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CCWS: Community Coordination for Women’s Safety Program

The Community Coordination for Women's Safety Program (CCWS) provides assistance to BC communities to develop new models or improve existing models of cross-sector coordination on violence against women.

Coordination brings together different sectors in a community—for example, counselling centres, transition houses, police, hospitals, Aboriginal services, etc—to ensure that all services work together as effectively as possible.

Our program

  • Works with urban and rural communities, and women who face particular discrimination in those communities (including Aboriginal women, women of colour, immigrant women, low-income women, women with disabilities, lesbians, transgender women, older women and young women)
  • Identifies barriers to women’s safety that are common to communities across the province, and works with the provincial government and leaders in all sectors to reduce or eliminate those barriers

We are guided by a Provincial Working Group that includes senior personnel in government, police and community agencies. The group provides input to CCWS on issues that relate to their field of professional expertise and identify local and provincial strategies to help enhance coordination and implementation of violence against women policies.

Goals of CCWS

  1. To facilitate the development of an effective and consistent community response that enhances assaulted women’s access to the justice and other relevant systems.
  2. To provide support to communities for the implementation of violence against women policies.
  3. To assist communities to identify and bring forward issues that need to be solved at the provincial level.
  4. To increase communities’ ability to analyze issues related to women’s safety.
  5. To assist communities to address and remove barriers that limit women’s access to the justice system and other relevant response systems for women who face particular discrimination.
  6. To support the development of solutions and strategies at the local, regional and provincial levels that address assaulted women’s access to the justice system and other relevant response systems.
  7. To analyze and problem solve identified local, regional and provincial issues using a range of initiatives chosen to effect change.

History

The CCWS Program is an outcome of the work of local and provincial women’s organizations and of the Ministries of Community Services and Public Safety and Solicitor General (MPSSG). The program is the end result of several years of consultation and coordination that the BC Association of Specialized Victim Assistance and Counselling Programs (BCASVACP) did with groups across the province who were attempting to improve their community’s response to violence against women.

The program’s development and start-up work was managed through a partnership between the BCASVACP and VSCPD. The BCASVACP is now the sole managing partner, while VSCPD continues to participate actively in the Provincial Working Group. Funding for the CCWS Program pilot was provided by the Law Foundation of BC, the National Crime Prevention Centre, the National Victims Policy Centre of the Federal Department of Justice, the Ministry of Community Services and the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General.

Since April 2005 CCWS has received program funding from the Ministry of Community Services.