Thank you very much.
First of all, I'd like to thank you for inviting us to this committee to present our views. I'd like to reiterate a little bit of what the last speaker said, the sentiment that we are glad that this is becoming a national conversation. However, the information we are presenting today is coming as more of a case study. We understand that we are a small, localized organization in Saskatchewan. Nonetheless we do feel that our 20 years of experience within the labour market industry will help provide you with a better picture of the overarching localized issues that some areas are facing in the provinces.
I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Lindsay Manko. I am the assistant manager at Ignite Adult Learning Corporation. I'm here with Carlo Bizzarri. We are a small yet mighty organization here in Regina, Saskatchewan.
The demographic that we work with is generally categorized as the vulnerable populations within our society. We work with youth at risk who would be categorized as more or less unemployable. They have few or no skills appropriate for our current job market in Regina, due to a number of personal setbacks and issues. Accessing the system in the first place to take advantage of the EI funding is an issue.
Specifically we have over 20 years of experience working with this demographic here in Saskatchewan. Our model is predicated on the marriage between business and not-for-profit. Our model essentially means that if you're coming to work in Ignite, you're getting paid to attend classes to gain and garner that training. You're being paid; however, we are a not-for-profit model, so we understand that in order to gain skills that make you employable, specifically soft and hard skills, you need to practice those skills and we provide that setting.
I'd like to talk a little bit about what we've seen as creating long-term success within our program in Saskatchewan. We have over 500 graduates who have come from a number of demographics, but essentially have not been—I want to really highlight this—successful in accessing meaningful, tangible, long-term employment within our community. So they went through our training process and then have garnered long-term, tangible experience within our employment sectors.
Our program actually runs for a seven-month period. Long term is long term. It takes a long time to make tangible change within your life. A lot of issues that we see—addictions, housing, child care—are not something that's going to change overnight. Going through a program that is short-term, we haven't had the success rates that we would expect for somebody going through a long-term program of about seven months. That's something we'd like to highlight.
Also, we want to talk about this marriage between soft skills and hard skills. It was quoted before. You were talking about making sure that you tie talent to task. If you've never had a chance to garner talents or had an opportunity to really realize what you're good at, because you've been involved in the youth justice system or you've been involved in the foster system, which has effectively not delivered what you necessarily need to become an able-bodied, working young adult, it's hard to access the system.
Really what we're here to talk about is being the advocate on behalf of that vulnerable population and how they access the LMDAs if they don't have the skills to get the job in the first place.
I know that there are portions within the current suggested scenarios that state that if you lack essential skills or have a low level of literacy you can still garner help from this program. But what we have experienced is that a number of the individuals who come into our program actually have undiagnosed learning disabilities and because they don't have the basic essential skills to access a formal system, it's harder for them to gain the employment to get access to these different things.
Again, I'm just speaking from our personal experience. I'm in the classroom every day from Monday to Friday working with individuals, and I'm not speaking for every organization, but this has been our experience.
Also, more in-house training for employees—we've talked about how we're going to be transferring the Canada job grant funding directly to employers, but if our employees can't access the employment in the first place, how are they going to access these funds directly for training in specific areas? Ultimately, our goal is to help individuals who are undervalued and don't necessarily have the soft skills—reliability, accountability, dependability, independence—that you need to work in this Canadian job market. They're essentially just going to become a continual debt load in the future for us. So, yes, we commend you guys for doing long-term planning and considering these different areas, but we just want to advocate on behalf of the vulnerable populace that we work with directly.