Vickie and I have just come back from sharing our work in Europe, particularly in the city of Barcelona, which is quite fascinating. She'll tell you about that in a minute.
We will share the presentation. We are co-founders of the Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network, as well as the other things that were mentioned at the introduction. We're not speaking to you from Surrey. We're actually speaking to you from Vancouver.
I'll very briefly describe PLAN.
PLAN—the Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network—is now over 25 years old. It was set up to answer a question that nobody in history had ever had to answer before: what happens to people with disabilities when their parents die? We started this organization in Vancouver thinking that it would be a small pilot project. It has now spread to over 40 locations around the world. This is the first time in history that people with disabilities are outliving their parents.
PLAN started with a very small grant from the federal government. Once that grant was over, we operated without any government money and have been independent of government financing for over 25 years, so we are a social enterprise.
I'd like to tell you about two particular elements of social financing: one, our work in creating the registered disability savings plan; and two, a social purpose business called “Tyze”, which Vickie started.
Before I do that, I want to share a couple of biases. The first bias is that we are not particularly interested in social finance if it does not get to the roots of our social challenges. We spend an awful lot of money in this country basically remediating poverty, homelessness, and issues facing people with disabilities and the like. If all we're doing is rearranging things and finding other sources of money, we're not particularly interested. We think social finance can be used to actually get to the source, to get to the roots, to go upstream, and to deal with issues of prevention. That's bias number one.
Bias number two is that we are less interested in securing new sources of funding, although that's a worthy effort. We don't think that in the short term there are going to be a lot of additional funds coming from the private sector. We think that will be a much slower process. We are particularly interested in social finance because it gives people an opportunity to leverage the existing resources and to have money coming from different sources working better together.
That brings me to my third point. We think social finance has to be lodged or anchored within the context of what many of us around the world are now calling “social innovation”. Social innovation invites all of us to look differently at our toughest, most stubborn social problems. It invites us to do five things.
One, it invites us to rethink our solutions, to be more open-minded and not simply focus on the way we've always done things. Two, it invites us to work together differently. Three, it invites us to use technology when appropriate but not to become overly fascinated by it. Four, it invites us to use our money wisely, which brings us to social finance, of course. Five, it gives us an opportunity to scale, and another bias Vickie and I have is that already in Canada there are solutions to our toughest social problems: they're just orphans and they're not at scale. Social finance gives us an opportunity to do that.
Let me very briefly talk about the registered disability savings plan. If a family or a person with a disability were to put the equivalent of a Tim Hortons double-double and a doughnut aside every day, in 30 years they would have over $350,000—depending on the interest rates available to them—to spend on what they see as appropriate for their life in the world. The registered disability savings plan is the only one in the world, and it involves leveraging government, foundation, family, and individual contributions to enable the person with the disability to finally have a bank account and to have funds that he or she can control, as opposed to being at the mercy of a service delivery system that's been set up through the non-profit sector.
I won't get into it in a lot of detail, although I'd be happy to answer any questions on it. Today there is over $2 billion in deposits by people with disabilities in RDSP accounts, and they are essentially fomenting a revolution in how we look at supporting people with disabilities. Clawback is being eliminated by most provinces and territories. The ability to earn and accumulate assets is now policy in most provinces and territories in Canada.
Finally, I think it is providing an opportunity for us to rethink how we approach poverty not just for people with disabilities but also for the other tens of thousands of Canadians who are in poverty.
We think this is an example of government, private sector, and the community sector working together to solve a brand new social challenge, which is what happens to people with disabilities when their parents die; and, too, providing some advice and perhaps a model for how we approach some of our other tough social problems.
I'm now going to pass it over to Vickie to tell you about another invention that came out of our work with PLAN.