Organizations should look to innovative solutions and promising practices in the anti-violence sector to transform workplaces and address labour issues, researcher Krys Maki explains.
Anti-violence work is lifesaving and essential for the health, safety, and well-being of survivors of gender-based violence (GBV), yet the work remains invisible, devalued, and precarious. They are the workers behind the crisis line calls, helping survivors with safety plans to leave abusive homes, providing counselling and support, and collaborating with schools on consent and violence prevention. Such hard and rewarding work requires a wide range of skills, empathy, and care. The workers at the heart of this care labour deserve recognition, adequate compensation, and supportive workplaces. What can we learn from GBV workers and leaders across the country who are transforming their workplaces through collective care and action?
Anti-violence workers are found in various community victim-serving agencies. This analysis focuses on non-profit organizations such as violence-against-women shelters and sexual-assault centres, which provide direct support and services to survivors of GBV. While political and steeped in a history of feminist activism, these organizations aimed at ending GBV fall broadly under the care economy. This highly feminized workforce has historically low wages compared to similar sectors like public health and lacks the occupational health and safety standards found in other trauma-exposed fields, such as first responders.
Low salaries, heavy caseloads, and exposure to vicarious trauma can increase workers’ risk of “overwhelm,” stress, and burnout. This labour crisis has emerged alongside decades of neoliberal policies (deregulation, privatization) and cuts that created significant challenges for GBV organizations. Beginning in the 1990s, Conservatives launched reforms and funding cuts to women’s shelters. Alongside cuts, new funding requirements, based on managerialism, were imposed that altered governance models from collective to hierarchical models, replicating business models focused on fiduciary duty, reporting, and efficiencies. Market-based logic and practices are misaligned with community-based services whose mandates centre on connection, healing, and support as well as transformative goals to end gender-based violence. Organizations reluctantly complied to remain operational and maintain vital community support.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated pre-existing labour issues in the sector. As rates of gender-based violence increased during the pandemic, workers reported upsurges in workloads, clients, and stress, while their mental health decreased. Organizations and workers were struggling to cope with growing caseloads without long-term funding to develop recruitment and retention practices to sustain the workforce. Emergency funding was a welcomed relief, but it was not enough to address the sector’s needs. Consequently, high rates of burnout, vicarious trauma, and workplace stress were reported alongside increasing turnover among leadership and front-line workers. This has led to what some have called a “feminist brain drain,” where workers are leaving the sector for more competitive salaries and better work–life balance.
Key practices for transforming the GBV workforce
For decades, neoliberal funding models have impeded workers’ and organizations’ capacity to advocate for systemic change, exacerbating precarious employment, low wages, workplace harm, and retention challenges. However, despite these challenges, the sector is mobilizing to find innovative solutions to wider labour issues and the needs of this unique workforce.
Unionization remains a key strategy for workers to gain a sense of power and collective voice in the workplace. Historically, anti-violence workers have organized during funding cuts and imposed governance mandates. Community GBV organizations are usually small non-profits loosely organized at the provincial level but lack a strong national network to mobilize workers en masse. This analysis focuses on emerging collective-care practices and collective action that are transforming the sector and movement in Canada.
Emerging collective-care practices
Collective care originates with Black feminist, disability justice, and queer organizing that centres a community-based approach to supporting the well-being of its members. There is an ethical imperative for anti-violence workers to be cared for by their organizations and the communities they support because trauma exposure affects workers’ well-being. Caring for workers ensures that survivors receive the best care possible.
Recognizing that anti-violence workers are in a helping profession, “collective care speaks to the shared responsibility between helpers, organizations, governments, and community to take care of the helpers.” This perspective challenges the notion that self-care is an individual’s burden, instead emphasizing the collective to address workplace stress and harm. This is particularly important in anti-violence work as staff not only provide direct support and services to survivors, but also engage in prevention work and advocacy to improve funding and responses to GBV at local, provincial, and national levels.
Caring for myself in this work is wrapped up in how we care for each other as a team and as a larger community.
Feminist Brain Drain study
Various collective-care practices have been implemented to help workers build resilience and support each other. Women’s Shelters Canada’s Feminist Brain Drain study found three key promising practices that workers developed to improve their well-being and create healthier workplaces, which helped them remain engaged in their work (Table 1). As one worker said, “Caring for myself in this work is wrapped up in how we care for each other as a team and as a larger community. I feel very fortunate to be part of a team that supports and cares for each other in very overt, meaningful ways.”
Table 1: Promising practices in collective care
| Promising practice | Examples |
| Staff-led wellness committees | Feedback from the team to determine activities or projects to undertakeSpace to reflect on wellness and build skills and engagement with the team |
| Group activities | Wellness workshopsOffering client programming to staff (e.g., art therapy, yoga)Wellness Mondays (no clients, space for reflection) |
| Organizational supports | Gift certificates and gifts Wellness spending benefitsOn-staff wellness coordinator (e.g., clinical supervisor or counselling) |
Sexual Violence New Brunswick developed a collective-care guide for GBV organizations. The guide recognizes that harm comes to workers not only through exposure to vicarious trauma but also through oppressive structures and broken systems that workers must navigate to support survivors. These systems are steeped in colonialism, cis-heteropatriarchy, and racism. Funding freezes, cuts, and short-term, program-focused funding models also have a negative impact on workers’ well-being.
If we can enact collective care, as opposed to only self-care, sustainability becomes possible.
Vikki Reynolds, activist/therapist
Vikki Reynolds specializes in resisting burnout in helping professions; she encourages us to decolonize our “justice-doing work” by engaging in broader systemic change. She also emphasizes the importance of person-centred teams where workers can support each other while holding each other accountable: “If we can enact collective care, as opposed to only self-care, sustainability becomes possible, and we can act in solidarity as activists to change the social context, and should hold each other up in resistance to the dark spaces of our work.”
YWCA Canada’s Anti-Gender-Based Violence Staff Network provides practical knowledge and information in workshops and resources that address decent work, burnout, strategies to foster sustainable teams, and building organizational capacity for change. While collective care alone cannot solve the systemic issues that affect the sector, providing opportunities to connect and share practical resources and knowledge is a powerful act of collective care and resistance that inspires workers to harness their collective power.
Policy and workplace interventions
While funding challenges remain largely out of the control of feminist organizations, these organizations still have a responsibility to create healthy workplaces where workers are supported and sustained in their work. Decent work is more than fair wages and benefits and is encapsulated by a cultural shift, which can emerge from collective-care practices. It recognizes the deeply gendered and racialized nature of non-profit work and centres on equity and inclusion. Collective-care practices must be embedded in the organizations and supported and modelled by leadership. The responsibility must be shared among the entire team and secured through workplace policies.
Collective-care practices must be embedded in the organizations and supported and modelled by leadership.
With the context of limited resources, GBV organizations have found creative interventions to ensure worker well-being, including:
- regular debriefing
- access to counselling and employment assistance programs
- wellness days
- flexible hybrid work
- four-day workweeks
- additional benefits
- shift premiums for evenings and weekends
- shift premiums for staff working on-site
- involving staff in decision-making processes
Building a national labour-force strategy
The GBV sector is transforming collective care into collective action and mobilizing for systemic change. This has been difficult and slow since the “advocacy chill” that resulted from the Conservative government’s Income Tax Act, which restricted charitable organizations’ “political” advocacy between 2012 and 2018. Monitoring and surveillance of political activities had real-life consequences, where violations could result in the loss of charitable status and government funding. Feminist organizations, already grappling with precarious funding, faced pressure to reduce their political advocacy, which tempered movement activities. Yet they continued to network and mobilize informally and away from the public sphere, thereby sustaining solidarity, building capacity, and finding innovative ways to continue the fight to support and care for survivors of GBV.
The Liberal government eventually lifted the restrictions, yet organizations are still hesitant to lobby and engage in advocacy as the chill remains frozen in their institutional memory. Larger, more established national feminist networks engaged in government relations have the capacity to advocate, yet shelters and sexual assault centres with small teams have limited time, resources, staff, and expertise to engage in large-scale advocacy. This is why our national networks and provincial and territorial associations are so important for the health of the sector and collective advocacy – they keep us connected, engaged, and hopeful even when the work feels unrelenting and government relations are strained.
In 2025, the Ending Sexual Violence Association of Canada (formerly the Ending Violence Association of Canada) is conducting nationwide engagement sessions to gather research and feedback from the GBV workforce and provide grassroots knowledge on the sector’s core needs. I am part of a small network and research team working on the strategy. Preliminary discussions emphasized the need for a labour-force strategy with actionable steps and practical resources to strengthen the sector’s infrastructure, capacity, and sustainability. Drawing on expertise from the workforce and existing literature, we’ve identified training, feminist leadership, decent work, labour standards, and advocacy as critical aspects the strategy should include to sustain and care for community-based GBV workers. The engagement sessions will add depth and nuance to the strategy’s scope while also compiling evidence-based practices. Together, these elements will support the co-creation of the first strategy of its kind – developed by and for the sector.
Conclusion
Solidarity is a powerful connector of social movements, collective actions, and our shared workplaces. Leading up to and during the spring federal election, feminist and queer organizers were busy mobilizing to ensure that care labour, women, and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities were not sidelined from political platforms. Following the election announcement, the Demand Better campaign was launched by Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights. It called on voters to demand better from their elected officials, including investments in families, communities, healthcare, and affordable housing, recognizing the additional burdens and barriers on women, gender-diverse people, and children. Campaigns like this encourage GBV workers, and care workers more broadly, and leaders across Canada to find points of unity beyond their organizations and collectively push for systemic change to demand that governments recognize and adequately fund the anti-violence work to sustain the essential work to end gender-based violence.
Shortly after the Mark Carney Liberal government announced that it was eliminating the position of minister for women and gender equality (WAGE), feminists across Canada quickly mobilized. Attendees at the UN’s annual Commission on the Status of Women in New York responded with a joint news release, signed by hundreds of organizations, demanding the minister be reinstated, as it has “real-world implications for millions of women and gender-diverse people and workers in Canada who rely on the government to protect their rights and advance their interests.” Considering the current heightened political climate involving the rollback of gender progress for women’s reproductive rights and 2SLGBTQIA+ people, feminists working on the ground are sounding the alarm bell; Angela Marie MacDougall reminds us all that “years of advocacy and policy gains are at stake,” including the National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence, which requires a dedicated ministry to ensure accountability and transparency. Lives are also at stake, particularly for Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQIA+ people, who face the highest rates of all forms of violence and higher rates of femicide – six times higher than for non-Indigenous women.
Together, we can make real and tangible change. Thanks to the collective advocacy of feminist and queer organizations and activists, the minister of WAGE was reinstated by the Liberal government, ensuring that women and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, and the organizations and workers that support and serve them, have a seat at the table. The feminists are not backing down.
