Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic offers legal services and representation, trauma-informed counselling, and multilingual interpretation to diverse women and gender-diverse people who have experienced violence. Rooted in the foundations of intersectionality, innovation, and a client-centred approach, we foster the skills and resilience of the people we serve and amplify their voices to create individual and collective change.

We cultivate women and gender-diverse people’s skills and resilience by fostering their safety, dignity, and equality, and we amplify women and gender-diverse people’s voices to create individual and collective change.  At the Clinic, the umbrella term “woman” recognizes that gender is a self-identification that does not necessarily correspond with assigned sex at birth. We recognize the complexity and diversity of gender and aim to be inclusive to people outside and across the gender spectrum.

Since its founding in 1985, the Clinic has assisted more than 100,000 women and gender-diverse survivors of violence through our direct services, advocacy efforts, legal reform, submissions, projects, and programs.

Services

• Legal help in family, immigration, criminal and sexual assault law
• Therapeutic counselling, information, and support through group-based and individual counselling programs from compassionate and skilled counsellors, employing diverse and culturally appropriate methodologies
• Multi-lingual interpretation and translation, including over-the-phone interpretation (access to an interpreter in less than 60 seconds) and video remote interpreting through a Deaf interpreter.

Barbra was an idealistic young lawyer who was murdered in Toronto on the day of her call to the Bar of Ontario, April 11, 1980. She was returning home from celebrating this milestone when she was brutally sexually assaulted and killed in the basement stairwell of her apartment building.

Barbra’s death changed the lives of those who were close to her and they resolved to use her tragedy as a springboard for changing the world. Frances Rappaport and Patricia Ashby, who had once planned to be her law partners, decided to establish a clinic in Barbra’s honour to make the difference that Barbra had hoped to make as a lawyer.