That's a big question.
What we know is that aboriginal people, indigenous people, who make it to post-graduate studies, master's or doctoral studies, do as well as any other person in Canada, so we know the problem is further down the chain. The question is leveraging young aboriginal people, young indigenous people, into an educational system. Obviously there are multiple barriers, both in access and cultural appropriateness. Location matters a lot, so if you have to finish grade 12 in Thunder Bay and you are from a reserve farther north than that, and you get that dystopia of moving to a city and not having parental support, we do have big issues. I am sure my first nations brothers and sisters would talk at length about education issues. If I could try to bring it back to social innovation, there are ways to facilitate engagement that young people can own. They think differently than I do and Yancy does, and we are both aboriginal people. You know, under 24 they think differently.
We have discovered this most appropriately in our A4W Live, action for women live mobile platform which we are building. It goes to individual cellphones. We are going to be releasing it in June. It is designed to change gender-based behaviours between aboriginal men and women, boys and girls, about sexually based violence and all those sorts of issues. I have done focus groups and testing, and we now know that they think completely differently than we do about the reality. I think they are the source of energy and dynamism at a community level. I come back to, as much as possible, facilitating community-led and community-driven approaches to an issue, awfully creative at the community level, once you get down there and put mechanisms in place. Right now we know that when we take supports.... For example, the urban aboriginal strategy is designed to funnel partnerships, in particular. If we can get it down and support it at the community level, they can leverage what I call the nested energy inside communities in bigger and smaller cities.
It is a complicated question, to be honest. It has a lot of different leverage to it, a lot of things that we would need to do. From a social finance and social innovation perspective, it's there. One of the components in our social innovation summit is to engage youth as the facilitators, those who run around and learn from the folks who are doing social innovation, whether from MaRS or all the other big social innovation labs, because they need to own it. We found that if they own it, then it will flourish. This is not totally on point, but just to add something to that.