Okay.
We represent, really, the grassroots, because we are the first response in the community.
Our community has a membership of approximately 2,000 people. We are located outside the city of Sault Ste. Marie, in Ontario.
We first began our pandemic planning in 2005, post-SARS. SARS really had an impact on us and our community. Although we don't have any close contact with H1N1—it hasn't been in our community, really; we've only had two cases in the Algoma district—we felt that we needed to take it seriously, because we understood that the disease didn't have any boundaries. It didn't matter where you lived, where you came from, whether you were first nations, who you were, it was going to come. We thought we might even be a little more at risk because of our prevalence or high rate of chronic disease and because we're first nation populations.
So we asked what we were going to do, because it's just the two of us. We have a few nurses in our community and some health educators. If the pandemic hit, if we had a pandemic in our community, what were we going to be able to do, just the two of us? We decided that we should start getting ready. We said we needed to start teaching people how to take care of themselves and each other by giving them the information they needed to be able to do that. So that's where we started.
In regard to some of the initiatives we have been working on, creating, and developing in our community, we're going to pass some things around here. This is probably not the usual way you do things here, but we didn't know. We have never been here before, so we're not really aware of what we can or can't do.