Angela Day

Looking back to January - when it was dark before we left the office - I realized we had accomplished a lot with FemmeToxic in a short period of time.

In January we established a partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation, conducted outreach to like-minded organizations across the country, established an advisory group, got our Toxic Twenty up on the web, filmed footage for our short film, and made major headway on our workshop development.

By the time February rolled in, we were ready for some love! And so we organized an event called “Love Yourself” just before Valentine’s Day for young women to gather, learn about FemmeToxic, drink tea and treat themselves to all-natural, homemade facials. The event was a huge success, with over 20 participants, a warm environment, and a lot of positive feedback. After this event, we continued doing outreach and developed a database of schools and community groups in the area, and recruited new interns. We finalized our workshop presentation for schools, and designed a postcard and flier for publicity.

During March, we could really feel momentum with the project. We hosted a table at Vanier during International Women’s Week and another successful “Love Yourself” event at McGill and facilitated our first in-school workshop at Trafalgar School for Girls. During this time, we booked many more workshops for schools and community groups for the rest of the school year, and kept the website active with consistent blogging and with the addition of our new FemmeToxic video.

Our facebook fans more than doubled this month (in one week actually!) and we also started to see a stark increase in hits to our website, from diverse sources.

Now it’s the end of March, the days are longer, and we are looking forward to the coming months where we will be facilitating over a dozen workshops, hosting a potluck for our shiny new interns and launching a city-wide poster campaign. Watch out, beauty industry!