Thank you very much.
Hello everyone. I'm pleased to be here this morning to speak to you about Actua and our work with young people who live in poverty.
Actua is a national charitable organization that engages youth in experiences that build skills and confidence in science, technology, engineering, and math. We support a national network of 35 university- and college-based member organizations, who hire 1,000 undergraduate students to deliver programming in 500 communities, covering every province and territory in the country. Actua members offer in-school workshops that support current curriculum objectives, after-school and weekend clubs, and weekend summer camp experiences.
At the national level, Actua is focused on inclusion by engaging underserved and under-represented audiences through national programs for girls and young women, youth facing socio-economic challenges, youth living in remote and northern communities, and indigenous youth.
We're working with many youth who are living in poverty, among many other challenges that they are facing. Engaging youth living in poverty and building STEM skills has both a social and economic imperative. From a social perspective, all youth in Canada deserve equitable access to good-quality educational experiences, both inside and outside of school, to help them reach their potential. From an economic perspective, these groups of youth, who have traditionally been left out of STEM fields, represent our best long-term solution to filling the workforce gaps that are plaguing our corporate sector.
It is well documented that skills in STEM contribute substantively to building resilience and economic independence. The Borgen Project, an innovative U.S. charity addressing global poverty, points to a simple formula for alleviating poverty both domestically and abroad: education, entrepreneurship, and technology. Actua programs are in complete alignment with this formula, and I will share more about our approach in a few minutes.
In addition, as Canada grows its knowledge-based economy, digital literacy and coding skills will be in huge demand and jobs will be plentiful. Just like numeracy and basic literacy, literacy in digital and coding skills has become essential not just for future programmers, but for all youth, regardless of what path they choose to pursue.
A large part of Actua's focus on underserved youth is with indigenous youth, the fastest growing youth population in Canada. We all know the massive challenges faced by these youth—secondary school graduation rates less than half those of other Canadians, food and housing security issues, mental health issues, and systemic racism, to name a few.
Each year, through our indigenous youth and STEM program we engage 35,000 Inuit, first nations, and Métis youth in 200 indigenous communities across the country. We're also engaging other underprivileged youth through a unique initiative involving partnerships with youth-serving organizations. We reach an additional 35,000 at-risk youth through this program. Those are youth facing socio-economic challenges, youth who are new Canadians, and other youth who are not given the same opportunities.
How do we get these youth into STEM experiences? Many of these youth would be unlikely to attend an actual program for a host of reasons. Certainly there is the lack of financial means, but also many have limited history in post-secondary education and a lack of role models who would encourage them to pursue these types of programs. As well, we know that community organizations that serve these youth are challenged in their ability to provide STEM-based programs.
Access is the starting point. How do we reach these youth? We learned about 15 years ago that providing the programs for free is not enough to engage youth facing extreme poverty situations. These youth need to be actively engaged and invited to participate, and they need additional supports that are different from those for other youth.
Our recipe for success has been to partner with hundreds of community-based organizations that serve these youth on a daily basis. We partner with new immigrant associations, family service associations, boys and girls clubs, and others to bring our programs to them, to a space where youth feel safe and where they've already built trust. We deliver our STEM-based programs through these partners, thus building STEM content into a sustainable web of support that these youth desperately need.
Through Actua's multi-stakeholder approach, we're providing youth with experiences that not only build STEM skills, confidence, and awareness, but also expose them to post-secondary environments in a non-intimidating way. Many of these students, as you know, would be first-generation university students.
We also engage them with mentors from our corporate sector partners. Companies such as Google, GE Canada, Lockheed Martin, and Suncor are making their employees available as mentors so that these youth can start to imagine themselves in these jobs in the future.
I mentioned digital skills earlier, but it's worth repeating: engaging youth in computer science and coding experiences is not only about making sure that we have more computer scientists and programmers. We live in a digital world in which every aspect of our lives is underpinned by technology. If youth don't learn to code, which is the language of computers, they will be left behind, period.
In October 2014 we launched a three-year project with Google called Codemakers, to transform the way that youth engage with computer science. Codemakers is focused specifically on engaging those underserved youth, youth facing the harshest socio-economic challenges in the country.
We've engaged 80,000 of them to date since we started. We are working hard to solve the challenges of getting more youth involved, such as the ongoing misunderstanding among youth and parents and a lack of awareness of how important these skills will be to the future.
To conclude, STEM careers can absolutely be a pathway out of poverty. We must equip youth in their early years with the necessary skills and beliefs to take advantage of this opportunity.
We are making two recommendations to the committee.
One is to increase federal investments in programs that engage youth in early skills development, especially youth living in poverty and indigenous youth. It is too late to start skills development in upper high school and university. Our skills agenda must start in early elementary school. These programs should also include a parental engagement component.
The second one is, from a policy perspective, to formally recognize that youth engagement is an essential component in the innovation ecosystem at the federal level. The ecosystem typically only starts at university level. This is too late for at-risk youth.
Thank you.