There are many stories here. There is a strong organizing community here in Winnipeg where people are coming up with different kinds of solutions. I mentioned Inner City Renovation. It's a construction company that was started to employ people who had various employments, and they've been paying out millions of dollars in wages over the last number of years for housing and commercial construction work.
A new initiative doing energy retrofits is called BUILD, or maybe it's called Warm Up Winnipeg now. They're doing energy retrofits on Manitoba housing as a training program for individuals with various.... I had the opportunity to go on local radio with one of the young men who was in the program. He came out of the gangs and said it was really hard to come out, but his life was so different now because he had an opportunity to earn a paycheque, go home, watch TV with his girlfriend, and I think he had a dog. He said, this is a clean life, a good life; it's a life you can be proud of. But when he tried to turn this corner, nobody would hire him. But when he walked into BUILD and dropped off his resumé, he didn't hope for anything because he knew he had a record, and he knew his appearance and who he had associated with, but they hired him.
We need social enterprises like this because they create opportunities for people to get the job experience, to get the resumé, to get the connections, to enter the labour market to create a different path for themselves. We have many; some of them are worker co-ops. We have Enviro-Safe Cleaning here. A group of refugees from the Congo started a commercial cleaning worker co-op. There are thrift stores for women run by the North End Women's Centre. These are women who have many different kinds of barriers, but they learn retail experience with flexible work hours because that's what's required. There are many like this.
Some of the policies...what's tricky is that in terms of support there's not a lot of understanding of what these organizations are. In Quebec there's a strong social economy and a different kind of understanding of what these organizations are and the value they add and how to support them. They're not just a regular commercial enterprise. You can't treat them just like regular competitive private businesses, with the same kinds of lending mechanisms and the same kinds of policies. But they're not just a social service either. So there needs to be a better understanding of the value they bring and the kinds of initiatives they are in order to be able to support the social side, the employment, the labour market development side of it with resources, understanding that these social enterprises are taking on important work that private enterprise is not likely to do.
They need resources for that part of it. They are enterprises and they need access to markets as well. So there's procurement. How much does government spend? How much do institutions spend? And we work with this, whether it's with the credit unions or the universities. It's one thing to hand out grants to start or support these kinds of initiatives, but if you shift the way government spending is done, and if government is really for the good of the people, purchasing from these kinds of enterprises can do a lot of good for different communities and for reducing poverty. But one of the challenges is that contracts are often huge. If you unbundle contracts, it makes them more accessible to smaller social enterprises.
You just need to make sure there are not actual barriers in the tendering process. I think when we looked through the federal initiative years ago, some said it had to be for-profit businesses and completely ruled out any of these social enterprises from being eligible. If value is going to be recognized--and this is where a poverty reduction lens would be very useful--this enterprise would do more in terms of either local spinoff, as Susan was talking about with child care, or in reduced poverty, increased labour market attachment bringing people off EI, these kinds of things. If that value, which is very valuable especially in reducing poverty, is going to be recognized in the tendering process with extra points or extra criteria, it's valid, but it's not recognized. If that were recognized, these enterprises could gain access to a lot more contracts.
These are some of the stories, and there are many more out there. I'd gladly write you a storybook on these things and the difference they make. Never mind the funding or the grants at start-up; the procurement piece could make a huge difference in supporting the work these social enterprises do and in helping them grow so they can do even more of this work.