What We Do
This section of our 2024-2025 Annual Impact Report offers a snapshot of what we do, from our wide range of programs and services, to outreach, consultation, and community collaborations.
People We Served Across All Areas of SACE
While the impact of community events and outreach work can’t always be captured in terms of the number of people we reached or supported, this chart illustrates the number of people we served in the 2024-2025 year, and the range of ways we supported the Edmonton community through our range of services.
*You can hover over the end of each bar or over the audiences at the bottom of this graph to get the specific numbers for each audience, including those too low to display in the bar graph.
Supporting Communities Across Alberta
SACE delivers online and in-person education and support services for people in the Edmonton and surrounding region, across Alberta, and the Northwest Territories.
Some of the communities we serve each year: Edmonton, Sherwood Park, St. Albert, Spruce Grove, Stony Plain, Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation, Barrhead, Beaumont, Camrose, Devon, Enoch Cree Nation, Edson, Evansburg, Garrison Military Base, Hinton, Leduc, Morinville, Pigeon Lake, Swan Hills, Warburg, Westlock, and Wetaskiwin.
Support
Collaboration Stories:Community Justice Supports
- PACS built a new relationship this year with the Edmonton Rural and Regional Response Office (ERRRO). A lack of familiarity with SACE PACS services created uncertainty and skepticism among some Crown prosecutors who were more accustomed to working with traditional law enforcement and victim services, resulting in delayed responses, difficulty in securing necessary information, and a general reluctance to engage. To address these challenges, the PACS Team Lead, with the support of the Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor of ERRRO, delivered a presentation at their office that has led to an increase in communication, and referrals directly from ERRRO.
- Our ongoing work on case reviews in cooperation with Edmonton Police Service is based on the Violence Against Women Advocate Case Review (VACR), commonly referred to as the “Philly Model”, developed by the Improving Institutional Accountability Project. It is an external file review process aimed at reducing police case attrition and offering oversight in sexual assault cases. SACE provides 6-8 staff to participate in each week-long, biannual review. Staff are given full access to all the sexual assault files that did not proceed to charge, and are trained to look for areas of bias (for example, reliance on rape myths) and areas for improvement (for example, needing to offer more resources). The reviews have been going well, and advocates have noticed a marked improvement in the quality of investigations and treatment of survivors.
- SACE continues to collaborate with many victim and legal support sector organizations through information and referral sharing, and client support and advocacy. We also co-developed our second edition of the Community Justice Supports Brochure in collaboration with other community agencies.
- At the end of the 2024-2025 year SACE PACS advocates were supporting 216 active cases, a high number for our growing young program, which grew from two to three full-time staff this year.
Counselling
Collaboration Stories: Counselling
SACE continues to offer Reclaiming Otipaymsowin
A psychoeducational and support group for federally incarcerated Indigenous women who are serving their sentences at Buffalo Sage Wellness House, a Section 81 wellness house. In exchange, Buffalo Sage offers consultation to SACE on an as-needed basis. To ensure that this underserved population has timely access to counselling services, SACE also triages residents from Buffalo Sage and/or Stan Daniels wellness houses into adult counselling.
Child and Youth Counsellors at SACE
Attend the monthly High Risk Youth Committee on a rotating basis. The work of this committee includes collaboration across the mental health and not-for-profit sectors to ensure that youth who are at higher risk of experiencing harm can receive the care they need at critical points in their development.
Bent Arrow led teachings to set the intention and spirit of open and fulsome collaboration among agencies involved with Kickstand Youth Integrated Services Hub, where SACE is now offering weekly outreach counselling services.
Our ongoing cross-trainings with EPS Sexual Assault Section (Serious Crimes Branch/Division) continue to focus on youth, as we know that a youth’s first point of contact with EPS can be pivotal in determining how their police and court process proceeds, as well as how they navigate those systems throughout their lives.
Stop Abuse in Families (SAiF) approached SACE to collaborate on delivery of The Mosaic Program for Healthy Sexual Behaviours, a 19-week outpatient group treatment program for youth aged 7-14 who have engaged in problematic sexual behaviours. We know that youth who have engaged in these behaviours experience barriers in accessing services, and this partnership allows for expanded access to supports. This group is ongoing, with numerous families graduating from the program.
Education & Consultation
Education Story:Trust and intentional relationship building
Our team has devoted significant time to building a trusting and intentional relationship with the Alexis Nakota Sioux First Nation, including setting up in-person meetings. Meeting face-to-face ensured that we start our relationship in a more personable way. While developing sessions for Alexis First Nation, our team reflected on our learnings about colonial perceptions of time. Time in the colonized world is much more rigid and constrained, whereas Indigenous perspectives of time are more open and flowing. With this knowledge, we ensured that the sessions we developed were less rigid and allowed for plenty of space for open-ended discussion.
This year WiseGuyz worked with maskêkosak kiskinomâtowikamik School to adjust their approach and curriculum to best match the local culture, including taking a more casual, relational approach with students and a gentle, less direct approach to conversations around sexual violence and consent. As a non-Indigenous person, the WiseGuyz educator took great care to work with school staff to understand how best to connect and facilitate. This relationship has been incredibly fruitful, with kitaskinaw asking WiseGuyz to return next year.
All staff participated in a river walk where Dr. Dwayne Donald, a Papaschase Education professor, shared the oral history of the land we are on. This was an excellent opportunity to experience embodied education about local Indigenous history, colonial history, and deepen our relationship to land.
Our relationship and work with Native Counselling Services of Alberta (NCSA) and Bent Arrow have created opportunities this year to develop Institutional Support and Public Education content to support staff and programming at these agencies, working closely with external Indigenous Elders and knowledge keepers to ensure that our educational material and facilitation is done in a way that is culturally appropriate and adequately addresses the needs of the participants.
2024-2025Education Topics
Live Presentations
- Addressing Sexual Violence in Health Professions: Bill 21 & Responding to Disclosures
- Bystander Intervention
- Creating Safer Spaces & Responding to Sexual Violence
- First Responder to Sexual Assault & Abuse Training
- Gender, Sexuality, and Media
- Healthy Relationships
- Health Care Systems and Sexual Violence
- Intimate Partner Violence
- Masculinities, Sexual Assault, & Consent
- Non-Consensual Photo Sharing
- Privilege and Oppression
- Racism and Sexual Violence
- Rejection Resilience
- SACE Services
- Sexual Assault & Consent
- Sexual Harassment
- Sexual Violence
- Sexual Violence in the Workplace
- Sexual Violence Trauma
- SPEAK Safe Preschoolers (Parent Information)
- Supportive Responses to Sexual Violence
- Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence
- WiseGuyz Program Curriculum
- WiseGuyz Program Pitch
Online Course Topics
- Information for Partners & Supporters
- Recognizing and Responding to Sexual Violence
- Consent: Ask Me About It! (High School)
- Racism and Sexual Violence
- Sexual Violence and the 2SLGBTQ+ Community
Outreach & Awareness
SACE is a member of:
- Alberta Association of Sexual Assault Services One Line, Clinical, Leadership, EDI, PACS, and FRT Committees
- ACT Alberta (Action Coalition on Human Trafficking Alberta) Quarterly Human Trafficking Collaboration Committee
- Alberta Ability Network
- Alberta Human Trafficking Network
- Centering Relationships to End Violence Committee
- Edmonton Counselling Community of Practice
- First Responders Training Advisory Committee
- High Risk Youth Committee
- Immigrant Family Violence Prevention Committee (IFVPC)
- Intra-Fraternity Council
- Next Gen Men
- Public Education and Awareness Training (PEAR) Committee
- Rainbow Alliance for Youth of Edmonton (RAYE)
- Sexual Exploitation Working Group (SEWG)
- WiseGuyz Community of Practice
- Youth Agency Collaboration Table
Community Story:Meeting the needs of distinct populations
- Engaged in monthly consultations with the Atlas Institute for Veterans and Families to develop four distinct resources for diverse audiences on military sexual trauma.
- Supporting work with newcomers, we continue our long relationship with CSS through staff training, consultation, and the CSS Spring Social for Newcomers. We also shared our successes and challenges working with the South Asian community at a roundtable hosted by the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA).
- WiseGuyz facilitators met with their teacher contacts and school administration at Edmonton Public Schools to problem solve creative solutions for situations that arise during session, and worked with school social workers to connect students to the WiseGuyz program that they think might benefit from it. The reputation of the WiseGuyz program and the connection between facilitators and their schools helped the program reach four new schools in the 2024-2025 school year.
- Staff of the EmployAbilities Society of Alberta wanted to develop education for their Strive 4 Work skills training and work experience program for people with different types of disabilities and medical conditions. Educators consulted with the Edmonton Association of the Deaf (EAD) on best practices, and worked to tailor content to the needs of deaf participants, creating a resource package and accessibility tool that gives deaf and hard-of-hearing participants more opportunities to follow along in presentations and retain the information that is being shared.
- SACE staff this year again heard about the high rates of sexual violence that can occur in supportive housing for older adults. Staff attended training with SAGE that addressed ageism, special considerations and how to support older adults who have experienced abuse, tips on how to keep ourselves centered when working with older adults, statistics, resources, and more. We also updated our session for supporters working with older adults.
- SACE continued to connect with 2SLGBTQ+ communities through a range of organizations and opportunities, including refresher work with Evolution Wonderlounge that builds on trainings and policies first implemented in 2021. All staff participated in a training on gender affirming care in Alberta, and the Clinical team also did Skipping Stone’s clinical-focused training on building trans affirming spaces.
Supporting Volunteers
To become a support line volunteer, prospective volunteers must apply, interview, and then successfully complete our volunteer training program. Spanning more than seventy hours, this program remains one of the most rigorous in Alberta, covering essential modules on trauma, sexual violence, anti-oppression, colonialism, boundaries, technology-facilitated sexual violence, self-care, resourcing, and risk assessment (including child sexual abuse, suicide, and domestic abuse). Support for these incredible volunteers is an important part of what we do as an agency. Some highlights from this year:
- We created new risk assessment conversation scripts for training, and with the help of volunteer “actors”, recorded them to use as audio clips in training. These clips accompany risk assessment roleplays, and are intended to help volunteers contextualize the concepts discussed around what a call might look like when it involves risk (suicide, domestic/intimate partner violence, and/or child sexual abuse).
- We developed and facilitated a two-hour session on domestic violence. This training focused on reviewing how we handle domestic violence risk assessments on the support lines by looking at the Healthy Relationship Spectrum and discussing what respect looks like in healthy relationships.
- We organized refresher trainings, including an interactive Jeopardy game in which volunteers were put into teams, competing to answer sexual violence/SACE- specific questions.
- Other development opportunities included gender-affirming care, and a presentation from the Government of Alberta’s Clare’s Law Coordinator, Integrated Threat and Risk Assessment Centre, to answer any questions volunteers had about Clare’s Law.
2024-2025
Counselling Group Clients
People were supported through a range of processing-based counselling groups and psychoeducation groups through the 2024-2025 year. SACE groups are delivered based on demand as well as agency capacity.
While it was cancelled indefinitely due to the funding cuts we experienced at the end of the year, a new group was developed this year that we are incredibly proud of: SOLACE, a group for racialized folks who have experienced sexual violence. We are hopeful that we will be able to launch this group in the near future.
2024-2025Collaborators & Partners
