To explain the relationship with Elections Canada—which we're grateful for—last year Elections Canada contributed around $2 million to the student vote program. That would put us somewhere in the range of under $2 per student. This is more than just active voting; in some cases this is a month-long learning experience.
Additional funds were raised to cover the cost of teacher training across Canada, other provincial elections and their work in Colombia. Last year was a terrific year, being somewhere in the range of $5.5 million. This year I think will be somewhere in the range of around $2 million. We're a project to project-based organization and very entrepreneurial. I'll just emphasize this: we don't receive funding, as in money to exist, from either Elections Canada or any election agencies or any government body. It's a mix of individual donors, community foundations, and on occasion election agencies and different levels of government.
I will also emphasize what Sabreena said, which is worth putting out there, especially to this committee. For the groups of organizations in this space, which are few—you could count them with the fingers of both hands, and a couple of them are affiliated with universities—there is no pot of money for them to excel at their work.
You can go back and figure out who said this, but a couple of different speakers, some of them election officers, were asked about turnout. What they say about turnout is that worrying about turnout isn't something they want to be tasked with. They're comfortable being tasked with making voting and elections accessible. That's great, but here's the problem with that. If election agencies aren't the ones tasked with worrying about voter turnout, nobody else has the capacity to concern themselves with that.
I'm comfortable taking the massive risk if we have the capacity to focus on voter turnout. I imagine Sabreena's organizations and a few others would love to team up with us on that. But I worry that if we leave it in the hands of election agencies who are not taking on that responsibility, they won't be as creative, ambitious, as forward-looking or risk-taking as groups like us have been for the last number of years—but on nickels and dimes, it's important to point out.