Finance committee  It's Canadian—it's a Statistics Canada program.

Finance committee  The Canadian survey of giving, volunteering, and participating. It's the only national Canadian data collection for volunteering and donations.

Finance committee  First of all, it's not volunteers. The voluntary sector is $80 billion. Anybody would say that's an awful lot of volunteer time if it were. What we're asking for is to look at what is already there to make sure we can use it. So there is already a plethora of existing information about voluntary sector organizations and how to work with them and how to engage volunteers in the 21st century.

Finance committee  An organization would be in charge, one or more of them. We're good at partnering and at making sure that we're cost effective in getting the information out. One of the things we are asking for is the Canadian survey of giving, volunteering, and participating—I'll refer to it as the CSGVP.

Finance committee  Yes. We have a network of 27 volunteer centres in Alberta. They are funded through a variety of different methods, some through the provincial government through social service funding, some by communities through their town councils, and then we have two of them who are completely independent.

Finance committee  We've had two models. We had a federal volunteer program that supported capacity building. That one was an interesting one, because it focused on on-the-ground development of volunteers and, more importantly, provided opportunities to have national research and national best practice learning.

Finance committee  Chair and finance committee members, my name is Karen Lynch. I am the executive director of Volunteer Alberta, a 20-year-old provincial organization connecting the non-profit voluntary sector, and specifically volunteer-engaging organizations. I'm also a volunteer on three boards.