GRSJ224/WISH

Land acknowledgement

This article was written on the traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Watuth) nations. [...]

WISH Drop-In Centre Society serves the women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES).  Over the years, WISH has evolved into a valuable non-profit organization for women sex-trade workers in the DTES. WISH Drop-In Centre Society provides a number of important services that contribute to improving the mental, physical and emotional well-being of the women of the DTES. Just as importantly, the WISH Drop-In Centre’s Literacy for Women on the Streets program can be seen as a powerfully empowering source for WISH’s clients.

Background

In 1984 Dave Danchuk, a church outreach worker, noticed the need for outreach services for street involved youth. Through the help of St. Michaels Anglican Church in Mount Pleasant, a Drop-In centre began. This centre was available for young men and women to attend as part of the Anglican Street Ministry for Youth. After a three-month closure, the centre reopened at its same location in Mount Pleasant for women in 1986. In 1987, First United Church donated space in the DTES at Hastings and Gore, so that WISH could remain open and operational, after facing opposition from residents of Mount pleasant. A few years later, in 1991, WISH became registered as a non-profit charity and in 1998 it received charitable status with Revenue Canada.

Since WISH’s inception, all three branches of government, individuals, foundations, businesses and community groups have been involved and continue to be engaged in funding and sustaining the WISH Drop-In centre. In 2008, through the generosity of Vancity, the City of Vancouver, BC Gaming, the BC Women’s Hospital Foundation and the Central City Foundation, the WISH Drop-In centre moved to 330 Alexander Street. Through this continued generosity over the years, WISH has been able to expand and currently serves 300 women daily with the 800 women seen by WISH's Mobile Access Project (MAP) monthly. In 2016, WISH helped 11,702 different women. Included in this assistance was 239 heath referrals, 3,436 different supports, 4028 referrals to addiction services, and 3,389 harm reduction education provided.

Furthermore, WISH may not have achieved its success without the incredibly committed WISH staff and volunteers, as in 2019 110 volunteers put in over 7,500 hours of volunteer work. A collaborative effort within the community, WISH sustains its organization through the involvement of many other individuals and organizations, including Providing Alternatives Counselling and Education (PACE) Society, Battered Women’s Support Services, Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, Positive Women’s Network, In-site, Lifeskills Centre, as well as a number of other organizations.

Issues Addressed by WISH

The issues addressed by the WISH Drop-In centre pertain to women involved in the sex trade. Goals of the centre involve improving health, safety, and well-being of women who suffer from poverty, marginalization, and vulnerability to violence and chronic trauma.

Women in the Downtown Eastside are often unable to access women-centered health care. They may not receive health care for a variety of reasons, including fear of negative encounters in the waiting rooms at clinics and in places where they do not know anyone. Many women in the Downtown Eastside suffer from chronic traumatic stress disorder and many women live with depression, addiction, Hepatitis C, and HIV, among other health-related issues. At WISH, there is an on-site clinic staffed by nurses from the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control’s (BCCDC) Street Nurse Program and Nurse Practitioners from BC Women’s Hospital. Furthermore, the Peer Safety Patrol Program consists of a peer outreach program around the centre. Through this, in 2013 they distributed 8,288 condoms to promote safer sex, provided basic first aid related services 1,002 times and provided peer support services 2,035 times.

WISH has many programs that focus on safety. The Centre has an Aboriginal Health and Safety Program, which is a culturally-relevant response to the trauma related to colonization, residential schools, and ongoing racism and discrimination that many Aboriginal women, who are over-represented in the DTES street sex trade, experience. This program is designed to help Indigenous women involved in the sex trade reclaim their culture. The clients accomplish this by "connecting to each other, participating in cultural crafts and activities, learning new skills related to Indigenous traditions and experiencing sisterhood with each other." Because of the nature of working within the sex trade, many women in the DTES are particularly vulnerable to violence and chronic trauma. Many women who use WISH experience frequent physical and sexual violence, poverty, social isolation, and lack of access to many resources. Statistically, these women experience much higher rates of violence and sexual abuse. According to the Women’s Coalition study, which surveyed women in the DTES in 2014, 48% of the respondents were victims of violence in the previous two years, while 87% of the respondents had feared being victimized by violence at different times. WISH acts as a safe place for these women, as it offers a "welcoming and non-judgemental space for all self-identified women, including trans women, who are current or former sex workers."

Women in the DTES are marginalized, stereotyped, and stigmatized. Along with issues surrounding their physical health and safety, these women also face numerous other issues pertaining to economic instability, social and psychological issues, and the need for spiritual guidance. WISH has a variety of programming options to meet these needs. These programs include the Literacy Program, Aboriginal Culture and Creativity Program, the AESHA Project, the Mobile Street Project, a Women’s Advisory Group, Safety Night, and Peer Safety Patrol. Each of the programs are unique and bring attention to different needs; however, they are all imperative in offering a comfortable, safe environment for all kinds of women. Women in the DTES are able to use these programs to better themselves, which contributes to personal stability and wellness as they provide an alternative option to their daily chaotic lives on the street.

WISH: Building a Sense of Community

As WISH provides services and resources for female survival sex workers, one of the organization’s main purposes is to foster a sense of community and belonging within this heavily stigmatized population. One of the most important features of the centre is the “nurturing and non-judgmental environment” created by the staff and volunteers in an attempt to re-assure a safe and comfortable space.

Brown and Hannis explain how “people want and need a sense of community”, furthering this point by adding that “when individuals feel that they have little or no control over their environments, their self-image suffers, and they may experience a sense of hopelessness and loss of power.” Street sex work in Vancouver, Canada has been a topic of interest amongst academics for over a century. As Canada’s apparent “Prostitution Capital”, much of the debates on Vancouver’s outdoor sex work have been focused on the stigmas and mistreatment experienced by these female sex workers, as well as policy and societal changes to view sex work as a legitimate occupation. With the amount of hostility this population of sex workers receives, organizations such as WISH provide a place of solace from the discrimination they are faced with daily. WISH not only offers these women access to essential medical, food, hygiene and education resources, but also provides them with a space to feel understood and important.

The terms positionality or social location refer to one’s position in society in relation to the people around them. Factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation and religion can all affect one’s positionality, as they influence our interpretation and understanding of the information we acquire, and how we, ultimately, choose to transfer this information into knowledge. The employees, organizers and volunteers at WISH are aware of any preconceived ideas or expectations they may have specifically in regards to residents of the DTES or sex workers, so that they do impede the support services they are providing. As WISH’s participants are used to feeling unworthy or judged, it is especially important for WISH employees to ensue an empathic and caring orientation towards clients.

Literacy for Women on the Streets

In regards to the Literacy for Women on the Streets program, this initiative is just one of WISH’s many that serves to combat the stigmatization and mistreatment of street sex-workers in the DTES. In the development stages of the program, facilitators Alderson and Twiss did extensive research into the literature on the education of sex-trade workers to better understand what methods of teaching would be the most productive and helpful for participants.

Literacy for Women on the Streets, Empowerment and Radical Education

It is clear that the WISH literacy program set out to empower its participants.  In fact, one of the program’s original objectives was to “Collectively explore and document the literacy activities that help to empower and stabilize the lives of participants at WISH." However, in the realm of adult education, attempts to empower can often lead to disempowerment, especially if the program designers do not adopt a participatory research approach.  According to Cusack, the path to empowering participants in adult learning projects is through critical literacy, which includes working with program participants in order to determine their needs and then building a program based on these needs. Therefore, an empowering assessment program does not treat its subjects as objects. Instead, it treats its participants as equals, and actually takes into consideration the needs and opinions of its participants. Lather provides insight into what an empowering experience for adult learners consists of: “a more collaborative, action-oriented, advocacy model that acts on people’s desire to gain self-understanding and self-determination in their lives, (and) is premised on a deep respect for the intellectual and political capacities of those whom one is seeking to empower.” For Lather, “Empowerment means not giving power to people, but enabling them to exercise their power.  By focusing on empowerment as the exercising of power to help others exercise power, critical pedagogy embodies a concept of power as energy, capacity, and potential, rather than domination. A dynamic and reciprocal teaching-learning relationship that is empowering generates energy for its participants.” Therefore, an empowering educational experience for an adult learner involves creating a learning environment where the learners and the facilitator are equals and where together all members of an educational community actively learn and grow together.  That is, a program such as the WISH literacy program needs to be driven by participatory action research in order to facilitate the empowerment process.

In their design of the Literacy for Women on the Streets program, Alderson and Twiss did their best to ensure that participatory research was foregrounded. It is important to understand that the women who the program was designed to serve have lived lives that involve their being subjugated and oppressed, which means their relationship with power has been negative. This is made evident by the observations of Alderson and Twiss: “Many women do not trust anyone who is seen to be in a position of authority or control.” According to Alderson and Twist, this made full-scale participatory action research very difficult, as many of the women were weary of participating in anything that they perceived as emanating from an institution or which treated them as objects of research. This resulted in a lessening of the intended participatory action research element of the project: “Although the project did not follow the rigorous definition of  participatory action research, we were able to achieve many participatory instances in the research process. We also learned a great deal in our efforts to do collaborative inquiry and analysis with women in transience, addiction, poverty and homelessness.” Nevertheless, as Alderson and Twiss state, they were able to engage many clients of WISH in a participatory manner. As they state, "we found ourselves in a strong collaboration with women about many priorities - literacy, learning, violence, the Missing Women, creating a voice in the WISH organization, and many other issues that played a critical and current role in women's lives."

The actual process that began with this participatory research and ended with the creation of classes fo the Literacy for Women on the Streets program very much followed the Literacy Campaign framework developed by Paulo Freire. The first stage of this framework is the study of context, which involves investigating the relevant community to “determine the common vocabulary and the problems that confront people in that area.” This is what the creators of the literacy program did through conducting informal interviews with clients of the centre. The second stage is the selection of words from the discovered vocabulary. According to Elias and Merriam, this stage involves choosing words that have experiential and generative meaning to the target students. The most important characteristic of these words is “its capacity to confront the social, cultural, and political reality in which people live.” Embedding the classes in the life of the students was the primary goal of the program creators. According to Alderson and Twiss, “In working with this group, we were looking for information and ideas that would help us provide safety, acceptance, challenge and opportunities for increased self-esteem, within the context of chaos, grinding poverty, violence and substance abuse.” In addition, Alderson and Twiss "felt it was important that women who came to the WISH Learning Centre experience acceptance on a weekly basis, regardless of whether they are withdrawn, happy, sad, angry, have just been beat up, are sick, need help, need to help, want to be busy, are using, are not using, etc." In the case of the literacy program, the participatory research resulted in the development of a program focusing on building clients’ communication skills; helping them become engaged in community affairs; developing their self-advocacy skills; helping them work towards stabilizing their lives; providing classes for writing; and enhancing clients’ computer literacy. The third stage is the actual process of literary training, which has been immensely successful with women being able to learn in what they see as a safe space. The success can be seen in some of the results of the literacy program, which includes skill building, self-expression, enhancement of self-confidence, empowerment, and increased self-efficacy.

Women's Advisory Group (WAG)

One extremely positive result emerging from the Learning Centre is Women’s Advisory Group (WAG), which consists of students from the literacy program. WAG’s meeting minutes are shared with the Board of Directors, which has resulted in collaboration and the implementation of positive changes within the centre. Another result is the monthly publication, Literacy for Women on the Streets, which has essays, poetry, stories, and commentary written by program members. In addition, the women who attend the program have created a curriculum for programs helping disadvantaged women with literacy. These projects represent an opportunity for the women to truly have their voices heard, exercise leadership skills, and play a role in bettering their community.