The Emily Murphy Centre’s Tiny Homes campaign has been launched because the need is real, visible, and growing in our own community.

For more than 36 years, the Centre has provided second-stage, transitional housing for women and children leaving violence. More than 2,500 families have rebuilt their lives within its walls. Women arrive after crisis. They stay long enough to stabilize, find work, secure schooling for their children, attend counselling, and prepare for permanent housing. It works. Lives change here.

But we do not have enough space.

Inour community, thousands of calls are made each year to crisis lines and shelters. Hundreds of domestic violence calls are made to police. At any given time, families are waiting for a safe place to start to rebuild their lives. Some wait years. When housing is not available, women face choices no one should have to make: return to an unsafe situation, move into poverty, or enter homelessness. Children carry that instability with them into school and into adulthood.

The Emily Murphy Centre currently operates 20 apartments. They are almost always full. Demand has outpaced capacity. We can do better.

The Tiny Homes project will add five self-contained homes on the Centre’s existing land in Stratford. Each unit will include its own kitchen, bathroom, and sleeping space. These are small homes, but they offer something powerful: privacy, dignity, and safety. Residents will also have full access to counselling, life-skills programming, employment support, and a strong peer community. This is not an emergency shelter. It is a structured bridge from crisis to independence.

Thanks to a remarkable partnership, the structures and materials for the five homes are being donated. That generosity reflects the best of our community.

But we still need to raise $600,000 to install them. Site preparation, foundations, roofing, plumbing, utility connections, fencing, landscaping, and security must all be completed before a single family can move in. Without this infrastructure, the homes cannot open their doors.

Your support makes that possible.

This campaign is not simply about adding units. It is about shortening waitlists. It is about preventing women from returning to violence. It is about giving children a stable place to sleep, study, and heal. It reduces pressure on shelters and police. It strengthens the entire community.

A donation to this campaign becomes a front door. It becomes a warm kitchen. It becomes safety.

Five tiny homes will change five families’ futures every year. With your help, we can build them.