The Canadian Women’s Foundation is a charitable organization focused on achieving systemic change for women, girls, and gender-diverse people to move out of violence or poverty. When lockdown led to an increase in domestic violence, we launched a covert signal to help that mission – the Signal for Help. While the Signal gained massive organic spread, in 2023 we noticed the Signal also began appearing in mainstream English-speaking media all on its own – appearing in shows like “Law and Order” and “Family Guy.” Each appearance put the Signal into new living rooms worldwide – ones we may never have reached on our own – and taught new viewers about the Signal for Help’s importance. Our objective was to capitalize on the Signal’s momentum in culture at large and to try to incentivize even more appearances in mainstream media, so we could turn new people into responders.

We knew that the Signal for Help appearing in mainstream media meant writers were in the know. But to keep the Signal showing up in TV shows and movies, we needed to bring writers onto our side and show them just how important choosing to include the Signal in their work could be. So we got personal, and created a specially-designed package just for them: the Signal for Help Writer’s Toolkit. Each kit featured a reimagined version of the Canadian Women’s Foundation Responder’s Toolkit (an information package used to teach people how to safely respond to someone at risk of violence) designed specifically for the medium writers work in – with storyboard examples of how the Signal might accurately be depicted in their next script, and ways to appropriately have characters respond should they see the Signal.

Though we were already seeing mainstream media appearances in English-speaking markets, we knew we needed to take the Signal beyond just North American content; access to Bollywood, Chinese cinema, and other film industries around the world would put the Signal in front of an entirely new group of potential responders. So, we found addresses for writer’s guilds, agents, and showrunners in seven of the world’s largest media markets and mailed them Writer’s Toolkits with personalized letters written in their respective languages: English, Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, French, Arabic, and Japanese. This ensured the kits wound up in the hands of those with the power to influence the next generation of stories we watch around the world. Each Toolkit had a simple but poignant call to action: include the SFH in your next work and help us save lives.

The first batch of Signal for Help Writer’s Toolkits were mailed out after the 2023 Writers Guild of America strikes ended, knowing that TV and film writers were heading back to work to start on their next batch of scripts. Each kit linked back to the Canadian Women’s Foundation website, where more in-depth resources and FAQs were available.

The Signal for Help Writer’s Toolkit is a long play, with the goal of seeding more stories into mainstream media that feature better outcomes for women in need. We knew that the writing process would take time; there are a lot of steps between a story being written and it having it appear on the big screen. But each appearance of the Signal for Help in mainstream media is worth its weight in gold, and our hope is that by sending these kits out to storytellers today, the Canadian Women’s Foundation will have more good stories to tell about women being saved by next year’s Cannes Festival.