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Welcome to She They Us, a podcast about making room in housing for women and gender-diverse people brought to you by the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women’s Housing.
Join host Andrea Reimer to hear about why Canada’s housing crisis is hitting households led by women and gender-diverse people harder and what you can do about it.
Welcome to She.They.Us., from the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women’s Housing.
Your host, Andrea Reimer, is a housing advocate, educator, and former Vancouver City Councillor who’s experienced homelessness firsthand. Andrea has spent her career at the intersection of power, policy, and courage to catalyze transformative change— and here, she brings that passion to the stories of women and housing across Canada.
This is She They Us, a podcast about the women and gender-diverse people living at the frontlines of Canada’s housing crisis.
The premise of this season is: did housing ever work for women and gender-diverse people in Canada?
In the last couple of episodes we’ve talked about the historical experiences of Indigenous women, Two Spirit and gender-diverse people and how that’s informed the current very challenging housing situation for many households led by Indigenous women, Two Spirit and gender-diverse people
The treatment of Indigenous women, Two Spirit and gender-diverse people throughout Canada’s history has been unconscionable: and you can see a clear through line from the forced displacement, racism and violence that Indigenous women, Two Spirit and gender-diverse people experienced since settlers arrived… and the precarious situation many Indigenous women, Two Spirit and gender-diverse people find themselves in today,
But what about households led by settler women? Over the next few episodes we’ll unpack that, recognizing that different waves of settlers have had different experiences. In this episode we will look at the experiences of White women.
Let’s dive in. I can think of no better place to start this episode than with a guest we had on in our first episode in season one
Carolyn Whitzman Sure. My name's Carolyn Weitzman. I'm a senior housing researcher at University of Toronto, but I actually live in Ottawa
Andrea Carolyn is a very accomplished housing researcher, advocate and author. In just the last couple of weeks she’s finished three blockbuster new housing studies. I asked her to tell me a bit more about those studies.
Carolyn Whitzman Indeed. So it's been a Super Tuesday, sort of September for me, with three reports released. The first was for the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate, and it was updating a 2023 report where we looked at a human rights-based calculation of housing need. And this was on targets and mechanisms for the current federal government. The second report, which was related to the first report, was for the Maytree Foundation, an anti-poverty organization, and it was on financial mechanisms that have worked in the past in Canada and other countries to enable scaling up non-market housing.
The third report is for a CMHC Solutions Lab that I'm working on with a number of partners and that was on how can non-market developers and providers bundle their assets together so that they can scale up non-market housing. So really all of the three reports are linked but all have slightly different emphases.
Andrea She also did her masters thesis on the history of housing in parkdale, a neighbourhood in Toronto. She looked at a 125 year span ending in the early 2000s, with a specific emphasis on women’s housing. And Carolyn loves to talk about history!
Carolyn Whitzman Gender was so important in housing history and we tend to ignore it. So in the early days of Parkdale, which was a suburb of Toronto at the time, women inherited land as widows and as orphans.
and they didn't have many other ways of making money. So if you look at the early history of this neighbourhood, there were a lot of women who became developers. And there were other women who became rooming house and boarding house. The distinction is whether you included food or not, owners. And one of the things that always interested me about the neighbourhood I was looking at, Parkdale,
is that it had a very high proportion of women-led households, partly because from a very early stage, there were a lot of rooming houses and boarding houses. And again, that's something we don't talk about very much, but we lost tens of thousands of rooming and boarding houses that were lived in by young singles, by older singles.
by young couples quite often, even families with children. And it's not great to live in one room, as we know. And again, I don't want to be nostalgic about it because people were plenty critical of rooming and boarding houses, the conditions there. But it was a stock of low cost housing.
Carolyn Whitzman And because of that stock of low-cost subdivided houses, Parkdale was called a slum from a very early stage and there were repeated attempts to get rid of that low-cost housing without providing alternatives. So when you look at the history of this neighbourhood, and I think it stands in for a lot of neighbourhoods,
municipal governments were much better at closing down low-cost options than in enabling them. And the rhetoric, the rhetoric of what was called the larger evil, if you had lodgers, they might be child abusers, which of course flies in the face of the fact that most abusers are within the family. If you look at the notion of destruction of family values and indeed the white race,
that accompanied a lot of the crackdowns on boarding houses and rooming houses, you realize that gender stereotypes
are an important part of housing policy. And indeed, even into the 80s, there was a famous case where two women were living together. I don't think that they were sharing a bedroom, but they were two divorcés. And it was a test case. And we're talking here, I think it's the early 80s in North York, again, a part of Toronto. That was illegal because it was single family zoning for single families.
nuclear notion of families and we're still getting over that notion that a normal family has one, maybe two breadwinners and you know children under 18 and it's just it's not the reality of the majority of Canadians right now that's about a quarter of households.
Andrea Carolyn comes by her interest in women and housing honestly, going back to her childhood memories of her family’s experiences with housing.
Carolyn Whitzman When I was very young, my mother was a real estate agent in Montreal. She was a single mom. And I spent a lot of time looking at open houses. So I guess I've always been interested in why. places cost a certain amount of money.
Carolyn Whitzman I was born in Cornwall, Ontario, which is a small city halfway between Montreal and Ottawa. And the move to Montreal when my parents split up, which happened to be, we moved to Montreal on my fifth birthday in 1968, was very much associated with the freedom that big cities had. And of course, that's been a theme even now. There's queer and trans youth.know, women post divorce who are moving to cities because they don't want to be considered weird. So we lived in a series of flats and duplexes and triplexes. In one of them, there were threespinster, unmarried women, sisters, the Mademoiselle de Saint-Pierre. And one of them was particularly dear to me because she offered me my first job at 12. She worked in a library and she offered me a job reshelving books. And it was about 20 years after the fact that I realized that she was offering me an alternative. And I don't know whether my mother was involved in it, to being a latchkey kid. So I don't, you know, I earned a dollar an hour and I was pretty darn proud of that, but I also got some after-school supervised care. So my experience and my mother's experience of being a tenant was of the, and again, I don't want to get misty-eyed and nostalgists, but it happened that we had a series of landlords who were women.and who were renting out the flat above them or the two flats above them in the case of a triplex as an affordability mechanism.
Carolyn Whitzman I'm not saying that the age of the small landlord is over and again I really want to stress this in many cases so-called mom-and-pop landlords are the worst when it comes to evictions. They certainly can say that they need the unit for themselves or a family member because they're selling it a little bit more easily than a large corporation. Having said that...There was an ecosystem which started to change in Montreal with the growing condoization in the 80s and 90s of duplexes and triplexes, but was a fairly benevolent tenant situation for me and my youth.
Andrea As Carolyn was talking, I actually got goosebumps. because it goes right to the heart of why we created this season. Our goal was to uncover and document the history of women’s experiences in housing, and to reveal how those patterns echo across generations and shape the challenges women and gender diverse people face today.
And on the day I talked to Carolyn, I’d already talked to my next guest…and the threads running between Carolyn, her mother, my next guest and her grandmother, are profound. And then there is a little extra twist. Let’s have a listen.
Jennifer Smith My name is Jennifer Smith and I'm the CEO and founder of Everything Podcasts and I live in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Andrea Full disclosure - Everything Podcasts is the company that produces this podcast. I chose them because they are women owned and led. It wasn’t until we were done season two and batting around ideas for this season that Jenn told me about her experience with housing.
Jennifer Smith my wife Donna and I were going to buy a place together. So we purchased the home and we were going to get a mortgage. All the subjects were removed and we'd been dealing with our bank HSBC for years. And so we just thought, ah, it's a no brainer. And we went to go get the financing and it was a new manager at the time. And she said, oh, yeah, we can't do that.
And I said, do what? And she said, well, like do the mortgage. And I said, I'm sorry, I'm not following. And I said, we've been here for years. I think we're seven or eight years in. We both make a very attractive income. So it wouldn't have been a financial issue. So I was a bit confused. I said to her, you know, I'm sorry, I'm just not tracking on what you're saying. Could you...
sort of give me a bit of context and she said, well, like we can't do that thing. And I said, what thing? She says, you know, like you're not married and you know, like you're dating and it's like a girl. And I'm like, still not quite tracking. And I said, I have to apologize. I really, I don't really know what you're saying. Isn't money money?
Jennifer Smith Well, we don't recognize you as a married couple. We don't sort of support that. And I said, I'm really not asking for support, I'm asking for mortgage. And I make a really good income.
And so not only is there no issue with debt ratio, but there's a lot of security here because I literally had just sold my home. …..Yes, but when we formalize and we put it on paper and it becomes legal documents, the recognition of you as coupled is not something we see. So I said, let me get this straight. So I've previously had a mortgage at your bank. Again, I'm reminding you, I sold my house. Now you're telling me that this is a policy? She said, no.
I didn't say that. It's just we've looked at this and this is the decision and it's way over my head. I'm just delivering the news.
Jennifer Smith So I said, okay, so I have GICs with you, I have my checking with you, I have my savings with you, I've referred three friends with mortgages to you, and you're telling me right now you're refusing my business because I'm buying a home with my wife who is same sex. I just want to be super clear that that's what you're saying. So I'm not saying it in those words, but it's just not something we can do at this time.
I said, okay, thanks, appreciate your time. And quite frankly, I laughed, we removed all of our funds that were invested in the bank, including a pretty attractive investment portfolio. And we made a decision to talk to other banks and actually share our experience and the communication that was shared with us because we really wanted to use it, if you will, as a litmus test.
that our money is the same as anybody's money. My money doesn't look different because I love this woman called Donna. So we found a new home at the Toronto Dominion Bank. They were phenomenal.
Andrea For reference: this was not Jenn’s first home: she’d already bought two houses…
So you would have, so based on that timeline, just my little sketchy math here, you would have owned your first home in your twenties then.
Jennifer Smith Now I owned my first home 18 years old
Andrea Unlike Carolyn, Jen did not come from a comfortably middle class family. She grew up in social housing in Jamestown in Toronto where she had to share a room with her brother well into her teens. Her mothers partner was an alcoholic and for a time her mother also struggled with alcoholism leading to her and her brother getting split up and placed in other houses for a time.
She got the down payment of $5000 for the first home by working days selling ads at a radio station on commission and working nights as the stations janitor.
Jennifer is only 5 years older than me and I can not imagine the circumstances that would have inspired her to buy when she did. On top of all the hurdles of being young and a woman, the early 1980s were a terrible time to borrow money to buy a house.
Jennifer Smith …you know, I'd grown up mostly through being raised by my grandmother, a Polish immigrant. And she said to me, there's only three things, Kukonho is a granddaughter in Polish. Kukonho, if there's only three things that I can tell you, it's this. In your life, your life will be a journey.
It'll have ebbs and flows and in order to give yourself the best possible chance for happiness and a happy family would be to do these three things. One, always own your own dirt because when you're paying rent, you're paying somebody else. If you have to work that hard to put a roof over your head, it just makes sense if you can find a way to pay yourself because you're the one doing the work, it's the best thing you could do. Try to own your own dirt as soon as you can.
Secondly, have a sharp pencil in your life. Finances are difficult. Finances are complicated. Finances can make or break your life. And if you had a sharp pencil in your life, it will help guide you through those hard times. And what she meant by sharp pencil was befriend and have a personal and a professional relationship with an accountant that's an expert at finance because that's not my job in life. There are people that do that.
And then she said, also have a smart mouth in your life. Somebody that will care for you, advocate for you beyond your personal experience in life. And I'm like, Bopchi is Polish for grandmother. said, Bopchi, what is a smart mouth? And she said, it's a lawyer. And she said, because their job is to navigate pitfalls in life, things that are hard, because they're gonna show up when you're building a family.
Jennifer Smith and when you want to be a strong woman in the world and you said you want to be a business woman, so you need to have that relationship and you need to have somebody outside that can look objectively for you and protect you through any of pitfalls that may show up. And I said, got it. So I did follow my grandmother's advice. I bought my first home just before the age of 19. And it was, I think, probably her showing up in her spirit from heaven that made it happen
Andrea … did she have land a lawyer and an accountant or was it her observation that if a woman wanted to make it in the world that is what they would need.
Jennifer Smith Great question. So she escaped from Poland on a boat to bring her children here and left her husband behind because of regime and she wanted to have a life for her children. And she took a big risk because as you know that could be a risk where you don't survive, right? But it was important to her and she was scared for her children and so she came here and back in Poland she had a prettypretty prestigious life and job but came here as an immigrant in Toronto is where she settled. She was a seamstress that worked at a very big fashion company in Poland but nobody would recognize the experience so she worked in the garment district in Spadina in back when it was a garment district and she was working like through the night right I mean
The favorite thing about my grandmother was her hands. Her hands had so many stories in them, you know? I would look at her hands with awe and just this like, wow, I wonder what that gnarly bump means and what's behind that and what, you know, she was just magical in her ability to connect to just reason. So she was working like as a seamstress in the garment district.like very much and I guess the way I'm trying to be polite here is before they had labor laws in place. So it was intense. And then at night she ran a rooming house. So she would clean, she would cook, and she would do all these things so that she could provide for her family as a single woman. And it was in that moment that she was doing all of these things and working around the clock that she realized these three things. So she made them so for herself. So.As she went through her journey in raising her children as a single mother in a foreign land, she got a smart pencil, a smart mouth, a sharp pencil, and also she got her own dirt. She ended up buying the rooming house that she had worked at for a decade because the people were gonna be retiring and moving on and she bought it. And so she had her own land. She had a smart mouth and she had a sharp pencil in her life.
Andrea Jenn is not the first person in her family who was turned down for a mortgage.
Jennifer Smith Well, and even when my grandmother bought the house, she quote unquote the rooming house, she had to do it through a man. They wouldn't give her money. She had to trust this man that she was friends with that worked for her in the rooming house to get all of that organized as far as mortgages and those sorts of things because they wouldn't give her a mortgage.
Andrea In a society organized around a quote unquote - “free market”, it turns out that for women that market hasn’t been that free. But as Carolyn and Jenn stories point to when money really is money women do better. To tell us a bit more about that I’m going to bring in Jill Kelly, Jill is a former long time general manager of a credit union that was started to give women and others who were traditionally economically excluded, the same access to financial services.
Jill Kelly Okay, my name is Jill Kelly and I have quite a history with CCEC. It was started as a project of the company of young Canadians and I was part of the second cohort of people working on that project. So I was part of negotiating the charter for the credit union and setting up all the policies and so on. And then I served on the interim board of directors and on the board for a bit.
I worked as a volunteer teller for a time and as temporary business loans manager. And then I went in as a temporary manager while the manager went on maternity leave. And when she decided not to come back, I continued on and I was there as manager for 23 years.
Andrea For context, many years ago I was on the board of CCEC Credit Union, serving as president for six years which is where I met Jill.
I asked Jill to give me a little context on what the need was that CCEC was responding to
Jill Kelly ⁓ So we, the way credit unions work is people pool their money and then they provide services to themselves. So our community, because there were groups involved, a lot of them had grants and grants would come at different times and you might get two or three months at a time of a grant. So you might have a chunk of money that would sit at the credit union for a bit.
We didn't pay any interest on deposits. Most of our depositors didn't have enough money that it would make a lot of difference to them to get interest on it. And instead we did lower cost loans to their organizations. And the theory was if the food co-op could get a lower income, I mean, a interest rate loan to buy equipment, then that would help.your food prices and you would have a better return than if you'd gotten a little bit of interest on the amount of money that you personally had at the credit union. But the times were that there were all these organizations. Housing co-ops were being built during that time. And CCEC did share purchase loans. Usually needed about $2,000 was a pretty common amount to get into a housing co-op. And if you were...you know, a single parent and maybe you were on social assistance, you wouldn't have that kind of money. So we always worked with the groups. The housing co-op could be a member and keep some money at the credit union in return. We would give the share purchase money to the member to give to the co-op. And the co-op would agree that if the member moved out and there was still any amount owing, the credit union would get paid back. So it was that kind of reciprocal.arrangement throughout the community.
Jill Kelly One of our favorite loans was to a childcare center, Mount Pleasant Childcare. It was on land leased from the city for a dollar a year. Because they didn't own the land, when they had gotten the mortgage for their portable buildings, they had to go to a mortgage company, which charged them 5 % higher than the going mortgage rate. That was how it was written.and they'd been paying for five years. And so they wanted to refinance with CCEC, which would not be at 5 % higher than the going mortgage rates. And it turned out they had only paid off a thousand dollars. And that's because the way their mortgage had been written, all the interest was loaded upfront. And so they had paid off interest for all that time. So.We really wanted to do this mortgage. And I can't remember the amounts. Credit unions did not generally do commercial loans at the time. So not only were we small and a bit of an upstart, but we wanted to do commercial loans. So we had to get permission from the Credit Union Reserve Board for commercial loans. And we sent them this application and they turned it down. And we were incensed. So wesaid we wanted them to come to a board meeting so we could talk to them about this. And the day of the board meeting, we got a letter from them saying they changed their mind and we could do the loan. And so they came to the meeting and all we could say was thank you.
Jill Kelly one other loan, this was to ⁓ a gentleman who was homeless. He'd been couch surfing and he'd been talking to people at a construction site and they needed somebody to kind of be eyes on the place at night. So if he could get a truck, he could sleep in his truck at the construction site and he would get paid for that and he would have, you know, his own space. So we lent him the money for the truck, secondhand truck. And, you know, that's the sort of thing you wouldn't find anybody else doing. And of course he paid us back.
Jill Kelly it's important to say that loans were approved by an elected credit committee. So at the annual meeting, the board got elected and the credit committee got elected. And in the very early days of the credit union, the credit committee was elected by sector. So somebody represented childcare and somebody represented housing and somebody represented food. And I don't remember what they all were.
After a while, that got harder to keep the sectors and people were involved in more than one sector. So we did away with that. But that helped a lot because often you knew the borrowers, you knew the organizations. And, you know, I was talking with another colleague from back then who worked with women futures.which was trying to do economic development for women. And she reminded me that once CCEC would give a loan, then they could go to other possible funders and say, we already have a bank loan for this amount. And it was a lot easier to get other funding. And the other kind of loan that we did a lot, and remember that a lot of these community organizations were women run, was that
If they were on grants, they'd get a grant and the grant's gonna arrive in a month or two. And in the meantime, you're supposed to be at least halfway through the project by the time you get the money. So we would do interim funding and we'd advance them the money waiting until they, you know, before they got the grant.
Andrea
One of the impetuses for me to talk to Jill was because CCEC was one of the first financial institutions in Canada to give mortgages to same sex couples. I ask Jill to tell me a bit about how that came to be
Jill Kelly Well, the main thing about CCEC is that we didn't discriminate. So we didn't come into this with the idea that women weren't good credit risks or same-sex couples weren't stable or whatever the going prejudice was about people who didn't fit the conventional norm. So...
If we gave mortgages and we had to have enough money to show that you could pay it back, like it didn't matter whether it was a woman or a same-sex couple or immigrants. So that was the key piece. And we didn't...
The credit union itself didn't go into the community and say, look, this group of people isn't able to get mortgages. We should find mortgages for them. There were other groups that were working with these various groups of people who were connected with the credit union. And they would come and say, we've identified this need. What can we do about it? And we'd all sort of figure it out together.
So that was something that people had
Jill Kelly trouble understanding about it. Like, how did you come up with this program? Well, there were community groups who were working on it and we worked with them. So we didn't, I mean, we did, and then we'd give a mortgage to individuals or couples or even, you know, ⁓
unrelated adults buying a place together. Like none of that stuff was a problem for us. You just did it.
One other kind of loan that we did, which I think is worth mentioning is ⁓ there was a period of time when refugees had to be able to have a thousand dollars in order to put in their refugee claim. And so we worked with a couple of organizations that worked with refugees and we would lend them the thousand dollars for their refugee claim. I mean, there's so many situations like that where
here's a solution for you, but you have to have some money to get there. And that's where CCC came in.
Andrea
Talking to Jill and hearing what a group of committed people were able to figure out and build by themselves to close gaps where governments with way more expertise and resources are failing, it feels like there is something broken. I asked Carolyn about it.
Andrea to Carolyn Where is the disconnect between these lived experiences and the way housing is discussed at the policy and political level?
Carolyn Whitzman Andrea, you're asking some really, really good questions. I mean, one thing I want to be really clear about is that I've been a pretty privileged person, not only because of my white skin, but also even when my mother was a single mother and left my husband, left my father rather, left her husband.
We were middle class, you know, we went on vacations, I went to summer camp, we were middle class.
That said, I was at a, I spoke at three public events last week and one of them was with a group of high net worth women in Toronto in the fourth season, so a pretty posh hotel. And I asked the women in the audience how many of them knew someone who had been homeless or at risk of homelessness.
And about a third of the women put up their hand. And these are, I cannot iterate enough, I net worth women. Most of them, most of them, although not all of them white, most of them if not all of them, well, many of them boomers. And I sometimes feel that, and I'm very much guilty of this, I like my statistics, I like my numbers.
But I think that we need to tell one another's stories a little bit more because I do believe that humans are naturally, they have empathy. And one of the things that really worries me is that when we talk, for instance, about homelessness.
Carolyn Whitzman Right now people are like post-empathy or something like that. I don't know what it is. But you know, it's pretty grim out there and people are hardening their heart because so many people are in such bad situation and it's so much in people's face that in public space because people don't have private spaces of their own. So...
I do think that storytelling is really important, whether it's women or men. Sometimes it's derided as indulgent or female. But I think storytelling is really important. And I would say in both right and left, like, you know, people do tell.
certain kinds of stories, but people don't reflect honestly on their lives and have their politics informed by...the kind of active listening that needs to happen. And again, I don't want to engage in stereotypes. I've been with men who are very good active listeners and I've been with women, course, are very not into sharing and caring. But I do feel there's a certain kind of storytelling that is really important in building not just empathy, but in building policies can help address disparities and marginalization that we sometimes forget about.
Andrea We are going to close out today with Jenn, and an answer she gave to my question about how hopeful she is about how the next generation of young women will experience housing.
Jennifer Smith The fear that I have for my daughter, because as I mentioned, I've got boys and girls, is that, again, back to this man's world a little bit in business, my daughter is going to be probably in her life in the arts side of things. And in most executive positions, those are still mostly run by men.
So, you know, likely she may be underpaid compared to my boys, which is gonna be unfortunate. Again, back to my experience as a woman in the broadcast space, you know, one of the first leaders in the radio world in a C-level position, and I made probably 40 % of what my counterpart made. And I did the same work, if not a little bit more. So, you know, I've grown up in that space, and it's sort of that experience that my grandmother shared with me, the lived experience that I can share with Alex.
So rather than coming from a place of fear, I want to come to her with a place of education and fortitude on, okay, Ali, here's how we get through these things. We start now, we build in some of these disciplines and these thought processes, and there can be some level of education that could maybe help you a little bit, but she's still gonna face a lot of those things that women face today in housing.
It's still gonna be a reality. And she's the type of girl who's very decisive. So she may end up being one of those people that doesn't have a partner until later in life, because she's not gonna settle. She's gonna make sure her heart's happy. So that might mean she's a single woman buying a house. I don't know. But I do have fears for her, because we're still a little bit from a housing perspective. in a place where there needs to be more work done for women. There's no question.
Jennifer Smith one other thing that I didn't mention, but my children are adopted. They're mixed race, they're from the US, they're all from the same birth mom. And so my kids are mixed. They're half African American and half white.
she's 13 she has faced adversity because she's mixed race And it's it's crazy. It's just crazy that in this world today that we still have that it's like what is wrong with people
Andrea And that’s where. we. are. going to pick it up in the next episode, talking about the experiences of Black women with housing in Canada
To close today’s episode, I want to thank the women and gender-diverse people across the country who had the vision to create the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women’s Housing—and the tenacity to keep it going. Because of you, we can imagine a future without the violence, poverty, and housing insecurity that so many have endured.
I’m Andrea Reimer. Thank you for listening to She.They.Us., a podcast from the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women’s Housing. You can find other episodes wherever you get your podcasts.
Before we go, I want to share a few resources—and a call to action. If you’re a woman or gender-diverse person who’s experienced housing insecurity but feel unsure about sharing your story, the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women’s Housing can help. We offer training programs to support and amplify your voice. Learn more and sign up at pcvwh.ca/training.
Your story is one of the most powerful tools we have to drive change. You can speak at a city council meeting, join a local housing advocacy group, or meet with your MP or Provincial Representative.
And if you haven’t personally experienced the housing crisis, we still need you. As many of our guests have said, allies are essential—and that means you. Share this podcast, use your voice, and help others raise theirs.
Thank you to Everything Podcasts for bringing She. They. Us. to the next level. Shout out to Jordan Wong, our Sound Engineer, Linda Rourke, Producer and Writer; Lisa Bishop, Senior Account Director; and Jennifer Smith, the Executive Producer. And my final two thanks. First, to my partner on the She. They. Us. project, Ange Valentini with the Strategic Impact Collective and the Project Coordinator, Monica Deng.