Ricki’s steps up for Canadian Women’s Foundation

By Lacey Morris

EDMONTON — Customers and sales associates of West Edmonton Mall’s Ricki’s store took their first 2,500 steps towards pulling low-income women out of poverty at Edmonton’s first Step Up Walk for the Canadian Women’s Foundation.

Although this was the first official year that Edmonton has had the opportunity to participate in the event, Ricki’s has hosted the event from its home office in Winnipeg for the past three years in collaboration with the foundation.

“We are, as a company, very concerned and supportive of the work that the CWF is doing,” said Anne Peikoff, Ricki’s company liaison with the foundation.

Canadian Women’s Foundation

The CWF was founded in 1991 when a few women gathered together in a backyard and came to the realization that Canadian women needed to step up and make a change that wasn’t already happening, and ultimately aid women and girls in self-empowerment, said Sandra Diaz, vice-president of marketing and communications with the CWF.

“Our overall goal is to help move women and girls out of violence and out of poverty and into confidence,” she said. “All of the programs that we fund and the research that we do [contributes to] that goal.”

The only organization of its kind in Canada, the CWF has come a long way in 20 years. In its first year, $40,000 was granted to programming that was designed to help women get on their feet and gain the confidence needed for them to succeed on their own. That amount has risen to over $35 million, which now funds over 1,100 programs in Canada.

Goals

The CWF focuses on three primary platforms:

• Violence prevention
• Helping low-income women get out of poverty
• Building strong, resilient girls

The foundation also prioritizes in areas that are traditionally underfunded, such as funding for aboriginal and disabled women, and support in northern Canada where women face more hardships as the result of a struggling economy, lack of jobs and high living costs, Diaz said.

“We make sure that those underfunded groups have a voice in our overall strategy,” she said.

Strategies

As for the strategies that the CWF uses to meet its goals, the grant system is a very consultative process, Diaz said. “We work with women and girls across the country and organizations across the country that are doing front-line work, like women shelters and other groups, to find out what the needs are.”

Campaigns

Aside from funding programs in the area of violence prevention, poverty reduction and confidence building, the organization also hosts a number of fundraising and awareness campaigns and events.

Shelter from the Storm is a joint venture between the CWF, Rogers Media, Winners and Home Sense retailers, which takes place annually in April. The main goal behind the campaign is to raise funds for over 450 women’s shelters across Canada, including Edmonton’s WIN House.

CWF’s other annual campaign is Women Moving Women. “[The goal] is to get 2,500 women or men to move 2,500 women out of poverty, and to do that it costs $ 2,500,” Diaz said. “That’s the cost for one woman to go through an economic development program.”

 

Stepping Up

The Ricki’s Step Up Walk has been an initiative of the Women Moving Women campaign for the past three years.  “We’ve been partnered with CWF for the last eight years and the mandate, annually, is to raise at least $100,000,” Peikoff said. “We’ve achieved that in the last eight years, so that’s $800,000 that Ricki’s has raised for the foundation.”

The Step Up Walk came to fruition three years ago when Ricki’s wanted to engage associates and customers in fundraising. This year was the first year that the event went national, with Ricki’s locations across the country participating. The event started as a sort of small-scale experiment, Peikoff said.

“We invited all of our associates and friends and family, there was probably about 40 or 50 walkers that joined us at that first one,” she said. “There was a group of stores in Ontario that joined us last year, they hosted an outdoor walk, and all of our Winnipeg stores joined us last year. We [also] had a store out in the Okanagan that had joined us.”

Ricki’s is particularly invested in the CWF’s poverty reduction campaign, Peikoff said. “For us it’s a really good partnership because our target market is the younger working woman,” she said.

Going National

This year, all of Ricki’s retails locations took part, with over 40 stores involved. “In some cases, as in West Edmonton Mall, the stores within the whole city kind of grouped together and did the whole walk together,” Peikoff said.

Ricki’s will continue to host the event across Canada in the future, Peikoff said. “We see it as a growing opportunity for us, and really, it’s as much about fundraising as it is about raising awareness.”

Twentieth Anniversary

The CWF recently celebrated its 20^th anniversary with a website relaunch and logo redesign. A meeting was held at the end of September for members to discuss future goals.

“We are at an exciting time at the Women’s Foundation,” Diaz said.