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Women’s Resource Centre Update

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In March 2021 I had the opportunity to interview Tanya Henck and James Foster about the work they are both doing in support of women on Cortes Island. This article presents some highlights from that interview. (For a more complete story, listen to the radio version.)

Tanya is the founder and coordinator of the Cortes Island Women’s Resource Centre; readers/listeners may remember her from a previous interview in April of 2020. At that time, official acknowledgement of the Covid-19 pandemic was just ramping up. Almost a year later — and what a year! — I asked Tanya how her work had been affected by the pandemic. Did the Centre have to shut down?

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Abuse

Cortes Island Women’s Centre

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The Covid-19 lockdown has sparked an upsurge in domestic violence both in Canada and worldwide, as well as making it harder for support services to offer counseling and shelter for victims.

On April 15, 2020, I interviewed Tanya Henck, founding member of the first Cortes Island Women’s Centre which opened in January 2019. A combination of diligent sanitization and long microphone cables, plus a newly constructed and never-inhabited space, enabled us to set up for Covid-19-safe recording.  (The room was so bare that you may hear a certain amount of natural reverb in the podcast.)

Tanya has lived on Cortes Island for 14 years, and has long been aware of the persistent and under-addressed problem of domestic violence.  Every community whether rural or urban has to deal with this issue, she says, and Cortes is no exception.  Yet Cortes, she feels, has been for years “behind the times” in coming to grips with this problem.

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