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Thrive Project

Huronia Transition Homes’ Thrive Project, funded by Women and Gender Equality Canada, aims to restructure current understandings of economic insecurity, specifically, as it relates to the ongoing epidemic of gender-based violence against women and its close interconnection with poverty. The project is working to build a movement for the realization of a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) within North Simcoe, through the establishment of a community network made up of municipalities, academic institutions, social services, regional committees, the local health unit, and women with lived experience of violence and poverty. 

The project engages women who have survived violence and poverty in feminist research to document their stories, strengthen social connections, and co-develop strategies for systemic change to support livelihoods and reduce gendered violence. By centering women’s lived realities, the Thrive Project aims to dismantle internalized stigma, build solidarity, and empower women to shape policies and programs that meaningfully address the intersecting structures of gendered violence and economic marginalization. 

The term thrive reflects the project’s core premise: that women’s safety and autonomy require more than crisis response or short-term stabilization. Thriving denotes the material security, social connection, and structural conditions necessary for women not only to survive violence and poverty, but to exercise agency, pursue meaningful opportunities, and shape their futures.

Key Findings

  • Poverty is gendered, and violence operates as an economic system that erodes autonomy and security
  • Institutional responses often replicate coercive control through surveillance, punitive rules, and inadequate supports
  • Indigenous women face compounded harm due to colonial policies and systemic racism
  • Women carry a heavy, unpaid burden navigating fragmented systems, worsened by transportation and housing insecurity
  • Respectful, trauma-informed, low-barrier services improve safety and outcomes
  • Systems change requires centering women’s lived experience and meeting basic needs

Our Major Insights

Thematic findings

1. Gender-based violence and poverty are interlocking systems not isolated experiences 

2. Institutional and social support systems replicate control, enforcing surveillance and economic dependency

3. Indigenous women’s access to systems of support are impacted by colonialism 

4. Women carry a gendered burden of system navigation

5. Respectful services foster positive experiences

6. Systems change depends on listening to, valuing, and learning from women’s lived experiences

Our Process

Intersectionality

To understand how multiple systemic forces work together and interact to reinforce conditions of inequality and social exclusion

 Feminist, trauma-informed approach

To understand the sociopolitical context of women’s lives, the importance of sharing power in the research process, and to resist the reduction of experiences of gender-based violence to individual pathology 

Our Recommendations

  1. Adopt a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) as a cornerstone anti‑violence, anti‑poverty measure
  2. Explicitly recognize economic abuse across eligibility, housing, and social support systems
  3. Redesign income supports to promote autonomy and reduce conditionality 
  4. Fund Culturally grounded supports and remove colonial barriers 
  5. Amend discriminatory laws and policies, including those rooted in the Indian Act, which limit safety, status rights, and access to supports.
  6. Reduce the Gendered Burden of System Navigation 
  7. Fund Trauma-Informed, Respectful, Low-Barrier Service Delivery and Implement Best Practices Systemically 
  8. Centre Women’s Lived Experience in System Design and Decision-Making 
  9. Advance Cross-Sector System Reform 

Publications

Literature review

Thematic analysis

Stewardship council info

Strategic guidance for the Thrive project is provided through a multi-sector Stewardship Council that integrates academic, Indigenous, public health, and anti-violence perspectives, strengthening both community accountability and policy relevance. The Stewardship Council includes:

  • Janet Mosher, Associate Professor, York University
  • Christine Bushey, Manager, Chronic Disease Prevention Program; 
  • Simcoe County District Health Unit
  • Meaghan Chambers, Executive Director, The Elizabeth Fry Society of Simcoe Muskoka 
  • Lisa Moreau, Waabano Kwe Coordinator; Georgian Bay Native Women’s Association 
  • Lauren Foote, Community Health and Wellbeing Coordinator; Chigamik Community Health Centre 

The Design

Qualitative 

To enable depth, nuance, and meaning making, allowing women – as experts in their own lives - to articulate how structural conditions shape their safety, dignity, and economic security

Focus groups

To support collective meaning-making and facilitate peer connection

Thematic analysis 

Allowed for the identification of recurring patterns, meanings, and priorities across participants’ experiences, centering women’s voices and ensuring findings were grounded in lived realities

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