Status of Women committee  Government programs are such that there are usually people who are happy with them and people who are not. But I would say that the large number of applications we get every time we issue a call speaks to the interest that groups have in our program.

Status of Women committee  It's totally our intention. We're only one year into our first attempt at doing this, and the blueprint projects were two-year projects for the most part, although I believe some were for three years. As the experience comes to its two-year point, we will be able to analyze our a

Status of Women committee  Yes, at this point we've had a couple of calls with groups. For instance, if four groups are working on a similar project, we've had conference calls with them so they can share and know what each one is doing, avoid reinventing the wheel, learn from one another's mistakes, and s

Status of Women committee  Our projects tend to be with the higher brackets of girls and young women. We fund a number of projects where we are facilitating the integration of immigrant women into school boards, so there is a natural progression. Some of our groups like to see a sequence in which they make

Status of Women committee  With most of these projects that conduct schools to train women in political literacy or engagement literacy, for instance, if they have a special emphasis on one population of women, it will be on aboriginal women...unless there's something I don't recall. There's not one that

Status of Women committee  It's difficult to choose.

Status of Women committee  What we were proposing for each of the projects we were going to fund—for instance, under the theme of the blueprint projects—was a specific recipe. But we left it to the groups to propose activities that take into consideration their local circumstances. The big framework was se

Status of Women committee  The groups are very clear themselves about what they consider to be the advocacy they do. In the two years I've been with the program, I haven't had an issue with definitions of advocacy.

Status of Women committee  What we fund are projects that are directly going to benefit women or are directly going to be removing barriers to women's participation. The activities connected to that are what we fund.

Status of Women committee  That's right. We're project-based; we're not group-based. It's not a situation of core funding. Core funding has mostly disappeared from all levels of government across Canada in the last 15 or so years. We're all functioning on a project basis, and that is one of the consequence

Status of Women committee  Rather than create new services, we try to fund things that will improve existing services, so that we're not creating exactly that situation you're describing. For instance, if there are services for immigrant women in a certain part of the country and they're not satisfactory,

Status of Women committee  That's how many we funded in the last approximately two years.

Status of Women committee  Those are girl-specific. That doesn't mean there are not a number of other projects we are funding that have a girl component, but those would be for women and girls.

Status of Women committee  I don't have an exact number right now, but we could provide that—the number of those 35 that are economic. But I would say they rarely have an economic focus.

Status of Women committee  We could certainly include those 35.