Okay.
Now, because I can't possibly say everything I want to in five minutes, I'll say right at the beginning that I'm going to advocate a bottom-up approach to poverty in Canada. I think the closest interaction with and the closest feel for poverty comes from the local communities. Groups like the John Howard Society, which Kelly represents, and many of the charities or not-for-profit groups that I'm involved in have the hands-on feel and the trust of a lot of the people in poverty.
I'm hoping that by speaking today I will advocate for a forum where you will have continuing input from representatives of groups like the one I work with. I'm not part of the Fundy Community Foundation, but I work intimately with them. I would like to speak to their model of approaching community development as one of the means at the community level--but with a national organization, the Community Foundations of Canada--to approach dealing with poverty.
That's what I wanted to say in my five minutes, so I got that off my chest to begin with.
I'm involved in the Charlotte County Dial A Ride program, which provides volunteer transportation for seniors, disabled, and needy families in Charlotte County. We have a number of volunteers who give up their time and will transport those people otherwise unable to have transportation in a rural community to medical appointments, to banks to cash their cheques, to grocery shopping, to social events, and to quite a few other things.
We do about a thousand trips a day. It's not something that was developed in Charlotte County. We stole the idea from Nova Scotia. There are about 10 counties there that do it. It was facilitated in our county by dialogues that were put on by the Fundy Community Foundation. They organized a community dialogue with stakeholders involved in programs to assist those in need in our county. At that time, it was the Charlotte County Benevolent Society that I was involved in, which provided support to families of seriously ill children. Through that dialogue about transportation, that problem was solved.
The foundation now has a poverty working group. I'll give you a little history, if I may. The premier of New Brunswick set up an advisory council on not-for-profits, headed by Claudette Bradshaw. In order to approach input to that in Charlotte County, quite a large number of the not-for-profits organized meetings to get together to share ideas so that we could give a better picture to Claudette Bradshaw on how she should advise the premier. I believe the input from Charlotte County was very helpful to Claudette. She spoke very highly of the organized approach we had to begin this.
That led to the idea that a lot of us overlapped in our objectives in helping the people living in poverty in our community and that we had a problem of not knowing each other that well. A lot of us are run by volunteer boards--and sometimes not even with any paid staff--with a mission, and we are very enthusiastic in approaching that mission, but there is difficulty in finding funding because we don't have a professional fundraiser. There are all kinds of grants that we don't know about.
In that dialogue when we got together, we realized how much we could contribute by working together rather than as individual charities, so one of the greatest things that Claudette's group did was to get us together to talk. In getting together to talk, we felt that we could come up with solutions. Yes, we can wait for the province and the provincial government to help out, and we can look to the federal government, but we feel there are things we can do without waiting for government support.
With the help of the Fundy Community Foundation, we began a series of dialogues. They have a nice process. You call together the stakeholders who have a similar interest, you address the need--and addressing poverty was the need--and then you have a facilitated dialogue. You have groups of five to ten people who get together, address and identify the problems, and suggest solutions.
We had a series of dialogues. Out of that, we decided within the group that we would do a number of things. We'd pick three target projects that we could and will do. We may get government help, but we'll do something.
First of all, because they interacted with the poverty people, we invited people living in poverty to work with us and advocate with us. Our committee includes people who are living in poverty, so input was there.
Three programs relate to food security and housing security. The outline on that is here.
Third, because of the volunteer hours, we learned of a program called time banking, and I've provided information on that.
I would like to address those in question period, if we may.