Yes, I would love to speak to that. It's my passion. My passion personally is getting young people in the outdoors. It's a magical thing to do. You get them out there and it changes them. I remember the first youth hunt that we did, a young lad had got his first duck in the morning and it was a big experience for him, a little emotional as well. We came back to our camp—and we had 16 kids in that first hunt—and we cleaned the duck. We showed him how to do it and he did it. His little sister was there too, although she was not old enough to hunt yet. We then cooked the ducks. He cooked the duck and then he served it to his mother. We called it “Duck, it's what's for dinner”. The parents came back and the kids served the duck to their parents, and he was emotional.
I get emotional even when I think about it. It was an amazing moment. He was emotional. His hands were shaking; he was walking out of the kitchen carrying the plate and his hands were shaking. And his mom's emotional. I thought, what's going on here? I didn't see that coming. She said he's never cooked anything in his life, never mind not knowing where his food comes from. He has no idea where his food comes from, no sense of that, no connection. After that, he's connected. It's a growth experience as a human being that too many of us as humans don't get anymore.
That hunt now has grown into 16 hunts across Manitoba. We take kids out hunting waterfowl, deer, and turkeys. We mentor them in. We have a tremendous amount of safety training.
There's huge demand for it, Lawrence, and our volunteers are ideally suited to taking them out and showing them how to do that. As I said, we have inner-city programming now where we're trying to get kids eating goose fajitas and we're going to try to pull them out of the perimeter now.
Our challenge is funding. We applaud the national conservation plan, it's outstanding, and working with farmers is essential to securing habitat and then, as Dr. Boyce talked about, the energy sector as well. We could use some funding to recruit young Canadians into the outdoors. Because if we can recruit them into it, they're going to be there to do the conservation work and to drive the conservation plan work.
We could use some help from all of you in the room today. I'm talking about tiny amounts of money, just a little money to facilitate our being able to get these kids out of the perimeter. We're going to be limited. We can work with the farmers and we can work with the energy sector. We've shown there are opportunities there, but we need to engage these young people and their parents in this stuff, the mothers especially, and we could use a little help in doing that.