Update about our name: The Single Mothers' Alliance has changed its name to the Centre for Family Equity. This change comes after careful consideration of feedback from members and others. We will be changing over to a new website in the next few weeks located at centreforequity.ca. Stay tuned for more updates.
The Single Mother’s Alliance is a membership-based non-profit of female and gender-diverse lone-caregivers raising children in communities throughout BC. Our mission is to alleviate family poverty in BC and particularly that experienced by female and gender-diverse lone-caregivers and the children they care for. Our members and participants reside in 41 diverse locations in the province, including cities, towns, and rural and remote locations.
We carry out our mandate through participatory action research into policy solutions and raising public awareness about the importance of a public policy approach. We make recommendations to government and other stakeholders regarding services, programs and measures that alleviate family poverty in BC.
As of 2020, there were 116,500 children living in poverty in BC, approximately 1 in every 8 children. Over half of these children, 65,230 of them, are raised in predominantly female lone-parent households. The child poverty rate for children in lone-parent families is 38.3%, nearly six times higher than the rate in other families.
Since SMA was founded in 2014, our work has been defined by our grassroots organizing model. We strive to employ an anti-oppression and decolonizing approach to all we do. We believe strongly that our members and participants are skilled leaders. As an organization, we are passionate about providing lone-caregivers with access to tools for impacting change, capacity building and building collective power.
Statistics on child poverty quoted here care of First Call's 2022 BC Child Poverty Report Card.
Thank you to our generous funders without whom we would not be able to do our work.
The Single Mothers' Alliance acknowledges the financial support of Women and Gender Equality Canada.
