Thank you. I can, absolutely.
When we started these programs, there was nothing called social finance or social enterprise. We talked about it as being hands-on work experience. The only vehicle available to us was federal funding through youth skills link projects, which were new at that time, in 1993 or 1996. We looked at taking it as a training opportunity, the bend being how we could offer young people a training opportunity that otherwise they would just not get.
But also, for us it was all about community engagement. Youth Opportunities Unlimited engaged in this stuff because we know that we can't create work on our own, of course. We rely on the private sector to hire people, on school boards to accept former students back into their systems, and so on, so we need to engage those folks in our family.
The federal youth skills link allowed us to hire young people. They paid for the wage costs for the young people, because they needed to be paid a wage, and a tiny bit of overhead back to the organization for us to employ subject-matter experts who could help us with the recycling, for example.
Then we relied very heavily on the private sector to come forward and offer up their offices for on-site experience, basically. For us, although it was harder to launch, it created ultimately a much stronger model, because now those folks are so engaged in the organization that they freely donate to it. It's not all Pollyanna kind of stuff but a resource base for us. We look at the private sector for employing with our job placement programs, and so on. It becomes an iterative process whereby they are not just recycling with us but are actively engaged in Youth Opportunities Unlimited.
But the training dollars are not really meant to be a social enterprise fund, so using the training dollars is always a bit of a square peg in a round hole. We can always demonstrate the outcomes very easily, but the training format, for example, requires extensive discussion and extensive elaboration with the project officers. We often find that we're in a gap. You can have a 12-month agreement, but six months into the agreement you're negotiating a brand new one, and that might take eight months to negotiate.
Right now we're in that experience, in which we're operating all of our social enterprises with absolutely no government funding. In the case of a traditional training opportunity, you just shut everything down. But we can't shut down the recycling service and we can't shut down the café and put a sign up that the government funding has run out right now, because every day we have to service those customers. We get by without the funding right now, but it is a challenge.
Did that answer your question adequately?