Briefly, sir, over that 20-year time span, we've had the opportunity in Alberta to work with about 80 watershed or community groups. We currently work with close to 50 watershed groups.
That work is primarily on the backs of five specialists who engage and interact with those communities. They help those communities start not just to understand some of the issues they face but also how to resolve them.
Of course, in many cases those issues may be large and diverse. It's helping the community pick the issues that they can most reasonably deal with at the time. One might be water quality. One might be changes in riparian and watershed health which have resulted in lower water quality and perhaps finger-pointing from other organizations.
The way that we have been successful—and I'll give you some of the statistics from independent evaluations that have been done of our program—is that our specialists engage with rural communities, and increasingly with urban communities in later years, at a level that develops a relationship.
Those relationships that our specialists have been able to make with community members have led to trust and credibility. They've led to higher rates of learning. I might say it's a two-way process: It's not just about our delivering learning; it's about our learning from rural landowners as well. It also revolves around the frequency of contact that our staff have with rural landowners.
The end point of that—the awareness that builds when we bring people together in a sense of synergy to deal with issues, giving them or providing them an opportunity to see what tools are available and what the options and alternatives to current management practices are—has allowed people who form community groups at a watershed level to make management changes. Over the span of our existence that has meant at a community level that about 65% of the people we work with make a management change within about a three- to five-year time span of interacting with us.
It's based, though, on frequency of contact. The more frequent the contact, the more learning levels there will be and the rate at which management changes are done will increase. So it hasn't been done through the lure of financial incentives. It's been done largely through a stewardship ethic, built on a foundation of awareness of the landscape and the ecological functions and process of that landscape, and by helping people to understand their footprint and how to lessen that footprint while at the same time maintaining their economic opportunity.