Jenny Trujillo was drawn to Canada because it offered her the freedom to be herself — a luxury she wasn’t allowed in her native Peru. As a lesbian, if Trujillo showed affection to her partner in public, she was subject to verbal abuse. “Every time it was a fight,” she says.

When she arrived here in 2009, she faced a different battle — one for financial survival. Trujillo, a trained geologist who’d worked in the mining field in South America, found herself relegated to a series of unskilled jobs as a cleaner and factory worker. Not only was the work unfulfilling, but it didn’t pay the bills. “Every month was a struggle,” says Trujillo. The debt kept mounting and she didn’t seem to be able to find a way out.

That’s a common story for many women in the GTA, says Ruth Crammond, vice-president, community investment and development for United Way. “In a region that is increasingly unaffordable, more than 450,000 women are living on low incomes,” she says. “And women are disproportionately over-represented in lone-parent families — so often those low-income women are trying to raise children.”

The fabric of issues these women face can be daunting, from violence in the home to mental-health issues and the high cost of housing, precarious employment and barriers to employment, such as lack of child care and transportation, language barriers and bias. “Even as the economy is moving ahead and there are more jobs, certain populations are not really benefiting from that growth,” says Crammond. “Racialized women, in particular, are falling behind.”

For Trujillo, the answer to her employment woes lay in a program offered through YWCA Toronto. Its goal was to train women for jobs in the skilled trades. Although a variety of programs were available, Trujillo signed up for YWCA Toronto’s Commercial-Residential Painter Decorator Pre-Apprenticeship program in partnership with the Finishing Trades Institute.

There was no fee for the course, but it required five months of her time and that meant Trujillo’s wife and young son, who recently joined her in Canada, lost their source of income. Since Trujillo’s wife is enrolled in English classes, Trujillo is the main breadwinner.

She made the leap anyway, hoping for a path out of poverty. “It’s a career, not just an unskilled job,” she says. “I hoped that if I did this, my future could be better.” Earlier this year, Trujillo completed a Level 1 certificate to become an apprentice and immediately landed a job. “I went from earning $14 an hour to $20 an hour,” she says. After a three-month probationary period with her company, she will see that rise to $25 an hour and when she completes her training and becomes a journeyperson, she can make $35 to $40 an hour.

As a result, Trujillo and her family have been able to move out of the one rented room they shared into an apartment of their own. Even better, they can afford to enjoy some of the wonderful things this city has to offer. “Before we couldn’t go to a restaurant,” she says. “We never had enough money.”

Dolores Montavez-Ruz, manager of employment and training (Newcomer and Refugee Services and Women in Trades and Technology) for YWCA Toronto, sees the Women in Trades program as an almost perfect solution. “This is the perfect marriage between market demand and supply,” she says. “Women are very successful in the finishing trades,” she says. “Employers want them because they have an eye for detail; they tend to be more precise in the application of paint; and quite frankly, they’re often more reliable.”

In fact, Montavez-Ruz points out, all but two of last year’s class of 16 got jobs right away. “Usually it’s more like 50 per cent,” she says. YWCA Toronto does its best to support the women enrolled in the program in other ways, as well, by pointing them to child care or offering support for transportation.

And the program is just one of a suite of services supported by United Way. “We fund about 28 agencies and 94 programs specifically designed for women,” says Crammond. “We believe the strength of United Way is that we try to knit the services that women need together to make a kind of fabric that acts as a social safety net.”

United Way’s ability to drill down to the complex and interconnected underlying issues that throw up barriers to women’s ability to dig their way out of poverty is what keeps United Way 2019 Campaign Cabinet Chair and Canada CEO of Dentons, Beth Wilson committed to the organization as both a donor and volunteer.

“I can really see that impact their programs are having on the lives of women,” says Wilson. “And I think what we’ve learned over time is if you help a woman to be self-sufficient, you’re really lifting the whole family out of poverty and breaking that cycle to set the stage for the next generation to succeed.”