That's quite okay.
I'm the program director at the centre. The funding we receive is through the employment assistance services program, which is under the Ministry of Housing and Social Development. We're located in New Westminster, British Columbia.
I found it challenging to talk about best practices, because there are so many issues that our clients have to go through before we can actually get to a ground-base of being able to say that we have established best practices. However, I'll start with what does not work.
The centre is funded not for settlement services, but to provide job search workshops for clients. However, we know fundamentally that in order for a client to come in and feel settled enough to start looking for work, there are other fundamentals in that client's life that need to be addressed. These are such things as languages, housing, education, and legal help.
Many of our clients are refugees coming from refugee camps. Many of these are families whose kids have never been in a formal education system, yet when they arrive in Canada, they are placed in the education system based on age, not scholastic ability. Many of them don't speak English, so basically this system is setting them up for failure. If a 13-year-old arrives in Canada and is placed in grade 8, let's say, with no language skills, naturally we can see what's going to happen.
We find that many of our clients are traumatized after coming from what are perhaps war-torn areas, and therefore, again, they're not settled enough to find work. We, not being funded for settlement services, have to work with them to find legal help and to find organizations that can help them deal with the trauma from which they have just arrived.
Again, these are things that we're not funded for.
Among a few things that work, one is the ability to have staff present who speak the languages of the clients whom we serve. We currently have nine staff members. I speak some French and Spanish. I have staff who speak Arabic and Swahili. I also have my colleague, Paul, who speaks approximately 11 other African languages. When we first started, our clients were primarily from Africa. Now we see everyone--Chinese, Russian, Korean, you name it, they all come.
The reason why they come to our services versus any others is primarily because they say they feel very much at home. This is one of the things that we feel is very important in settlement services: the ability to self-identify, to be able to access services from people who fundamentally understand your values, who look like you, in many instances, and who can speak the language of the service that you're demanding. I'll now pass it over to Paul.