A Winnipeg entrepreneur is going global with the online reporting tool she created to empower people to report sexual harassment, misconduct and assault on post-secondary campuses and other public spaces.
Five years ago, Mary Lobson founded a customizable platform that allows users to anonymously report incidents of sexual violence and seek support services located in their immediate community.
Lobson first rolled out REES (Respect, Educate, Empower Survivors) in partnership with Manitoba colleges and universities — each of which created campus-specific offshoots of reescommunity.com — ahead of the 2019-2020 school year.
DANIEL CRUMP / FREE PRESS FILES
REES is an online reporting used to report sexual harassment, misconduct and assault on post-secondary campuses and other public spaces.
She has since expanded her company to serve campuses south of the border, starting with Santa Clarita-based California Institute of the Arts, and incorporated offices in both the United States and Australia.
“There’s cultural nuances and language differences… but at its core, this is a global issue,” Lobson said, referring to sexualized violence and underreporting.
The University of Manitoba alum was a one-woman show in December 2019. Now, REES employs six full-time staffers and a technical adviser, Chris Derossi, who was the chief architect of MacOS at Apple between 1987 and 1993.
She’s been meeting with schools in Australia and more recently, Nigeria, to further scale up her startup and its mission to better inform and improve prevention efforts, she noted.
REES users can enter incident reports with as little or as much detail as they please.
On what Lobson calls the platform’s “back office,” website administrators are able to scan analytics and pinpoint incident hot spots.
“We are solving a need that survivors have, but also organizations, campuses, workplaces — the needs are different for both of those, but we’re able to meet the needs on both sides,” she said.
The program also flags repeat perpetrators who have been entered into a system.
Since its launch, the startup has widened its net to partner with music festivals, sports organizations and workplaces across Canada. It has clients in seven provinces.
U.S. residents in all states became eligible to use a version of REES that was custom-built for Take Back the Night Foundation in recent months.
Lobson’s team was hired by the charity, whose mandate is to end all forms of sexual violence worldwide, to equip Americans with anonymous reporting and connect them with its national sexual assault legal hotline.
Its founder has started splitting her time between her Canadian headquarters in Winnipeg and the American equivalent in Buffalo over the last year.
She entered a startup competition by Buffalo-based accelerator 43North in 2023, placed eighth in the contest for one of five $1- million prizes, and decided to make the city her second home to grow REES in the U.S.
Lobson likened the U.S. city to Winnipeg, owing to its “vibrant tech startup ecosystem.”
Citing the reality that roughly 90 per cent of startups fail in the long term, Lobson said she’s proud that her company continues to gain momentum and clients are seeing value in the service and its broader purpose.
REES has already announced a new campus partnership with Lakeland College in Vermilion, Alta. since the new calendar year began. The company is currently working on new projects with the Association of Alberta Sexual Assault Services and the City of Lethbridge.
maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca
Maggie Macintosh
Education reporter
Maggie Macintosh reports on education for the Free Press. Originally from Hamilton, Ont., she joined the newsroom as a reporter in 2019. Read more about Maggie.
Funding for the Free Press education reporter comes from the Government of Canada through the Local Journalism Initiative.
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