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By Linds Rohlf

As part of the GSWS 824 course, Gender and Social Policy: Gender Violence Resistance, I got to participate in a research team composed of my classmates. Our work focused on the importance of women’s only housing and services for precariously housed women in the City of Surrey. This project was initiated by the to help demonstrate to the city how needed services that support women and queer people are to the community. To conduct our research, we completed several service provider interviews and resident/guest focus groups across a handful of organizations in Surrey.

The process was revelatory for me. Much of what we learned was not all too surprising, as I have worked a lot with houseless communities in the US before I moved to Canada to pursue my master’s degree. A huge focus of this project and work I’ve done in the past is trying to understand the experience of queer and trans folks using supportive services and how to better serve them. As someone who is queer and trans myself, I know how much my own healthcare either falls between the societal gaps or is actively legislated against. I moved to Canada in large part to have access to better trans healthcare and generally feel safer, especially amidst the rising attacks on the trans community by the current US administration. This project gave me an opportunity to ask - are things really that different here? The answer turned out to be complicated.

As a newcomer to Canada, I had heard the stereotypes and overgeneralizations about Surrey as a more conservative and less accepting community. It is important to state that the intense vitriol against the queer community that has been growing in the US is less intense in metro Vancouver. But, in our interviews, it became clear that queer people were falling through a lot of the same gaps in care. Queer, trans, and two-spirit folks were massively over-represented in the focus groups of houseless neighbors, alongside BIPOC people. Again, while unsurprising, it is still staggering to me the stark increase in indigenous unhoused community members in both Vancouver and the Downtown Eastside as compared to other areas of metro Vancouver.

Interviews with service providers revealed how inconsistent and sometimes discriminatory the services for trans people are. They were an afterthought at best. However, I feel that it’s important to note that so many service providers are doing incredible work against the odds. After completing and publishing our research, we presented it at the 2026 Network to Eliminate Violence in Relationships (NEVR) conference. It was so important in these presentations for me to illuminate that there are a lot of people in these circuits doing amazing work, but there is still so much ground to cover.

Doing research like this is such a reflexive process in and of itself. The evidence we gathered and the conclusions we came to are undeniably important. And while research that shows the wide reaching impacts of systemic oppression is still lacking, if the presence of research about these issues was the only thing holding back policy change, changes would have already been made. I loved doing this project but it was nothing I didn’t already know. Women’s only services are essential and they save people’s lives. Sexual violence is still an epidemic everywhere. Queer and trans people’s care needs continue to be unaddressed. Black and brown people are systemically oppressed in much of the same ways they were 100 years ago. The things revolutionaries fight for now are not new. So much of the way houseless people are treated is rooted simply in their constant dehumanization. There is never enough funding where it needs to be to keep the most vulnerable of our community alive. And governments at all levels are constantly talking about how broke they are.

I feel strongly that research still has a place in larger liberatory struggles. But the question that always remains for me is where do we go from here? How do we continue to meaningfully address these systemic issues? How can we be heard and not ignored by politicians? How can we stop massive corporations from draining our resources and killing our neighbors?

But I remind myself that these are huge questions, and reiterate what I’ve been told by people with many more years of working towards liberation than I: never forget the impact of small actions. Reflecting on this project with new eyes, I see the individual conversations I had with residents. I see the eagerness and urgency with which they told their stories. I hope that our efforts to hear their stories and do our best to faithfully represent their experiences made an impact. I think it did. But there’s always more work to do…