Thank you.
Thank you for the opportunity and invitation to share what Habitat for Humanity is doing to help train youth with the skills they need to join Canada's labour market.
Many of you are familiar with Habitat for Humanity as a leading developer of affordable home ownership in Canada.
Habitat for Humanity affiliates across Canada help low-income families build safe, decent homes for them to purchase at payments they can afford.
Habitat for Humanity affiliates across Canada help hard-working low-income families build safe, decent homes for them to purchase for payments they can afford. Our traditional approach has been to enlist volunteers and donors from business and faith communities, as well as neighbours, who are touched by the need, want to help, and recognize how Habitat home ownership helps break the cycle of poverty permanently.
We will always offer this opportunity to community volunteers, and I invite community leaders like the members on this committee to come swing a hammer with us this summer and build alongside a partner family whose lives you'll help transform, but the reason I'm here today is to remark upon what has happened as Habitat affiliates diversify the approach to how we build our homes.
In recent years, several Habitat affiliates partnered with local colleges, trade schools and skills centres, and high schools to offer Habitat home builds as a living classroom for training youth in building trades and other skills that lead to apprenticeships. In 2013, over 1,500 students earned credits in carpentry, plumbing, electrical, and other construction trades taught on our home builds.
This works out to approximately 900,000 hours of training taught on Habitat home builds, most of which is counted toward apprenticeships. Not only are these students given valuable practical training, but they're also given an opportunity to meet and work with the families who will own the homes they're building.
Our success rate for retaining these students in trades programs and seeing them go on to trades is between 80% and 90%. Anecdotally, many of the students say that it's the human experience, more than anything else, that motivates them to continue pursuing a career in a trade. When asked why and what that meant, the common reply is that they come from families that are in circumstance similar to those of the families they're helping and who they met on their home build.
There are several reasons why Habitat for Humanity has moved into the direction of skills training partnerships.
Some affiliates did it out of necessity to add new volunteers so they can scale growth in homes built and families served. Others did it out of our own sense of corporate social responsibility or a duty to leave a legacy that goes beyond the homes we build and the families we serve. Still others saw it as part of a plan to attract new resources and donors interested in supporting education and youth, and not just affordable housing.
We understand that if you poll Canadians on their top 10 priorities, affordable housing sometimes comes in at around 11, but jobs and skills are always consistently at one or two. Creating skills training benefits and affordable homes out of the same dollar is something that we knew we could do. Our investment in these partnerships has begun to pay dividends.
In Canada's economic action plan 2013, Prime Minister Harper and his government acknowledged the success of Habitat for Humanity Canada in leveraging skills training from affordable housing dollars. We thank him and we thank you for that.
In Saskatchewan, Premier Wall has been a leader in Canada by doubling his investment in Habitat homes, which his housing minister, the Honourable June Draude, has said is attributable to the skills training partnerships that we've leveraged and the results we've proven out there. Minister Draude and her government are eager to explore with the federal government what other ways there are to leverage programs that achieve results for multiple priorities, and I thank her for her leadership.
Status of Women Canada's support for Women Building Futures, a skills program based in Alberta and targeted for women, also benefited Habitat Edmonton and the families they serve. Habitat affiliates in Manitoba, Prince Albert, Kingston, and the national capital region have also partnered with CORCAN to give federal offenders a second chance by learning a skilled trade and building a home that gives a low-income family their second chance.
The Canadian public is excited when we tell them what we're doing, and many are eager to support us with funds to enable us to grow these partnerships. Given the impact we have on government priorities for youth skills development and affordable housing, we look to governments at all levels to recognize these returns by investing in our ability to grow these programs.
Merci.