Scarborough Women’s Centre is a small, 4-star charity with Average demonstrated impact. It is financially transparent and has low overhead spending and an average results reporting grade.

Founded in 1982, Scarborough Women’s Centre (SWC) provides counseling and support services for women who have experienced abuse. SWC works to help women become economically and emotionally independent. The charity has four primary programs: Information, Education, Support, and Building Strong Futures. It does not provide a breakdown of expenses among its programs. SWC reported helping 3,688 women in F2022. Its head office is in Scarborough, ON.

Information is the charity’s referral program. The charity states that it speaks to 2,000 women by phone and email each year about newcomer integration, abuse, jobs, education, and emotional health. In F2022, the charity received 2,037 contacts, with 1,894 individual and 143 agency contacts.

Through its Education program, SWC offers free webinars to its clients on healthy relationships, financial planning, self-esteem, family law, and dealing with anger. In F2022, SWC hosted 91 webinars with a total of 1,912 hours of service for 550 participants.   

Support programs are the charity’s on-site Counselling and Mentoring initiatives. According to the charity, it helped 456 women through its free counseling program in F2022. Through counseling, women make plans to leave abuse and recover from abuse. In the same year, 15 women were matched with trained community volunteers who will provide mentoring support for six months to one year.

Building Strong Futures program supports women who are navigating systems, developing life skills, building their freedom from violence, and becoming economically secure. It focuses on supporting women to build a foundation for future success in their lives. In F2022, the charity delivered 20 sessions of the Leadership Development program with 38 webinars about life skills, self-esteem and pre-employment to 573 women. Through its Outreach program, the charity provided eight rebuilding lives consultations to 40 women and six resilient community webinars to 17 women.

Scarborough Women’s Centre is a small charity in terms of donations, receiving donations of $402k in F2022. The charity received $372k in government funding, representing 48% of total revenues. Administrative costs are 19% of revenues, and fundraising costs are 1% of donations. This results in total overhead spending of 20%. For every dollar donated to the charity, 80 cents go to the cause, which is within Ci’s reasonable range for overhead spending.

In F2022, SWC has $381k in reserve funds. The charity can cover almost eight months of its annual program costs with its reserves.

This charity report is an update that has been sent to Scarborough Women’s Centre for review. Changes and edits may be forthcoming.

Updated on June 16, 2023 by Krystie Nguyen.