Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning, members of the committee. Congratulations to you all for celebrating your first electoral anniversary today.
My name is Melissa Sariffodeen. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Ladies Learning Code, which is a Canadian not-for-profit organization empowering women in the use of technical skills.
We run anything from a one-day workshop teaching a woman to make a website to a summer camp for kids. Most recently, we drove across the country in the computer lab teaching kids through pop-up workshops.
Research suggests there'll be a shortage of more than 200,000 ICT workers in Canada by 2020, and right now there's a huge under-representation of women and other groups in this field. As a nation, how will we thrive and prosper, both socially and economically, when only a small portion of Canadians have the skills we need in our increasingly digital world?
I'm here today to make the case for investing in digital skills and coding education. This is absolutely critical to future prosperity in our country. That success is undoubtedly compromised by the fact that only a small portion of Canadians actually have the skills necessary to fully participate, let alone innovate, in this increasingly digital economy.
Over five years ago, a group of women, myself included, hosted a workshop in Toronto on coding. It sold out in seven minutes. A month later we hosted another. It sold out in 30 seconds. After that, we hosted another, and another. This demand has propelled us from a single workshop for adult women to a national not-for-profit organization. We now run programs in more than 29 communities across the country, in places like Charlottetown, Cape Breton, Vancouver, and Quebec City. We've taught over 50,000 women and youth to code. We've had over 3,500 new volunteers who have taken our programs.
All this is because of a key few factors. One is that we have this really strong community-driven model, and in every city we're in we have individuals who understand their community. The programming we run in Cape Breton is different from what we use in Lethbridge, Vancouver, or Toronto.
Also, for every four learners in any of our programs, we have one technical volunteer. That person comes from industry—they might be a developer at Microsoft or Google—and they support women and youth in learning. What that means is that these individuals go back into their workplace with an understanding of how women learn, how beginners learn, and they take that with them as a professional development opportunity.
More and more, we also employ a pay-what-you-can model to ensure accessibility. Year over year, we've almost doubled our operating budget, and definitely our reach. We've had no government funding to date, aside from a small translation grant. It's all private sector funding from Google, Microsoft, Telus, Scotiabank. This underscores their desire to invest in an organization that is scrappy and lean like ours and is focused on impact and has built a mechanism that can scale up.
While these numbers might be impressive, what I'm most proud about is the impact we're having on Canadian women and youth. I think of Nancy, who came to us in 2012 with a music degree and no job. She learned to code with us and now runs our programs in Montreal. She is a developer on her way to a very lucrative and rewarding career. I think of Lauren, who's 11, from Calgary, who took our girls' program and was then inspired to create a company called Robots are fun!, which creates educator kits for teachers. She's not even in high school, but she is running a business effectively.
We believe that coding education is the next necessary step we need to take as a country to usher in a new era of Canadian innovation. I know Canada is uniquely positioned to rise to that occasion. We have the expertise, the infrastructure, the resources, and I think the political will to do what it takes to become a world leader in digital skills. At Ladies Learning Code we have the experience and the delivery model to scale up and do that.
Our funding ask to the Government of Canada is to help us offer our programming in more places, to do more programming in the places we're already in, and to expand the pilots we've been working on for other under-represented groups, such as indigenous communities, newcomers, and people with disabilities. Therefore I ask the Government of Canada—all of you here today—to help address our current challenges by setting out a bold and thoughtful plan to usher in a new era of Canadian innovation by investing in digital skills, in coding education, and in women and girls, so that we can give these under-represented groups an equal opportunity to build our future together.
Thank you so much. I welcome any questions.