I'd like to once again thank you for inviting us to join you. We are much appreciative that you are interested in our program.
I'd like to refer back to a little earlier when Jeanette spoke about the “one person at a time” model. I'd like to say that we're in total agreement that this is the way to go, particularly with our client base. The young aboriginal adults who we serve and work with do respond to this type of support.
I am a support person at Ignite Adult Learning. By profession I'm a social worker and I have an open door policy. Each apprentice who works with us is able to come to visit me pretty well any time during the day, if they're not missing too much class time, in order to deal with specific issues that are barriers. There have been barriers in the past to them developing their education and being able to be employable.
Our nine-month program focuses definitely on components of reliability and employability. What we do is give them self-empowerment, including skills such as the health and wellness component of the program that Carlo mentioned. Another part of that is changing your thinking, changing through Pacific Institute thought patterns. Some of you may be well versed in the Pacific Institute's Lou Tice's teachings on being able to change our thinking patterns and move from the negative to the positive.
Another health and wellness component, which is an open book basically for our young people in the program who I work with, is on addictions education. Too many of them, unfortunately, have come from backgrounds where they have lived with this type of problem and the chaos addictions create in a young person's life. Oftentimes they have embraced it themselves, then tried to move forward and improve their lives.
This particular part of the program is extremely valuable for them, and all of those components of the whole make a difference in the end result of employer retention of the workers who graduate from our program. We actually have a community that supports us. There are investors who support us, who call us quite often to ask for employees, “Do you have someone because we love your employees”.
We have amazing support from our community here in Regina and from our investors. We have a wonderful relationship with our crown corporations, with Casino Regina, Conexus Arts Centre, Sun Life, SGI, and Yara Belle Plaine. They absolutely embrace what we're doing to help our young aboriginal people, as well as those who come to us who are not aboriginal, because it's open to anyone.
I think probably some of the barriers have already been addressed by our respondent from Edmonton, but I'd like to add also that there are definitely issues of lack of day care. There is terrible underfunding regarding living expenses. We are unable to give them minimum wage currently. The best we can do is a training allowance that actually amounts to $5 an hour, so anyone joining our program is not going to be able to do that if they are single young adults, because they can't survive. Oftentimes that results in their living in untenable situations in another home.
We have a young man currently—and this is not unusual—who has been couch surfing for the last few months in the program, who never knows where he's going to stay, because he's trying to stay healthy. He's trying to move forward, away from his past and places and people who would pull him back. This is a commonality across the board over the years with our clients, and in that regard, besides what Carlo talk about, these are the other supports that we are trying to give them in order to help them become successful young adults.
That's about all I have say. We're open to any questions.