Promising practices
Learn about Women and Gender Equality Canada’s (WAGE) concept of promising practices to help with your application to the Gender-based Violence (GBV) Program.
About
The Gender-based Violence (GBV) Program supports promising practices that seek to prevent and address gender-based violence. Promising practices funded by the GBV Program should strengthen the GBV sector by addressing gaps in supports for Indigenous and/or underserved groups of victims and survivors in Canada, as well as those who are at increased risk of experiencing violence.
Promising practices are:
Programs, services, interventions, strategies, or policies that have already shown potential to have positive impact and are now being further elaborated or adapted to a different context, or scaled to a new level.
Practices that have already been developed and tested/evaluated by your organization or another organization, but the evidence for the practice’s effectiveness has not been fully documented.
They are not:
A new intervention, program/service, strategy, or policy developed by you or your organization that has never been implemented nor tested.
An intervention, program/service, strategy, or policy that has gone through multiple implementations, demonstrated high impact, high adaptability, and high quality of evidence.
Types of promising practices funded
The GBV Program funds these two types of promising practices.
1. Adapting/further elaborating
These projects seek to adapt an existing promising practice that has been implemented by another organization in Canada or elsewhere. Alternatively, they can further elaborate an existing promising practice that was developed in-house and showed preliminary evidence of being effective but for which the organization would like to collect further evidence.
2. Scaling
Scaling projects build on and expand a promising practice that has been fully implemented and formally tested by the applicant and for which the applicant has gathered robust evidence. Information on required evidence for either type of promising practice is available below.
Two types of scaled projects funded by WAGE:
- expanding an existing promising practice to a new region or a new population, or scaling a promising practice from local/regional levels to a national level; and
- increasing access to supports through the development of strategic partnerships and collaborations to strengthen a network of organizations. For instance, if the initial promising practice featured supports delivered through shelters, it could be expanded to offer supports through social services.
Examples
- A promising practice tested and shown to be effective in Australia adapted for a not-for-profit organization in Saskatchewan.
- A community-based organization that previously created a service for survivors now seeking to strengthen and formalize the model, including formally testing its effectiveness.
- A project adapted a model of practice to improve the interventions of youth protection services in the event of domestic violence and to increase the safety and well-being of immigrant mothers and their children.
- A project further elaborated wraparound supports for Indigenous women and their children in transition houses and safe homes, to foster safety and healing for GBV survivors.
- A project adapted a trauma-informed and survivor-focused reporting platform for women survivors of sexual assault or gender-based violence to reduce the number of unreported cases of sexual harassment.
- A project adapted a low-barrier and survivor-centric approach for criminalized women survivors of GBV that use public transportation in a metropolitan area of Canada, to address barriers to accessing support services.
- A project adapted and implemented a platform connecting corporate entities and intervention organizations to help improve supports for youth and young women trafficking survivors.
Demonstrating a need
To show that your promising practice fills a gap, your funding proposal should explain:
- Why your promising practice should be adapted/further elaborated or scaled
- How it will help to address a gap in services/supports
- Who initially designed the promising practice
- What are the relevant results
Providing Evidence
If you are adapting/elaborating a promising practice, preliminary evidence can take multiple forms. You could include:
- input from individuals your organization serves
- lessons learned identified by staff
- feedback from the broader community
- key statistics
- previous project results
- letters of support from partners demonstrating the potential or effectiveness of the practice you wish to elaborate
- studies or research reports
If you are scaling a promising practice that has already been formally tested by your organization through previous WAGE funding, evidence should be provided through more formal documents to develop the proposal, including:
- previous project evaluation or research reports
- working papers
- consultations
- policy documents
Evaluation
Once funded, the GBV Program may require that organizations undertake external project evaluations to assess the impact of a promising practice. You may refer to the call for proposals’ eligibility criteria for further guidance.
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