Thank you.
I think you just spoke right to my heart on that one. Both President Sheppard and I are alumni of our own national youth council for friendship centres, so we were mentored and developed through the friendship centre movement, and up until about 2016, we actually had a national youth program, which was the cultural connection for aboriginal youth. Prior to that were the urban multipurpose aboriginal youth centres, called the UMAYC for short.
These programs had a profound effect on indigenous young people across the country, and many of the colleagues that I met when we were young people in our early 20s are now leaders in national indigenous organizations, banks and companies, and they've started their own.... We're all over the place, and we're still in contact with each other.
Indigenous young people are the fastest-growing population in Canada. We know that. We know that more than half of the indigenous population across the country is under the age of 25. We have no national indigenous child care or children's framework or strategy, and we have no national youth strategy. To me, those are two major things.
In our budget submission, we've housed our request under the children, youth and family programming because we know how important it is to maintain cultural connections, to maintain family connections and to create new community connections for those urban indigenous children. Friendship centres do so much for young people in care, and even during the pandemic we've heard of friendship centres that were finding young people who were aging out of care, finding them safer homes that weren't overcrowded, and making sure that they had connections to employment and could come to the centre to apply for their CERB and receive support.
I would definitely agree, and we're also working on an anti-indigenous racism in health care initiative. We just started this past month. We don't know how things are going to roll out with urban indigenous young people as Bill C-92 is developing in jurisdictions or developing within first nations, Métis and Inuit governments, so we've been wanting to be involved in those conversations.
What I would say is that it's on our radar. Youth engagement, children and youth are huge areas of interest and passion for us, the friendship centres. Hence, we are asking for investments in children and youth programming as part of our budget ask.