Gender-based violence (GBV) is a national crisis in Canada—persistent, pervasive, and often invisible. Every six days, a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner. One in three women will experience sexual violence in her lifetime. Indigenous women are 12 times more likely to be murdered or missing than non-Indigenous women. Trans and non-binary individuals face staggeringly high rates of violence, harassment, and homelessness. And many survivors—especially those in rural areas, living with disabilities, or navigating poverty—have no safe place to turn. The pandemic worsened an already dire situation. Lockdowns trapped victims with abusers, shelter capacity was slashed due to distancing requirements, and calls to crisis lines soared. Yet funding and policy have often lagged behind the scale of the need. Gender-based violence is not just an individual tragedy—it is a systemic issue tied to patriarchy, colonization, racism, economic inequality, and lack of access to safe, affordable housing.
But hope lives in the work of frontline organizations—charities that meet survivors with compassion, offer pathways to safety and healing, and work to change the conditions that allow violence to flourish. These organizations are not only responding to crisis—they are imagining and building a safer world.
Here are some of the Canadian charities leading the fight against gender-based violence today.
Women’s Shelters Canada: Supporting a National Network of Safety
Women’s Shelters Canada (WSC) is the backbone of Canada’s shelter system, representing a national network of over 550 shelters and transition houses. They don’t operate shelters themselves—instead, they support the people who do, advocating for consistent funding, policy change, and survivor-centered services across the country.
WSC amplifies the voices of local shelters and leads national initiatives like Shelter Voices, an annual report that provides a snapshot of what women’s shelters are seeing on the ground. During the pandemic, they launched the More Than a Bed campaign to highlight the full range of services shelters offer: legal help, trauma counselling, child care, safety planning, and housing support.
Your donation helps WSC strengthen Canada’s response to GBV by ensuring shelters have what they need to stay open, train staff, and innovate in response to new forms of violence—like digital abuse and coercive control.
Native Women’s Association of Canada: Uplifting Indigenous Survivors
For Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people, gender-based violence is inseparable from the legacies of colonization, residential schools, systemic racism, and intergenerational trauma. The Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) has been a vital voice for Indigenous women’s rights and safety for over four decades.
NWAC supports healing lodges, traditional ceremony, mental health programs, housing initiatives, and MMIWG2S advocacy across the country. Their Safe Passage project tracks and responds to violence against Indigenous women, and their policy work pushes for systemic reforms to policing, child welfare, and health care systems.
What makes NWAC essential is its centering of Indigenous ways of knowing. Services are offered in culturally grounded environments with Elders, traditional medicine, and land-based healing. Donating to NWAC supports programs led by and for Indigenous women—restoring safety, identity, and sovereignty.
YWCA Canada: Empowering Women Across Generations
YWCA Canada is one of the country’s largest and oldest women’s organizations, with a strong focus on housing, employment, advocacy, and violence prevention. With over 30 member associations nationwide, YWCA operates shelters, second-stage housing, counselling programs, and youth empowerment initiatives that reach over 330,000 women, girls, and gender-diverse people each year.
Their programming spans emergency shelter to policy change, with a strong emphasis on intersectional equity. From GirlSpace to Think Big! Lead Now!, they nurture leadership among marginalized youth while also serving survivors with trauma-informed care and transitional housing.
YWCA also leads campaigns against toxic masculinity and rape culture, working with schools and community groups to challenge gender norms and promote healthy relationships. Your support helps sustain this multi-generational, multi-level approach—treating not only symptoms but root causes.
Interval House Toronto: Canada’s First Shelter for Abused Women
Founded in 1973, Interval House was the first shelter for abused women and children in Canada. Today, it remains a leader in survivor-centered, trauma-informed care. In addition to providing emergency shelter, Interval House offers innovative programs like Building Economic Self-Sufficiency (BESS), which helps survivors find long-term stability through job training, financial literacy, and career coaching.
Their Her Home Her Voice program ensures that shelter residents have a say in how services are delivered, and their staff receive continuous training in anti-racism, anti-oppression, and harm reduction.
Interval House serves as a model for what shelters can be—safe, empowering, and transformative. Your donation helps fund beds, meals, counselling, and career supports that help survivors not just escape violence, but rebuild their lives on their own terms.
Muslim Resource Centre for Social Support and Integration (MRCSSI): Culturally Responsive Services
Cultural stigma, language barriers, and fear of community backlash can make it even harder for survivors from Muslim, immigrant, or racialized communities to seek help. The Muslim Resource Centre for Social Support and Integration (MRCSSI) in London, Ontario bridges this gap by offering culturally and religiously informed services for families affected by domestic violence and forced marriage.
MRCSSI provides confidential support, education, counselling, and mediation through a faith-sensitive lens. They also work closely with local imams, women’s organizations, and social service providers to ensure that responses are both trauma-informed and culturally respectful.
What sets MRCSSI apart is its prevention work—addressing family conflict early, educating youth about healthy relationships, and working with men to change harmful norms. Your support helps expand access to culturally grounded care and strengthens entire communities from within.
BWSS: Ending Violence Through Advocacy and Systems Change
Battered Women’s Support Services (BWSS) is one of the most outspoken and multifaceted anti-violence organizations in Canada. Based in Vancouver, BWSS works at the intersection of crisis response and systems change, offering both immediate support to survivors of gender-based violence and long-term advocacy aimed at dismantling the structures that perpetuate it.
Their 24/7 crisis line provides immediate, confidential support to women, femmes, and non-binary people experiencing abuse. But BWSS goes further—offering trauma-informed counselling, legal advocacy, immigration assistance, housing help, and employment training. Their services are multilingual and inclusive, with specialized programs for Indigenous women, immigrant and refugee women, LGBTQ2S+ survivors, and survivors with disabilities.
One of BWSS’s most innovative projects is My Sister’s Closet, a social enterprise thrift boutique that provides survivors with job training and clothing while generating unrestricted funding for BWSS programs. Their legal advocacy team also helps survivors navigate complex systems—family court, immigration, custody battles, protection orders—giving people the tools to assert their rights and reclaim their futures.
What makes BWSS particularly powerful is its commitment to systems transformation. They don’t just support individuals—they challenge institutions. BWSS trains police and legal professionals, testifies at government hearings, and leads campaigns against coercive control, femicide, and systemic discrimination. Their work is deeply rooted in feminist, decolonial, and anti-oppressive principles.
When you donate to BWSS, you support both urgent, life-saving support and the long-term fight to change the conditions that make such violence possible in the first place.
Maison Interlude House: Francophone Services in Eastern Ontario
In rural regions and Francophone communities, accessing support for gender-based violence can be especially difficult. Maison Interlude House, based in Eastern Ontario, fills this critical gap by offering bilingual, trauma-informed services for women and children fleeing violence in Prescott-Russell, Stormont, Dundas, and Glengarry.
Their 24-hour shelter provides a safe, confidential environment for survivors and their children, complete with counselling, legal accompaniment, parenting support, and access to transitional housing. What sets Maison Interlude House apart is its commitment to culturally sensitive, community-specific outreach: they operate satellite offices in rural areas, organize prevention workshops in schools, and offer mobile advocacy for women in isolated communities.
Survivors in rural settings often face limited transportation, social stigma, and a lack of anonymity—all of which can deter them from seeking help. Maison Interlude House addresses those realities head-on, ensuring that no woman is too far, too remote, or too isolated to receive support.
Donating to Maison Interlude House helps ensure that Francophone and rural survivors are not left behind. Your support funds safety planning, outreach staff, crisis response, and life-changing programs in communities where the need is often hidden—but deeply urgent.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Gender-based violence isn’t just a women’s issue—it’s a human rights crisis, a public health emergency, and a societal failure that touches every community. And while shelters and hotlines are vital lifelines, they cannot—and should not—be expected to carry this burden alone.
Ending gender-based violence requires deep, collective action. It means shifting how we understand safety, justice, and accountability. It means investing in prevention, not just crisis response. It means listening to survivors and funding their leadership—not only when their stories are palatable, but when they’re hard to hear.
You can take action today by donating to the organizations featured in this article. Your contribution—whether $20 or $200—helps fund emergency shelter beds, trauma therapy, legal aid, food security, cultural safety, and long-term support programs that restore hope and rebuild lives.
You can also volunteer. Many of these organizations rely on volunteers to support crisis lines, help with fundraising, offer admin support, or even provide professional skills—whether legal, financial, linguistic, or digital.
But this is about more than charity. It’s about challenging the conditions that allow violence to persist. That means calling for stronger tenant protections, universal childcare, living wages, safer public transportation, and immigration policies that don’t trap women with abusive sponsors. It means demanding that survivors with disabilities, trans survivors, Indigenous survivors, and racialized survivors are centered in policy and practice—not pushed to the margins.
It also means educating yourself and those around you. Learn about coercive control, economic abuse, and how abuse can escalate without leaving bruises. Call out rape culture, misogyny, and toxic masculinity wherever you see them—at home, online, in the workplace, or in your community.
And perhaps most importantly, it means showing up. Not just when it’s trending. Not just when it’s easy. But again and again, as part of a deep commitment to care, safety, and justice.
Final Thoughts
Gender-based violence doesn’t start with a single act—and it doesn’t end with a single solution. It’s rooted in histories of power, silence, and control. And ending it will take all of us: survivors, advocates, educators, community members, and donors.
The organizations in this article—Women’s Shelters Canada, NWAC, YWCA Canada, Interval House, MRCSSI, BWSS, and Maison Interlude House—are leading the way. They offer safety when someone is in danger. They offer healing when trauma takes hold. They offer possibility when the world has narrowed to survival.
When you support them, you help build a world where survivors are believed, not blamed. Where safety is a right, not a luxury. Where no one has to choose between abuse and homelessness. Where children grow up learning that love does not hurt, control is not care, and strength comes from kindness—not coercion.
We cannot undo every act of harm. But we can prevent the next one. We can be the voice on the line at midnight, the bed in the shelter, the counsellor’s steady hand, the advocate’s fierce resolve.
And if we commit to that together—not just today, but every day—we can build a Canada where gender-based violence is no longer tolerated, dismissed, or ignored.
We can build a Canada where everyone is safe.
