The new venue at Ricky’s Private Event Room in Murrayville was well received by all at the BPW Langley March 21st dinner meeting tonight. The room was bright and private and the meals and service were excellent. The comment forms were unanimously positive!
Our guest speaker, Shahnaz Rahman, the new Executive Director at the Surrey Women’s Centre gave us a lot to think about regarding women and children exposed to violence and insight into what goes on for the women and their?families. Her presentation created a lot of direction for our advocacy and resolutions discussions that followed, led by Bilkis Laher, one of the leads of that committee.
For instance, we were all blown away to hear that for all of the Vancouver and lower mainland area there are only two places that have rape kits/centers available! These centers are in Vancouver and Surrey. Therefore if you live outside these areas ie; Mission, you must travel a long way to receive the proper follow-up, and needless to say, one in this circumstance, most likely does not want to travel at all. This is unacceptable and BPW Langley will be working on this right away. Other issues also came up that our group will help to work through, such as the lack of transition houses and secondary secure places for women that need a safe place, legal aid that is needed by the women which the province has cut back drastically and much more work to be done.
It is wonderful to know that there are people like Shahnaz Rahman and her support workers out there trying to help. Kamal Dhillon, author of Black and Blue Sari also attended tonight, as well as Tikiri Herath, author of the new Red Heeled Rebels book series. They were both speakers at past meetings and we are grateful for their work to help women and their continued support of BPW Langley by attending our meetings when they can.
We have a great group of heart-centered women that are passionate about making a difference in our communities. I am reminded every day of the compassion and caring our members have and the hard work they continue to do. It is an honor to be your servant leader and president.
We welcome you to join us for our next monthly dinner meeting on April 18 at Ricky’s Event Room in Murrayville. We have networking, mentors, business tips – but boy, we have a whole lot more too!
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Wish I had been there! Sounds like it was a wonderful evening!