I'll take a try at the first part, in terms of the volunteer and the people-hours. The way it generally will work in a municipality is that, simply put, an initial group of people will go over for a pretty short period of time; then, over an extended time period that could involve years, there will be secondments of civic and municipal administration--people who will go to the actual place and spend time working with the people. That's how we come to the volunteers and the hours. We leverage it through people in the community, universities, private organizations, and individual donors who also want to get involved and travel to the countries.
The nice thing and the convenient thing about the set-up is that in municipalities, as you can probably appreciate, it's often a difficult political sell to be involved in other countries, but I think people in municipalities are more tolerant of this type of outreach if the funding is coming from the federal government and is supported by the municipalities from an in-kind perspective--i.e., when people are going and actually working, it has a better perception. I think it's a real win-win in that perception.
Someone had mentioned partisanship, and again the beautiful thing about local government is our ability to get in there in a non-partisan way. You can appreciate that partisanship means one thing in Canada, and it is what it is, I suppose, but regrettably it means quite another in other parts of the world--for example, if we talk about places like Palestine.
Maybe Brock can fill you in.