Thank you very much.
What a great opportunity to highlight some of the successes that are happening in our community. Really, it's a short answer to say that those successes are derived from engaging people in the solution.
When we talk about the value of engaging stakeholders, I wholeheartedly encourage that. It's engaging people with lived experience, either living in situations of poverty, raising a child with a developmental disability, having a teenager with a mental illness, or having a senior who is living at home and being in that sandwich generation. The situations of life that we find ourselves don't matter; it is engaging people in the solutions.
We have had tremendous success in our communities of Pitt Meadows and Maple Ridge by bringing people together. We have an organization called the Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows-Katzie Community Network. It's not a stand-alone organization, if you will, but it's a co-operative of faith-based organizations, government organizations, social services organizations, and citizens who come together and brainstorm solutions for our community.
Because of that, we've made a commitment to each other not to compete for funding when there are those provincial or federal grant opportunities, but rather to partner to see which organization has the competency to do that well. We support each other. We partner. We have found that we serve far more citizens and we address far more needs in our community when we work collaboratively through that community network, through things such as Alisa's Wish and the youth wellness centre to support dire situations that we know of on the street. We are all connected via email; obviously we're respectful of ethics and confidentiality, but we do not hesitate to reach out to each other to say, “There is this youth” or “There is this senior” or “There is this family”, and what can we do?
I would encourage some bravery to continue to look at wish number one—that there would always be new funding—but reality number two would be the courage to look at the reallocation of funding, at innovative solutions, and look at some of those initiatives across the country and some of them right here locally.
Dr. Matthew Chow, the psychiatrist, is a leader who is turning psychiatry on its head. We are providing psychiatric services to more youth in our community than in Vancouver, because of his approach from a community-integrated model. The idea is to be innovative.
Thank you.