In honour of International Women's Day, we at Temple of the Sun want to highlight an amazing organisation doing incredible work to empower women and promote gender equity: Centre for Women & Co.
Based in Queensland, Australia, Centre for Women & Co is a non-profit organisation that provides support and services to women and children who have experienced domestic and family violence. Their mission is to prevent domestic and family violence through education, advocacy, and community awareness programs, and to empower women to live safe and fulfilling lives.
As we celebrate International Women’s Day and the theme of embracing equity, it’s crucial to recognise the importance of organisations like Centre for Women & Co in achieving this goal. We recently sat down with CEO Stacey and COO Rebecca to learn more about their work. Here’s what we learnt.
Highlighting the Centre for Women & Co this International Women's Day.
Can you walk us through what it is that you do at Centre for Comen & Co?
Centre for Women & Co are a domestic and family violence and health and well-being centre, we service the Redlands and Logan region and see thousands of women and children a year.
Empowering women is a crucial aspect of Centre for Women & Co’s mission, what steps do you take to achieve this?
Centre for Women & Co empower women by listening to them. Women are the experts in their own lives so we take our lead from them on how best to support them, we come with expertise and resources and they lead us on what they need in their lives.
The theme for this year’s international women’s day is embracing equity. What does this mean to you and Centre for Women & Co?
Embracing equity is something that we do everyday at Centre for Women & Co, so we’re really excited that this is the theme for this year [and] Queensland Women’s Week and we look forward to encouraging the community to be apart of that.
How does Center for Women & Co engage with and involve diverse communities in its work, particularly those who are marginalised?
Centre for Women & Co has really great partnerships and we continue to rely on those partnerships and our elders in our community to guide us on how to best support marginalised community members. We are led by those people in our community to guide us in how to do that.
Centre for Women & Co continue to invest in education in our communities, education with our partners, our government and non-government partners and key people in our communities so that we can better educate them on how to support those experiencing domestic violence.
Looking forward, what are Center for Women & Co’s goals for promoting gender equity and empowerment in the coming year, and how can individuals support these efforts?
I think for Centre for Women & Co, our goal is always to promote equity in our community and that is going to forever be be something that we will do. I think in terms of having community organisations and businesses be part of that, we really welcome involvement from community members so we would really recommend giving us a call and giving services like us a call and seeing how you can be a part of it.
The Centre is a key contact so people can reach out anytime but we also reach out to key contacts in our community, continue to provide education and guidance on how to create gender equity in our communities and we also see women as full people so we continue to invest in all areas of women’s lives and their families’ wellbeing, so we can support them to have safety, wellbeing and healing in their lives.
To learn more about Centre for Women & Co and their important work, please visit their website at https://www.centreforwomen.org.au/.
Together, we can help create a world where all women are empowered and able to live safe, fulfilling lives.