In the lead-up to International Women’s Day, YSL Beauty announced a three-year partnership with Women’s Shelters Canada, a network of 600 shelters across the country supporting women and children fleeing violence.
The partnership marks the Canadian launch of the Abuse Is Not Love program, which YSL created in 2020 to prevent and fight against intimate partner violence (IPV). To date, the program has trained 911,000 individuals and the brand has provided €3.9M in funding to help organizations provide their own training, prevention programming, hotlines, chat support and support services.
Joining the effort, Women’s Shelters Canada will collaborate with the brand to spread awareness and prevention resources, with an initial focus on youth.
This year they will host educational conferences with university partners in three Canadian cities– Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver. Women’s Shelters Canada will also host internal training sessions for YSL Beauty and L’Oréal Canada employees to improve their understanding of the signs of abusive behavior, and available resources.
"This partnership means that more women experiencing violence in their homes—and their family and friends—will know that there’s a website where they can easily find their closest shelter and its 24/7 crisis line for support and safety planning,” Women’s Shelter Canada acting executive director, Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, told Campaign. “We’re encouraged that YSL Beauty and other corporations are increasingly recognizing that ending domestic violence requires an all-of-society approach.”
YSL Beauty will also launch awareness campaigns with paid media including OOH and social media. “It's important for us to have a worldwide cohesion about how we talk about abuse and our program,” said YSL Beauty global head of brand corporate engagement, Juleah Love. “The easier the information, and more widespread it is, the greater the impact we will have in the wider society.”
“We want to create campaigns that are easy to understand, use accessible language, and destigmatize talking about abuse,” said Love “The campaigns always talk about the nine warning signs of abuse, and how to spot them. Because, abuse can come with warning signs and if we are all aware of them we can better seek help and offer support.”
