Safer Together Campaign

Safer Together is an advocacy campaign focused on making gender justice and gender-based violence prevention central to conversations about community safety in Ottawa.

The campaign starts from a simple premise: safety is created through prevention, collective care, and the conditions that allow people to live with dignity; not only through responses after violence occurs. That means looking at the systems and investments that shape people’s everyday lives, including housing, economic security, transportation, accessible and culturally responsive services, healthcare, community infrastructure, and support for grassroots and frontline organizations.

The campaign brings together the perspectives of survivors, community members, frontline workers, service providers, and community-serving organizations to identify the issues that matter most and translate those priorities into concrete advocacy asks for municipal decision-makers.

Mayoral Candidates’ Forum

As part of Safer Together, OCTEVAW and the City for All Women Initiative (CAWI) are hosting a Mayoral Candidates’ Forum ahead of Ottawa’s 2026 municipal election.

Rather than developing questions internally, we invited community members to help shape the conversation. A public community session on September 18 brought participants together to co-develop questions across five themes:

  1. Safe, affordable and accessible housing as prevention

  2. Economic security, equity and pathways to opportunity

  3. Inclusive and caring cities

  4. Preventing gender-based violence and creating community safety

  5. Culturally Responsive Services

Participants then used dotmocracy to identify the questions they considered most important. Additional questions were collected through public registration for the forum. The final questions therefore reflect both in-person community deliberation and broader public submissions.

The forum gives mayoral candidates an opportunity to respond directly to community priorities and to explain what they would do, within the powers of the mayor and City, to advance gender justice and create safer communities.

There’s still time to register: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/mayoral-candidates-forum-forum-des-candidats-a-la-mairie-tickets-1997856541697

Card deck

The Safer Together card deck is another tool developed through the campaign. Rather than being simply an educational resource, the deck is designed to help people have conversations about what creates safety and what a safer Ottawa could look like.

The cards can be used to prompt reflection and discussion around the campaign's core themes—such as housing, economic security, public space, community care, prevention, and collective responsibility—and to help people connect everyday experiences to broader municipal systems and policy choices.

This makes the card deck particularly useful for community conversations, workshops, events, and civic engagement. It creates a low-barrier way for people to identify what safety means to them, consider what needs to change, and think collectively about the role of the City in creating those conditions.