Final Thoughts

The invisibility of older women in GBV research, funding, and services is not accidental. It stems from deeply held attitudes and beliefs that devalue older women’s lives, labour, autonomy, and safety.

Systemic neglect, economic marginalization, and ageism are expressions of GBV, targeting women as they age in ways that reinforce and uphold gender inequality.

It is a time of reckoning. We need urgent and necessary confrontations with systemic challenges and dominant worldviews that are oppressive and fundamentally inequitable. GBV is not an individual issue. Most human service organizations operate under business model assumptions and values that continue to subordinate and exploit women and the care economy. Efficiency is prioritized over relationship, competition over collaboration, and crisis response over investment in prevention. The roots of gendered violence remain underground and ignored, until the crisis of failing systems expose them.

The status quo of a crisis-oriented response cannot keep pace with increasing rates of GBV. The service system is deeply strained and unsustainable. Until we confront the root causes of gender inequality, we will remain locked in an inadequate cycle, where trauma multiplies and cascades across generations, communities, and the systems meant to support them.

Innovation often grows up from the grassroots, led by those closest to trauma and violence, yet furthest from conventional forms of power. While systems are built to preserve the status quo, they can be reshaped through the cumulative force of small, intentional actions that aggregate.

Everyday acts of care, when repeated and aligned, become the foundation for systemic transformation. Recognizing GBV and ageism as global challenges calls for a strategic redesign of services, one that centres equity, relationships, and the lived realities of those most affected.

It is an act of resistance to centre this woman, not a hypothetical client, statistical average, or policy category, but the actual person in front of you. The logic of this woman breaks with systems designed for standardization, efficiency, and control. It asks not, “How do we fit her into the system?” but rather, “How must the system change to meet her where she is today?” That question disrupts, and ultimately reshapes, the foundations of how care is conceived, delivered, and sustained.

Reckonings are difficult. But they also create openings for reflection, growth, and transformation. The Wildflower Guide and Tools offer a deliberate shift away from rigid structures toward relational, trauma- and violence-informed approaches that centre older women as vital, not incidental, to GBV solutions. Recognizing older women as diverse populations strengthens universal equity principles that can extend across communities and issues. Inclusion of older women is not just an add-on; it is a catalyst for broader systemic and social change. The Wildflower Framework is inspired by Reclaiming Power and Place and responds to the Calls to Justice, affirming that transforming colonial systems is both urgent and necessary.

Systems are only as strong as our willingness to uphold them. The exception becomes the rule when everyday choices, each encounter, each policy shift, each quiet act of resistance, go toward widening the cracks in the foundation of a status quo that is unacceptable. Real change, rooted in care and collective action, can overtake a dying system. The challenge before us is to continue to break that ground open, day by day, to grow whole gardens.

Together, we plant wildflowers.