Day Seven: Elizabeth Fry Week 2023
5/14/2023Welcome to our last day of Elizabeth Fry Week 2023, and happy Mother’s Day!
Every year, we host Elizabeth Fry Week on the week leading up to Mother’s Day. We do this to help draw attention to the fact that most incarcerated women are mothers, many of whom were the sole care providers of their families at the time of incarceration. The impact of their incarceration, and eventual parole, is therefore experienced by their entire families and their communities.
Today, in honour of Mother’s Day, we also wanted to repost a poem written and performed by El Jones, which she first shared with us during Elizabeth Fry Week 2022. It is entitled: Somebody Loves You (in Nova Institution).
Community Spotlight: Sheri
Meet Sheri! Sheri is one of the people that we featuring as part of our Elizabeth Fry Week community spotlights. If you know Sheri, you know that she is a proud mother, and so today feels like the perfect day to shine the spotlight on her. Sheri is one of many inspirational people in the CAEFS network who have experienced parole and who are pillars of their communities, and you may recognize her from past CAEFS events!
Thank you to our member societies
One of the focuses of this week has been on how community displacement greatly impacts formerly incarcerated people’s re-entry experience. We have mentioned how residential requirements placed on people who are on parole often force people to relocate to highly populated areas that are far from their home communities. When this happens, it is local Elizabeth Fry Societies who take on the important re-entry support work that reduces isolation.
We want to take this moment, at the end of Elizabeth Fry Week, to thank our member societies for all that they do.
Learn more about the work that Elizabeth Fry Societies do and how to get involved by visiting their websites, listed here by region.
Finally, we wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who engages with us during this year’s Elizabeth Fry Week and helped us improve our shared understanding of parole in Canada.
Please stay tuned for more community spotlights, resources, and information related to parole from CAEFS in the near future.
