Welcome! If you are visiting to donate to the Wendy Babcock education fund (Up With Women's $10,000 donor matching challenge) please click on the Canadian Donate Now button. All donations received between December 9, 2011and January 15, 2012 will go directly to the fund, run by Eva's Initiatives and will be matched by Up With Women up to a value of $5,000, totalling $10,000. But let's aim to exceed that goal so this fund will have as much imact as possible!

To kick off the fund, Up With Women founder and friend of the late Wendy Babcock, did a skydive, taking pictures of Wendy up with her. See here for the video of that.

Welcome to Up With Women

Up With Women serves 3 purposes:

Educate:
To raise awareness about homelessness, particularly in as it impacts women and children.

Help for Women:
Up With Women provides a women's program that pairs recently homeless women each with a certified executive career/life coach. The coach provides her time free of charge for a year to help these women to rebuild their lives quickly and move successfully into the career/business of their choice. Many of our clients have not only successfully entered into the careers of their choice, but they have also chosen to start their own business.

To hear one of our clients speak about her experience, please see here:

Help Children:
Up With Women also runs a children's leadership mentoring program where formerly homeless children take their experience of homelessness and turn it into a "Community Action Project" that does good for their community. To see an example of one of our successes, please see Briar's story below. Through her work with us, Briar became the youngest finalist for Canada's Top 20 Under 20. She received notification when she was only 9 years old.

Please enjoy our stories. The remainder of this site exists to educate and to inspire.

Here you will find the stories of some amazing women, living extraordinary lives, who were also once homeless. Some fled an abusive home, others found themselves jobless or extremely poor and couldn't sustain a home for a time.

We share our stories here to prove that homelessness is not a dead end, and that success belongs to everybody.

Poverty and misfortune can happen to anyone. May this site help us all to build compassion and hope.

Thank you for visiting.

Lia Grimanis

A real gem: My 9 year old friend Briar Rose did such an amazing job summarizing for us what we all want for people. Please have a listen to her little interview here:

If you know someone who has a success story to share, please email me. lia [at] upwithwomen.com

We are now running a North American Fund! We have built a North American foundation fund to bring added support to communities in the areas of housing, safety and the economic empowerment of women.