A night of good food, weighty topics and live music is in store for anyone who attends the International Women’s Day event at Northern Lakes College this Saturday, Mar. 8. The goal is to raise awareness of issues that affect women, celebrate their accomplishments and to raise some money for the local women’s shelter project.
The women’s shelter is moving along with some pace, now that the province has decided it can support an emergency shelter in Slave Lake. The Northern Haven Support Society hopes to be able to build and operate a 20-bed facility sometime in the not-too-distant future, and good attendance at Saturday’s banquet will help.
Kathy King and Shawna Hohendorff are the guest speakers. King is a parent who lost her daughter to the ‘streets’ and is a volunteer with the Prostitution Awareness and Action Foundation of Edmonton. She is currently acting director of that organization.
Hohendorff is Executive Director of Kindred House, an outreach program in Edmonton for women involved in prostitution.
In a telephone interview last week, Hohendorff told The Leader she’ll talk about her work at Kindred House to support street women, “where they’re at,” in a non-judgmental manner.
“How we do that at Kindred House is what I’ll be talking about,” she said.
The women are mostly drug addicts, and as such have difficulty changing their lives. If they want to, Hohendorff says, Kindred House does what it can to help, but the reality is that the window of opportunity, “is very short.”
Slave Lake may seem distant from such realities, but it isn’t, says Valerie Neaves, one of the organizers of the Slave Lake Women’s Day event. Some women from small towns are certainly at risk and some end up on the streets of cities. She points out that one of notorious killer Robert Pickton’s victims was from High Prairie. The spectre of violence against women haunts every community, no matter the size.
Brian Vallee, author of ‘The War on Women’, offers the following comparison to help put the situation into perspective. He says 44 Canadian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan from 2000 – 2006. In the same period, 500 Canadian women lost their lives at the hands of their intimate male partners.
The idea of raising awareness through such events locally, Neaves says, is to develop a network of support for women in this community, which of course includes a shelter.
Providing entertainment for the evening is Piper McKinnon and her band from Vancouver.
Tickets for the Women’s Day banquet are available at Rexall Drugs and the Workforce Development office at Northern Lakes College.

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