Preventable, Predictable, and Compounding: Childhood Adversity in Our Systems

YWCA Toronto
Oral Presentation to the City of Toronto's Board of Health on Adverse Childhood Experiences Report.
May, 2026

Good morning, Chair and members of the Board of Health,

My name is Sami Pritchard, and I am the Director of Advocacy and Communications at YWCA Toronto, which is the city’s largest multi-service organization serving women, girls and gender diverse people. Our services include supportive and affordable housing, shelters, child care, a girls' centre, and anti-violence services – including a 12-week parenting program for children and their mothers who have been exposed to abuse.

I want to begin by thanking you for your care and attention to this matter. The report highlights what our organization and the families we serve have long known: childhood adversity does not exist in a bubble or have a single, isolated impact, but is shaped by social, economic, and structural conditions that often carry into adulthood. Many of the children we support are experiencing multiple, intersecting adversities. These experiences are often shaped by gender, race and broader structural inequalities, including barriers to immigration status.

For the children and families we support, adverse childhood experiences show up in many ways. They show up as children entering shelter after fleeing a violent household, as families navigating housing precarity and migration and as caregivers navigating trauma while trying to secure childcare, income support and safety. When caregivers are unsafe, under constant stress, or navigating trauma without adequate support, it directly affects children’s ability to feel secure, develop healthily, and flourish. This tells us that preventing adversity for children means preventing violence and instability in the lives of their caregivers.

We welcome the report’s recognition of a coordinated, trauma-informed approach across City services. However, true progress requires more than just training or minor practice changes. We must fundamentally rethink our systems to ensure they offer dignity, trust, and flexibility. This is especially vital for Indigenous, Black, and racialized families who face systemic surveillance and barriers to care. And the City must ensure its services offer genuine support for survivors of violence, not undue obstacles.

Gender-based and community violence are key drivers of these experiences. Children who witness violence, whether at home or in their communities, carry that trauma into their development, their learning, their relationships and their health journeys. For caregivers, surviving violence while parenting often means navigating systems that are designed to support safety, healing and caregiving at the same time. From our perspective, in order to address these adverse childhood experiences, we need to focus on preventing them in the first place.

In practice, this means ensuring safe, stable and affordable housing, accessible child care that supports healthy development, income security and violence prevention – all of which are foundational to children’s health and wellness, and that of their caregivers. Having declared gender-based violence an epidemic, the City must now treat safety, housing, and childcare as essential health measures.

Multi-service community organizations like ours play an important role in making this approach tangible. Services such as our housing, child care, violence prevention and healing support services, as well as youth gathering spaces like our Girls’ Centre, allow us to identify adverse childhood-related needs early and strengthen preventive efforts by offering safe, stable environments and access to care. This work and that of our partners must be recognized and supported as the essential public health infrastructure that it is. To truly advance the goals of this framework, that infrastructure must be adequately resourced, stable and meaningfully involved in shaping solutions. We must provide sustained support to the community organizations leading the work of prevention and healing.

Finally, while the report acknowledges colonialism, racism and discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation as drivers of childhood adversity, we must move beyond recognition. We need clear, accountable implementation of decolonial, anti-racist, anti-oppressive practices that are embedded in how services are designed, delivered and evaluated across the City. And as a Sanctuary City, we must ensure non-status residents can access these services without fear or barriers.

Public health leadership is essential to aligning City divisions, agencies and community partners around a shared, trauma and violence-informed approach, and we appreciate that this lens is recognized in the report.

True progress requires more than training; it demands a systemic overhaul rooted in dignity and trust. We urge the Board of Health to adopt these recommendations to begin addressing the root drivers of childhood adversity, and advance a vision for public health that identifies safety, housing, and child care as essential protective measures; that addresses gender-based violence as a key driver of childhood adversity; ensures access to services free of barriers and fear, including for newcomers, migrants and families with precarious status, and that sustains the community organizations that are central to prevention and healing.

Thank you for your time and the opportunity to speak today.

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Sami Pritchard is the Director of Advocacy and Communications at YWCA Toronto