Good afternoon. Thank you very much for the invitation to appear today before committee.
My name is Shannon Benner. I'm the CEO of 4-H Canada. I know some of you have relationships in your home riding with 4-H clubs and communities and work with them at a local level. For those of you not so familiar, I'll tell you very briefly who we are and what we do.
We're a national youth organization. We work with young people in four areas. We have 25,000 youth members in 2,000 clubs across Canada, and we have 7,500 volunteer leaders who work with youth. We work with youth in four key areas, our pillars: sustainable agriculture and food security, science and technology, communications and community engagement, and the environment and healthy living. These are all things that are very relevant to today's conversation, so thank you for having us.
4-H started 100 years ago as an organization that wanted to help kids succeed both on and off the farm. That meant it started with the principle of giving them not only skills, farming skills—literally giving them a bag of potato seeds 104 years ago—but also teaching them to be leaders in their communities and developing the character traits. Fast forward to today and that's still who we are at the fundamental level.
Globally, 4-H works with seven million young people around the world in the core pillar areas of sustainable agriculture and food security, and science and technology, so this is very relevant to us both at a global level and also at the community level.
The success of our program is evident not only by the number of highly engaged youth that we see across Canada and the topics they want to be part of and have conversations on, but also with the millions of alumni we have in this country. Whether they're Olympians or whether they're parliamentarians, we see that these are very important topics and that 4-H members really want to be engaged and part of this discussion.
What makes 4-H unique is that we have a public-private partnership. No matter where you are, whether you're in B.C., where the Minister of Agriculture partnered with 4-H B.C., or the United States—the USDA partnered with 4-H in the United States—it's always this public-private partnership that delivers agriculture and food security programming to young people.
We believe this helps us be very nimble and adapt to some of the emerging issues that youth can respond to and where we can work with young people. For example, in 2014, we surveyed our youth members across Canada. More than 80% of them indicated they were aware of careers in agriculture, and more than 50% indicated they wanted to pursue careers in agriculture.
When you look at some of the skills and labour gap statistics in the agriculture sector, we believe 4-H can help respond to some of the challenges and see them as opportunities.
One of the key things we believe, though, is that we don't consider them leaders tomorrow; they're leaders today, so we commend this government on its response in addressing youth and including youth at this table and in this conversation.
What we also see is that youth are very interested in pursuing many of these other crosscutting themes. I'll speak to generation Z—that's really who we work with. Generation Z right now means young people under the age of 18. They're a unique generation. They're the most connected generation in history. They're very socially conscious. They have a global mindset. They think of themselves as a we, not an I. They definitely embody the ability to think globally and act locally. We see that everywhere.
I'll use the example of Carp Fair just this past weekend. The Agricultural Society dedicated a plot of land. Kids grew crops that were donated to the food bank. They built entrepreneurial skills, they sold some of those crops in market, they learned to run a business, they banked the funds, and they donated them to a charity. We see an immense amount of opportunity to engage youth in these conversations. These are young people between the ages of nine and 15 who want to be part of this conversation.
I have a couple of recommendations I would like to put forward and leave with the committee on behalf of 4-H, which we think would lead to success in adopting a national youth policy.
The first is that we would suggest meaningfully engaging youth and ensuring that there's buy-in in a national youth policy. If we want this policy to have longevity—they're the generation that this impacts, not only with young people being able to access food today but in delivering this policy and ensuring its success for many generations to come—then young people should be engaged in the process to ensure that there's coast-to-coast buy-in for youth adopting the policy.
The second is that we would suggest there be an alignment with sustainable development goals. Whether it's taking 4-H members to speak at the FAO General Assembly, or whether it's convening them at a global level and hearing them talk about soil, food security, water, and air, as well as growing more high-quality food, young people want to be engaged in the high-level conversation. We see that sustainable development goals are of great interest and relevance to generation Z.
The last one is that we would suggest that a national food policy be—like 4-H—made crosscutting, in many departments, a very collaborative piece; and also that, like 4-H, it have public-private partnerships and be a shared accountability across multiple departments and portfolios.
Thank you very much for your time today.