Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with the committee today.
My name is James St. John. I'm the business manager of the Central Ontario Building Trades, as well as the director of Hammer Heads. Along with me today is Peter Reed, one of the business agents of the Central Ontario Building Trades and also the field representative of Hammer Heads. We have one of our affiliate managers, Steve Martin, here also; he is the business manager of the IBEW Local 353.
The Central Ontario Building Trades represents 80,000 men and women working in construction. We developed a program called Hammer Heads in order to interact with the youth in the GTA. We're located in Toronto, essentially the GTA. The geographical area that we cover is essentially from Trenton to Oakville to Parry Sound, so it's a very large area representing, as I said earlier, 80,000 men and women in construction.
We have 26 trade union locals that give us access to state-of-the-art training centres where we're able to engage our local youth. That was one of the key focuses from our program, started by the Youth Challenge Fund. The Youth Challenge Fund put $51 million into how we could engage youth in a meaningful way to have them start with careers, not necessarily temporary jobs. Out of that, Hammer Heads was first developed.
We're not here looking for any money from the government, which is rare from a lot of the presenters that I'm sure come and sit where we're sitting. We're not looking for money today. One thing we are looking for is help from the government.
I had a meeting this morning on the Hill before I came here. I noticed all the construction. I wondered whether there were any apprenticeship opportunities with the contractor that is doing all that work. I'm not sure if this committee has that answer or not, but I think it's an imperative question. We want to see the government tie infrastructure dollars to apprenticeship opportunities for the youth of our communities. In doing that, there is no cost to the government whatsoever. The cost is really zero to the employers, who are going to need workers to build the renovations or the new buildings that you're constructing through infrastructure dollars. We've created a program whereby we could provide the training and the mentorship for these youth to be engaged fully when completing our program.
The earlier speaker talked about retention and how to engage youth. The youth that we've engaged from our program live in Toronto in 13 priority neighbourhoods. I think we have a lot more troubled neighbourhoods, but for whatever reason, we have only the so-called 13. Our program was initially targeted to engage the youth in these priority neighbourhoods, and we've since expanded it to the under-resourced neighbourhoods of our communities.
We're getting youth who have probably been engaged in gangs, who have not necessarily completed high school, and who have had some difficulties and troubles throughout their lives. We've been successfully engaging this youth and turning their lives around.
One of the goals of Hammer Heads was to make an immediate impact. A lot of the youth that we're targeting had previously been recipients of Ontario Works. In the short duration that our program has been in existence—it's coming up to almost three years now—we've engaged 21 youth from Ontario Works and put them to work as apprentices in our field of construction, thus resulting in savings of $184,000. Again, there's no cost to the government, yet we've lightened the load of youth who were previously receiving Ontario Works and we have now created taxpaying citizens out of these youth.
We think this model can be duplicated again and again. Obviously we're out of Toronto and the GTA, but a program similar to ours can go across Canada. There's definitely a shortage of youth linking to skilled jobs through apprenticeship. The end gain needs to be ensuring that when we're spending infrastructure dollars, those dollars are being linked to create apprenticeship opportunities for our youth.
We engage 45 youth a year in our 12- to 14-week program. We run it as a boot camp. The youth that we're working with have not been model students and have not necessarily been model citizens, so we run our program very militantly.
A day in the life of our program goes like this: the youth are probably up at 5:00 a.m.; they take public transport to two locations—they need to make their own way to our buses—where we pick them up and drive them to our training centres. They spend the full day learning green technology, getting hands-on training at our state-of-the-art training centres and getting to touch and feel what each of the trades is. We represent 26 different locals that all offer a different trade, a different ability to learn a career. Instead of just telling the youth what they're going to be, we get them in there. They get to touch it, they get to feel it, and then they get assessed by the professionals, by the trade instructors.
The unions collectively invest $20 million to $60 million in training in different parts of Canada. We have state-of-the-art training centres where we train our members. There's no reason why we can't train some of these at-risk youth so they have a meaningful career. Hammer Heads, being in building trades, is able to go through all the various training centres so we can find the right fit for an individual who maybe didn't understand the job of an electrician, or a plumber, or an insulator, or an ironworker, or a rod worker, or a worker in marble and tile, or a labourer. We put them in those environments so they're doing it real time and understanding what a life would be like in that particular trade. We think that's the best way to assess the youth. Not every youth will gravitate to a particular trade, so letting them try the abundance of different trades we represent is very key to what we do.
We also track the youth very carefully. In a short time, we've had 107 participants and 98 graduates. The thing we're most impressed with and most proud of is that after completing our program, five of our youth decided to return to post-secondary education. These are some of the youth from some challenging areas who dropped out of school, and once they got focus and direction, we engaged them to go back to school.
From our 98 graduates, we started 91 apprenticeships. That's 91 youths whose lives we've changed. Retention is key. As John alluded to, to start an apprenticeship is great, but we want to ensure they're finishing their apprenticeship, so in our program we track the youth for their first year with us. We take them to work the first day to introduce them to the employers; then we monitor them at the end of each of the first four weeks, and then monthly after that for the first year, thereby ensuring they are being properly integrated into the system.
We offer a variety of ways to interact with our employers, but dealing with the youth we're dealing with is a challenge. When we first started the program, we specifically dealt with the African diaspora youth. That was our target group, and it still remains our focus. We've expanded that to include aboriginals; we've put seven aboriginals through our program, and they've been very successful. We were able to obtain two GEDs and one grade 12 because education, we believe, as John also alluded to, is a huge part of what we do.
As I mentioned earlier, a day in the life of a Hammer Head in our program goes like this: they're up at 5:00 a.m., they catch a bus to go to the training centre at 6:30, they get there at 7:30, they train all day, and they leave the training centre at four o'clock. Two nights a week we bus them to Frontier College, where they're doing educational upgrading, because a lot of our trades have minimum requirements. An electrician is a prime example: you need grade 12 math, grade 12 English, and grade 12 physics. A lot of the youth we're dealing with obviously don't have these credits, so we work with the youth while they're with our program to ensure that we're upgrading their math and physics to meet the minimum requirements to gain entry into those trades. We think it's going quite well.
We can expand upon that with your help. We need to ensure that we tie infrastructure dollars to apprenticeships. We have the ability to train these youth, but after they complete our program, we need to lengthen the jobs. We change their way of life, but it's imperative that after our 12 weeks and as we're going through when they graduate, we need to link them immediately to an employment opportunity so that we can keep building on the momentum of changing their lives.