and Materials
Program: Emerging Therapies & Clinical Trials, Oncology Nursing Care,
Finding Information, Survivor's Panel on Education and Advocacy, Social
Support, Inspiration & Healing.
Presented by: GTA Ovarian Cancer Peer Support Network
For more Information: www. ovcapeers.com
Registration & More details on program available on-line as of August 21st,
2012
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| Greetings!
Welcome to the D&D issue containing the programs for the September 29th Standing Committees meetings and Ontario Council updates.
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September 29th, 2012
Standing Committees |
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Joint Morning Session
Topic: Transitioning Youth in Foster Care
Speaker: Irwin Elman, Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth
Mr. Elman was appointed in 2008 by an all party panel of the Legislature to provide leadership to the new Provincial Advocate Office established in 2007 by the passage of Bill 165. As the Provincial Advocate, Mr. Elman is responsible for how the Office conducts its work. The Office strives to promote the voice of children and youth across Ontario.
You will also hear about the working group struck by Children and Youth Minister Eric Hoskins that will see current and former youth in care working with the government, Children's Aid officials and others to develop an action plan to improve the system. Samples from the "Real My Life Book" May 2012, a Report from the Youth leaving Care Hearings will be available.
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Education Committee
The Ontario Council Education Committee welcomes you on September 29 to begin another exciting year. At the afternoon Education Committee session, Margaret McGovern of the Toronto Caucus Ad Hoc Committee on Poverty will be introducing Martha Friendly, the Executive Director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit. Martha will speak to us about her vision for universal early learning and child care in our province and in Canada. Following her presentation, members of the caucus will share the initiative that has been proposed to the national board for implementation by CFUW clubs.
Everyone will receive a package with information about the proposed strategy, including the CFUW resolution, some reference material and a copy of Ms. Friendly's paper.
We hope that this exciting afternoon will re-energize the members of the Education Committee to get their Clubs to enthusiastically advocate on issues of importance to women in Ontario and Canada. We look forward to welcoming both returning and new members.
Arleen Midriak Myrtle Greve
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| Legislation Committee
The Ontario Council Legislation Committee welcomes you to the first Standing Committee meeting of the year. This is an opportunity to network and share your current advocacy involvement, or issues from the past year. During the Standing Committee afternoon sessions, you will hear about the advocacy process, CFUW/OC policy and suggestions for carrying out your advocacy efforts.
Our afternoon guest speakers will be youth from the Office of the Provincial Advocate, who will be speaking on the Real My Life Report, Youth Leaving Care Hearings.
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Status of Women &
Human Rights Committee
The Ontario Council Status of Women and Human Rights Committee is kicking off the year with a session focused on ways to collaborate with other women`s groups in our communities.
Last February, CFUW Kitchener Waterloo Past President Ruth Russell launched the Women's Group Network of Kitchener-Waterloo and Area, an umbrella organization for all the women's groups in the region. Unfortunately, Ruth isn`t able to join us, however CFUW KW members Elizabeth Simpson and/or Barbara Spronk, both of whom have been involved in this initiative, will be joining us to lead the discussion.
We`ll learn about the resources and tools that have been used in the development of this network, we`ll hear about the positive outcomes, and we`ll have an opportunity to share our own stories about what has worked for our clubs and what to avoid.
Please join us to share and to learn! We`ll all go home with an expanded toolbox to help our clubs be more effective, grow and flourish in the year to come.
Cheryl Ambrose
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President's Message
September 2012
I would like to warmly welcome each of you as we begin a new year of membership with Ontario Council Canadian Federation of University Women. As you continue to read the September newsletter Dates & Data, you will come to an article written by Myrtle Greve on 'Why Join CFUW?' Myrtle gives some compelling reasons for choosing membership in CFUW. The one that stands out for me is the difference we can make in the lives of women and girls.
Your involvement contributes numerous scholarships, and lends your voice in advocacy from issues on FASD and Human Trafficking to Pay Equity and Child Care. Four of the six resolutions researched and presented at the CFUW AGM were from Ontario clubs.
In May, CFUW Etobicoke hosted the Ontario Council AGM with the theme, Green Energy. To the Local Arrangement Committee and the Co-Chairs Pat Joyce and Linda Rose, sincere appreciation for all the time and effort committed to provide a well-organized, engaging Annual General Meeting.
The Ontario Council Advocacy Chairs are planning a stimulating, informative year ahead for each of the Standing Committee Meetings beginning September 29with the Irwin Elman, Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth.
Ontario Council supports clubs in attending each meeting through the travel allowance identified on the Registration form. If you need a ride, call a friend or a neighbouring club. Car pooling is always a good idea. Perhaps neighbouring clubs may consider twinning for transportation on a regular basis.
Reconnecting and making new friends is also open to you at the Fall Gatherings being hosted this year by CFUW Renfrew and District, CFUW Milton & District and CFUW Guelph. A northern spring trek will take you to the May 2013 OC AGM hosted by CFUW Sudbury. What a wonderful way to appreciate our province and the activities of the clubs than to attend these events.
There are many of us who are starting a new role as president. Starting on the ground floor maybe a learning curve, but consider the mentorship which brought you to this place. Your past presidents, executive are there to support and work with you as you begin your term of office.
Many of your club members will bring their experiences and knowledge to the table during discussions and decision making time. Along with this support, your Regional Director is only a phone call away to ask questions and share thoughts. Through your term, communication will be the key.
As one of the few women's organizations left, we need to work together, support and encourage our membership, provide opportunities for leadership, and extend our efforts in the communities where we reside.
I am very pleased that Cheryl Hayles, CFUW Milton and District has accepted my invitation to be VP on the Ontario Council Board. I am grateful for each of the Ontario Council Board members who are sharing their expertise and talents, their time and commitment in their role.
If you have not yet had a chance to visit the Ontario Council website, please do. The website is maintained by Ann McElhinney and Teri Shaw who we are indebted for their management of this site. The Resources available are most useful and informative. Electronic copies of the D&D are now being sent along with NEWS from OC about six times a year.
'Women are Persons' is the theme that I have chosen for the coming biennium. When I read those words, I think of the work that the Famous Five undertook and the long years of effort before they succeeded. And succeed they did in far reaching ways. They did not give up.
Their persistence, determination and bravery give us all something to strive for as we try to achieve our goals.
The following quote has been taken from a brochure prepared by CFUW North Bay.
"The purpose of a women's life is to make the best possible contribution to the generation in which she is living." Louise McKinney-The Famous Five
Sincerely
Brenda
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What Ontario Council has been doing |
CFUW Ontario Council Continues its work on the Great Lakes Protection Act submitted by Carolyn Day, CFUW Southport
This has been a difficult summer for Water resources in Ontario. The hot dry summer of 2012 has created tremendous stresses on the Great Lakes. The government's own figures show that four of the five Great Lakes are in decline. Water levels have dropped to record lows. Algae blooms are appearing earlier, persisting longer and are increasingly toxic. Lake Erie is dying again - affected by the introduction of invasive species and climate change impacts. On Labour Day weekend tens of thousands of dead and rotting fish were lining a 40-kilometre stretch of Lake Erie shoreline. All cause for real concern.
But there are signs of hope!!
In early June, the Ontario Government introduced the Great Lakes Protection Act (GLPA) and its companion The Great Lakes Protection Strategy. The GLPA is an important piece of legislation which has as its aim to "protect and restore the ecological health" of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin waters. It is strong legislation - giving legal precedence to its provisions - so that whenever there is a conflict between this and another existing law "the provision which provides the greatest protection to the ecological health of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence River Basin prevails." It also sets up a Great Lakes Guardians' Council - an Advisory Panel of stakeholders and experts who will advise the Government on steps needing to be taken to better protect the Lakes. The Great Lakes Protection Strategy details how the Act will be implemented and includes funding provisions available for groups who wish to undertake a specific project to restore or protect an area or a shoreline region within the Great Lakes.
In July, CFUW Ontario Council submitted a Brief to the government which contained several recommendations to improve the legislation. We were also invited to attend a public consultation with Ministry staff in August to discuss the Act with them. We hope that the amended Act will be brought back to the Legislature early in the Fall session.
And then in early September, the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA) was signed by the governments of Canada and the United States. Renamed the Great Lakes Water Quality Protocol 2012, this bi-national agreement is also aimed at cleaning up and restoring the waters of the Great Lakes. It is an updated version of an agreement originally signed in 1972 and amended at intervals since. This newest update reflects eight years of negotiations. Ontario Council has been involved in supporting these negotiations. While the new Protocol continues to focus on cleaning up pollution in the Great Lakes, the revisions address broader threats to water quality too, including aquatic invasive species, climate change, habitat destruction, and harmful substances such as phosphates.
Signing on to the provisions in the Protocol is a welcome change of direction for both countries. Ontario Council has objected to the weakening of environmental protections in recent federal changes to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and the Fisheries Act. And the US government has been steadily undermining the protections in its Clean Water Act. It is past time for both governments to act to protect and restore our waterways.
So now it is up to all of us to watch and to hold both levels of government - federal and provincial - to account to ensure that these two great pieces of legislation are properly and fully implemented without delay.
Advocacy Issues and links
- Water: Ontario Council Brief sent in response to consultations on Bill 100 an ACT to protect and restore the Greate Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin, known as the Great Lakes Protection Act 2012 (GLPA) Posted on the OC website. Written by Carolyn Day.
- Child Care: Ontario Council Brief to be sent in response to consultations on Modernization of Child Care. Written by Wendy Taylor. http://news.ontario.ca/edu/en/2012/06/making-child-care-work-for-families.html
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/childcare/modernizing.html Deadline: Sept. 24th
- Universities: Throughout the summer and early fall, the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities will launch a series of roundtable discussions with the PSE sector on the topics presented in this discussion paper. All publicly funded institutions, student groups, and staff and faculty associations will be invited to send representatives to participate.
Institutions, student associations, Colleges Ontario, the Council of Ontario Universities, and other associations are asked to submit written submissions on behalf of their members to the ministry no later than September 30.
Submissions can be sent by email to: PSEsubmissions@ontario.ca or by mail to:
Postsecondary Education Transformation - Submissions Strategic Policy and Program Division
Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities
900 Bay Street, Mowat Block, 17th floor
Toronto, ON
M7A 1L2
Both the written submissions and roundtable discussions will provide direct input into the development of a postsecondary productivity and transformation strategy.
Please let me know if you are interested in working on the consultation for Universities.
Heather Mallick article in Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1219732--disastrous-ontario-government-report-suggests-three-year-university-degrees-and-online-classes
http://www.tcu.gov.on.ca/eng/
http://www.tcu.gov.on.ca/pepg/publications/DiscussionStrengtheningOntarioPSE.pdf
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Club Anniversaries
Please join us in celebrating the following club anniversaries:
CFUW Kitchener-Waterloo 90th CFUW Peterborough 75th CFUw Norfold 60th CFUW Etobicoke 60th CFUW Mississauga 60th CFUW Aurora Newmarket 55th CFUW Renfrew 55th CFUW Burlington 55th CFUW Milton and District 50th CFUW North Toronto 35th CFUW Welland & District is holding their 43rd Annual Book Sale Date: Saturday, October 13, 2012 Time: 9 am to 3 pm Location: Welland Fairgrounds, 1100 Niagara St. North, Welland Proceeds: Proceeds provide university scholarships for local high school students and donations to community projects. |
Women in Kitchener History submitted by Ruth Russell, CFUW Kitchener-Waterloo
It was on view for the month of August in the gallery at Kitchener City Hall, a handsome display of twelve historic photographs of important women in the history of Kitchener.
An attractive poster was mounted on an easel at the entrance to the "Berlin Tower Artspace", located off the rotunda at City Hall. The photographs were each accompanied by a succinct description of the woman's life, and the exhibit was officially launched on August 2 with a reception organized by Kathryn McGill, our co-President. The informal reception featured brief remarks from Kathryn; the exhibit's curator, Ruth Russell;
distinguished Kitchener resident and club member, Karen Redman; and Sean Puckett, the photographer and former Kitchener artist-in-residence who put together the display. The launch was photographed by the attendees against the background of the exhibit.
The City of Kitchener is celebrating 100 years of official designation as a city in 2012, and the exhibit was funded by the City as part of that celebration. The seed was planted in an informal meeting with the then-Co-ordinator of the celebratory events last fall. We discussed the possibility of a photo display using images from two of the books of women's history our club has published: "Women of Waterloo County" and Volume I of the "Proudly She Marched" series, the latter dealing with the WWII Army women's training centre located in Kitchener. As the months passed, the City agreed to hire Sean Puckett to design the exhibit, and to fund its creation. We pored together over the scans of photographs available, selected the dozen photos we wanted by applying technical, thematic and geographical criteria; the so-called "print tags" to appear beside each picture were written, the handouts designed, and Sean applied his photographic and artistic expertise to create the display. After the exhibit has been taken down, the display poster will be given to our club, and the exhibit itself will be available for us to borrow.
This display was a fine opportunity for intellectual property recycling, as we were able to reuse the photographs we had laboriously unearthed for previous projects. And it's possible that these historic photographs will find yet another life, in a web display; we are looking into those possibilities now.
WHY JOIN CFUW?
submitted by Myrtle Greve, CFUW Hamilton
September is the time of the year when we choose our activities for the coming months, whether that be an exercise program (Zumba anyone?), a class to learn something new or volunteering for one of the many services needing our help. It is also when we are asked to register for another year of CFUW.
We all know that there are many groups vying for our participation -so why would you write your cheque to sign up for CFUW? Maybe, like many of our members, you aren't clear on the role of our national office, to which a good part of our dues are paid. Did you know that because we are self-funded we are the only women's organization that can still advocate with the federal government?
Every week, CFUW sends interested members an e-bulletin called CFUW Week in Review which details the current advocacy work and also tells us how we can help. For example, the August 10 Week in Review reports that CFUW has signed on to the Child Care is a Right
declaration. To do this, our national staff have researched this effort and determined that it falls within our mandate. In the Hamilton club, there are a number of us who are interested in working on the Child Care issue this year. We hope to involve some young mothers in the effort to bring pressure to bear on our governments to make child care a priority.
I would like to challenge every one of our members to receive the Week in Review bulletin and to be part of the extensive work that is initiated by CFUW. E-mail cfuwadvocacy@rogers.com to sign up. Social activism was never simpler.
More advocacy work is achieved through our Resolutions. At our AGM in Victoria this summer, we passed five of this year's proposed Resolutions: Retention of Women in Skilled Trades and Non-Traditional Occupations; Climate Change: Mitigation, Adaptation, and the Inclusion of Women; Toward a Mental Health Strategy For Canada; Full Accessibility and Barrier Free Environments for Persons with Disabilities; and Ensuring Food Security in Canada. These now become CFUW policy. Our Action and Advocacy Committee will be planning how to present them to our federal MPs this Fall, so that our collective voice is heard.
We belong to CFUW because we value the general meetings, our varied and wonderful interest groups, and the friendships we make. But what really sets us apart from other groups is that we work to improve the lives of girls and women in the world. We do that locally, provincially, nationally and internationally and we need you, and many more women like you, to continue to do that.
Celebrate Women - A Signature Event Submitted by: Mary Ann Roscoe, CFUW Sudbury Seventeen years ago, a small group of women from CFUW-Sudbury, YWCA Sudbury and the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund, conceived the idea of Celebrate Women. Since then, this yearly fundraiser has become our signature event. Annually we invite a Canadian female author to present on her career and recently published book. A reception, book sale and book signing follow. This past March, we were very fortunate to have Dr. Samantha Nutt join us as guest speaker. She is the author of 'Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies & Aid', and a co-founder of War Child Canada. As well she is a practicing physician and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. Dr. Nutt is well known as a humanitarian, specializing in Maternal and Child Health in zones of armed conflict. 'Damned Nations' is a distillation of her observations over the course of 15 years of hands on care to children and their families in some of the world's most violent flashpoints. Her powerful book is riveting; her presentation was passionate, dynamic, at time humorous, and was met with a standing ovation. We were delighted to be joined by then Regional Director Ontario North, Brenda Robertson, and incoming Regional Director Kaarina Tulisalo of North Bay. Through targetted and widespread publicity, the auditorium at Laurentian University was a near sell out, and we sold a record number of books. Celebrate Women annually raises thousands of dollars for the three founding organizations. Our Committee and Ticket Captains nurtured every detail and planning is underway for Celebrate Women 2013. |
Fall Gatherings 2012 Ontario East Living on Earth as if we want to stay Hosted by CFUW Renfrew & District October 20 Ontario South Places to Grow and Glow Hosted by CFUW Milton October 20 Ontario West Inspiring Growth: imagination, innovation &i-clouds Hosted by CFUW Guelph October 27
2012 - 2013 Standing Committees Meetings September 29, 2012 January 19, 2013 March 16, 2013 |
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