Sure. We started in 1990. We're a provincial Crown corporation. We have a board of directors of 13 directors and then we have an advisory committee made up of a representative from every language in British Columbia. Our mandate is to revitalize language, arts, culture and heritage, so it's a holistic approach to cultural revitalization.
In early times, we supported cultural centres and found, though, that in order to support the languages we needed to support more organizations, more types of organizations, and shifted to supporting and prioritizing language revitalization. For many years we had a very limited budget. We were supporting 32 languages and 90 dialects with about $1 million a year. We acted as a non-profit, raising money, bringing in resources from multiple sources. In some years we could have up to 11 different funders.
Over time we worked with communities to identify the types of strategies that worked to revitalize languages. We decided to focus, in 2006, on immersion types of activities and focused on creating speakers in the community through early childhood development and language nests, through mentor-apprentice. We are now, in the last few years, really focusing on supporting communities to develop language plans where they collaborate with other communities that share the same language and focus on investments that are in multiple domains. One could say we have a school, that we're teaching the children, and revitalizing the language, but in fact, one needs to invest in multiple domains from baby all the way to elder in order to revitalize the languages.
We're really trying to shift with the $50-million investment from the B.C. government. We were able to share the story of how languages could be revitalized through a business plan that talked about the different areas we would invest in. Again, all these ideas and programs come from this reciprocal relationship with the community, because communities are the experts. We'll try something and they'll say that it doesn't quite work and we need to make a shift.