One of the things that a number of us at the table here have emphasized is the need for supports in the development of cooperatives. A key person in that development is somebody who has the background, skills, and knowledge of how to do that. One thing we've done, through the support of CDI, is develop an online training program. We trained 17 developers across Canada in the past year, and we expect somewhere between 20 and 30 people in our training program again this year. So that's one aspect of training, in this case training co-op developers to work with groups.
The challenge for small groups and training is that large organizations focus on the training that's going to move their cooperative forward. Just as we don't go to a typical small business and say, “We should all get together, and you should provide funds to train other small businesses you're going to compete with”, I don't believe we should expect large cooperatives to be funding the development of new businesses that don't directly benefit them, any more than we expect other large corporations to provide that kind of funding for businesses they're not related to.
So although we share very common value and principles, I think sometimes there's a misunderstanding of the cooperative sector in seeing it as monolithic. Each one of our cooperatives is an autonomous, independent business that is responsible to its members. So our training is often focused on our membership, on that management side. We do collaborate with Master's programs and those kind of things to enhance management training, but there is still a huge gap in resources for the kind of training really required at the start-up level.