Three-Year Strategic Plan
Towards a transformative future
2026 – 2029
Foreword
Towards a
transformative future
We are stepping forward with clarity of purpose — strengthening integrated service delivery, bold system change, and sustainable resource development.
We are at a critical juncture. Governments around the world and here at home are responding to human need with increased carceral penalties. People navigating poverty, intergenerational trauma, and displacement are increasingly criminalized, over-policed, and under-protected.
With this Strategic Plan, Elizabeth Fry Toronto (EFry Toronto) is meeting the moment. We are stepping forward with clarity of purpose, strengthening our role in integrated service delivery, bold system change, and sustainable resource development with, by, and for those with lived and living experience of confinement.
The focus for the next three years is clear. We will strengthen our internal cohesion, step into our public voice and leadership, and build the financial resilience required to sustain our mission and advocacy.
Our purpose is grounded in a long history of supporting imprisoned women and advocating for change within and beyond the system. This plan renews and sharpens that purpose for the times we are in. Indigenous and Black women, as well as gender diverse people, remain disproportionately represented in prisons, and these rates continue to rise. The need for an organization grounded in the intersections of structural harm and the carceral system has never been greater. In this context, we are moving beyond reform alone to more directly advance alternatives to incarceration and to support transformative approaches to justice.
EFry Toronto has a unique and vital role to play. We invite you to join us as we build on our history, deepen our impact, and move forward with the leadership of those with lived and living experience. Together, we will build for today and a better future.
Kelly Potvin
Executive Director
Lauriana Mandody
Chair, Board of Directors
Strategic directions
Three key areas
These Strategic Directions translate our critical shifts into action — strengthening our foundation, stepping into leadership, and building the resilience to sustain our mission and voice.
Elizabeth Fry Toronto (EFry Toronto) is stepping into a more fully articulated and bold identity while choosing to prioritize consolidation as the foundation for future growth. The Strategic Directions that follow reflect how we will focus our work and advance our role as Toronto’s anti-carceral, feminist, multi-service, and advocacy organization.
We will focus our work in three key areas:
Strategic direction 01
Consolidate and Integrate
Building one cohesive, intersectional, trauma-informed, client-driven multi-service organization.
Following a period of rapid growth and capital expansion, EFry Toronto is prioritizing consolidation, strengthening its systems, practices, and culture to operate as one cohesive organization. This includes aligning services, decision-making, and ways of working to ensure a consistent, trauma- and violence-informed, client-centred experience across all programs.
Priorities
- 1.1Integrate services across the organization to operate as one coordinated, client-centred agency, including aligned intake, referral, and service pathways.
- 1.2Deepen rights and interest holder engagement across programs and governance, strengthening the role of lived and living experience in shaping the organization’s work.
- 1.3Invest in leadership, staff, and organizational culture to ensure consistent management practices, staff well-being, and values-aligned service delivery.
- 1.4Strengthen backbone systems and data infrastructure to support consistency, coordination, and informed decision-making across programs.
- 1.5Clarify and align decision-making and governance practices to support accountability, transparency, and effective oversight.
- 1.6Leverage strategic partnerships to address client-identified service gaps and extend the organization’s ability to respond to complex needs.
Strategic direction 02
Define and Lead
Advancing Elizabeth Fry Toronto’s public voice and advocacy agenda.
EFry Toronto will clarify and intentionally assert its role within the justice ecosystem, strengthening its voice and influence at the intersection of gender-based violence, criminalization, and structural inequality. This includes moving from reactive participation to focused agenda-setting, public leadership, and systems influence grounded in rights and interest holders’ experiences and a non-carceral, intersectional feminist analysis.
Priorities
- 2.1Clarify and activate EFry Toronto’s advocacy framework grounded in rights and interest holders’ leadership, intersectional analysis, and abolitionism.
- 2.2Prioritize one or two public policy issues where EFry Toronto will lead over the next three to five years, with particular attention to the links between housing, decriminalization, transformative justice, and the lived realities of rights and interest holders.
- 2.3Advance community-based and restorative alternatives to carceral responses by identifying and promoting the policy and systems changes required to support them.
- 2.4Strengthen strategic communications, storytelling, and evidence use to shape public discourse, influence policy, and elevate a non-carceral analysis of gender-based violence and criminalization.
- 2.5Build and align cross-sector alliances that strengthen EFry Toronto’s advocacy priorities, public influence, and systems impact.
Strategic direction 03
Sustain and Protect
Building financial resilience to advance Elizabeth Fry Toronto’s mission and independence.
EFry Toronto will strengthen its financial resilience to support long-term sustainability, strategic autonomy, and the ability to advance its mission without constraint. This includes building the capacity to invest in client-driven priorities, advocacy, and innovation in a rapidly changing and often restrictive funding environment.
Priorities
- 3.1Strengthen strategic communications and visibility to support fundraising, public engagement, and relationship-building with donors, funders, and partners.
- 3.2Embed a culture of fund development and accountability across the organization, including leadership, governance, and staff roles.
- 3.3Align funding strategies with organizational values and advocacy priorities to ensure financial growth does not compromise EFry Toronto’s mission or voice.
- 3.4Strengthen and diversify revenue sources to reduce reliance on government funding and increase financial stability.
- 3.5Build a coordinated and sustained fund development approach aligned with EFry Toronto’s mission, priorities, and client needs.
Process
Our journey
Shaped by those closest to the work and those most impacted by it.
This Strategic Plan is grounded in the voices, experiences, and insights of the rights and interest holders who generously gave their time and energy to help us chart a future course for Elizabeth Fry Toronto’s evolution. We especially acknowledge the clients who participated in this process for their insightful contributions – their ideas and opinions were formative in the development of the strategic directions advanced in this plan.
The Strategic Planning Committee led this work with commitment and care, under a mandate from the Board of Directors and with support from There Management Consulting Inc. Their leadership ensured that this process remained focused, thoughtful, and accountable.
Across EFry Toronto, staff and management engaged deeply in this process, centring the values of the organization with both enthusiasm and creativity. The visionary leadership of our Executive Director and Board Chair ensured this project began with clarity and was completed with purpose. The EFry Toronto team has repeatedly demonstrated their tenacity in the face of challenging times. EFry Toronto’s future success is rooted in your strength and clarity.
We also acknowledge and thank our allies, donors, funders, volunteers, and partners. Your continued support strengthens our collective ability to respond to complex challenges and to advance more just and equitable outcomes.
This plan reflects a shared effort. It is shaped by those closest to the work and those most impacted by it, and it sets a clear path forward for the next three years.
What grounds our work
Our commitments
The commitments that follow are not aspirational statements.
Our commitments
What we stand for, and how we act in practice
Elizabeth Fry Toronto’s work is grounded in a long history of supporting women and gender diverse people impacted by criminalization. As the context of this work continues to evolve, so too must the clarity of what we stand for and how we act in practice.
The commitments that follow are not aspirational statements. They have grown out of the engagement and reflection of the people who use our services, our partners and allies, staff and leadership. They are the foundation that shapes our decisions, guides our practice, and holds us accountable to the people and communities we serve. They ground the Strategic Directions and reflect the role EFry Toronto chooses to play in advancing justice, equity, and transformative alternatives to incarceration.
Vision
Safe and just communities with strong, restorative alternatives to prison.
Mission
Elizabeth Fry Toronto works alongside women and gender diverse people to change the structural inequalities that lead to criminalization, providing housing, counselling, employment, court, and community-based supports.
Six values that
guide the work
Elizabeth Fry Toronto’s work is grounded in a commitment to anti-carceral feminism and to advancing community-based responses to harm. These values guide how we design services, make decisions, build relationships, and use our voice. They shape not only what we do, but how we do it, holding us accountable to women and gender diverse people who experience criminalization and to the broader movements for justice and equity.
01Abolitionism
We understand that most crimes arise from conditions of poverty, racism, colonialism and structural inequality. Addressing these root causes of crime is critical to its prevention. Alongside our partners, we work to replace carceral logic, which isolates and dispossesses, with a commitment to transformative justice that heals both the individual and the community. We work towards a world where well-resourced and broad-based community supports are the leading responses to harm, making prisons unnecessary. We advance meaningful, well-resourced and just alternatives to confinement that keep communities safe.
02Trauma and Violence-Informed
We recognize the central role that intergenerational trauma, violence, and discrimination play in the choices women and gender diverse people make to survive, and we commit to embedding trauma- and violence-informed principles across our services, leadership, and internal culture.
03Evidence-Based
Research, evidence and lived experience guide our work, helping us challenge stigma, scapegoating and harmful narratives. We monitor, evaluate, and continuously learn from our work to ensure its ongoing relevance, reflect diverse perspectives and drive positive impacts.
04Collaborative, Restorative, and Reflective
We recognize that meaningful change cannot be achieved in isolation. We work in partnership to build restorative, community-based responses to harm. We advance accountable, healing and preventative responses to harm beyond punishment. We collaborate, listen, and learn, adapting our approaches when they fall short of our values.
05Lived and Living Experience
Women and gender diverse people who have experiences of over-policing, under-protection and incarceration know best what they need to build the lives they want. We commit to engaging their expertise throughout our organization in ways that can govern, guide, and push us to be the best resource we can.
06Intersectional Equality
Criminalization is shaped by structural racism, gender oppression, gender-based violence, and intergenerational trauma. We know that the prevention of crime requires interventions based on equity and substantive equality. We work according to our belief that all people have the right to live in safer communities free from violence in all its forms.