Thank you very much.
Absolutely. I know that specialized programs are going to be coming to an end, and I'd suggest that for any ongoing recovery supports that you not make partnerships for the sake of having partnerships. I think I've been around long enough to have seen that when government wants to send support letters or to have six partners before it will fund a program and so on, you end up with nothing but a lot of paper going back and forth between organizations.
Where you can have really significant impact is by assigning true value in your funding assessments, in your programs, to interdisciplinary partnerships. For example, we have a great partnership with a local not-for-profit called London Abused Women's Centre. Their focus is on women who have experienced physical or sexual abuse. They are taking the lead on an anti-human-trafficking initiative. Part of that involves girls as young as 15 years old. They've reached out to us, and we have a very active memorandum of understanding between our two organizations whereby, for anybody who falls into our age mandate, we can help them out with housing. When the shelter opens, we'll ensure that each young woman who comes in through a referral gets a dedicated room at the shelter. Then these two organizations together—LAWC through the work that they do around the violence experiences and us around the housing and employment supports that we can offer—are doing something that neither one of us could do individually. We do that with mental health space, with CMHA, and even with our local hospitals around mental health care.
I would think that going forward for COVID recovery—these will be very complex issues—no one organization is going to be able to do all of these things. I would hope that any ongoing federal investments would look at.... You're not going to fund agency A to do what they normally do plus a whole bunch more, and then measure them. You should look at how, fundamentally, they are working with their partnership and can demonstrate the value in that, whether it's through an MOU that articulates the value added for the federal investment and then the community benefits.... It should be something like that, something that really instills these active partnerships.