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Secret Frequency is the music-related scratch pad of Candace Shaw.

Candace has worked in the music industry for almost 20 years, as a booker and promoter, posterer, merch girl, gear-lugger, grant writer, videographer/photographer, late-night campfire whiskey drinker, late-night conference whiskey drinker, committee sitter-onner, singer, promo consultant, festival Artistic Director, Executive Director, whipping boy, juror for grants and awards, Emcee, enthusiastic fan, first person on the dancefloor, destroyer of dreams and breaker of hearts.

Some of those roles have even paid.

Secret Frequency (formerly Canadian Women Working in Music) is and education and advocacy not-for-profit dedicated to raising the profile of under-represented people within Canada’s music community – women, trans and non-binary folks, racialized and Indigenous people, and more.

We’d like the music community to be as awesome as it pretends to be. We want it to be a safe, good place to party, to create, and to work.

We’re ready to rock the boat, even if it’s the boat that some of us are sitting in; no organization or individual should be above question or consequences.

If you don’t invite us to the table, we’ll show up anyway, and we’ll bring our own chair.

We produce the annual Canadian Festival Report Card, grading Gender representation on Festival stages, skills workshops, research, and more. We aim to create initiatives with demonstrable, measurable impact, which are also accessible and modular, designed to be shared and implemented by other organizations.