Thank you for the invitation to be here today.
As you heard, I'm the executive director for Big Brothers Big Sisters.
Big Brothers Big Sisters of Peterborough is a well known non-profit in the Peterborough area that empowers young individuals in our community. Our mission is to foster positive mentoring relationships between young people and caring mentors, to enable them to reach their full potential. We've done this for decades—since 1960—in the Peterborough area. Our organization has played a vital role in the development of young minds, and offers programs and camps that help shape the lives of the youth that we serve.
The Canadian summer jobs wage subsidy program has had a profound and positive impact on our agency, providing valuable opportunities to young people in our community. By offering the subsidies to us, it's a program that empowers organizations like ourselves to create summer positions that not only benefit the local youth but also enable us to enhance our services.
The following are a few ways that has taken place.
First, we have summer programming and camps that we offer. Often, we offer these to children who are on a wait-list, waiting for a mentor to be matched. The summer wage subsidy program has allowed us to expand our summer programming. It allows us to increase our ratios of children to supervisors, and it helps make them more accessible to a larger range of individual children. This has enabled us to engage in a variety of ways and offer summer programming opportunities. It provides a safe and supportive environment for the youth in Peterborough.
Another way is through our mentoring match support. As we match volunteers with children, that requires us to continue to monitor those relationships so that they remain positive. This subsidy helps us to facilitate the hiring of post-secondary students who are enrolled in a certificate or degree program directly related to the work that we do, ensuring that the mentoring relationships that we facilitate remain at the highest standard possible. This, in turn, has a positive impact on the lives of the children, the young people.
Following that, the valuable experience for young people that also takes place is with those students, and it provides them the benefit of our organization being able to invest in them in a meaningful way. It offers them the opportunity to gain valuable experience within the community that they are either schooled in or have returned to after moving away for school. It provides them with essential skills, improves their employability and supports a sense of responsibility in their community engagement.
While we have these positive opportunities, there are a few areas that I think would be valuable for improvement.
One is providing increased flexibility in the timing and hours. This would allow students, particularly those enrolled in post-secondary education, to be able to spread out their work hours across a broader timeline. This flexibility is crucial for students who wish to combine their summer job experience with other part-time employment or academic commitments.
The other would be a longer duration of the grants. Extending the duration of those grants from eight to 10 weeks to 11 or 12 weeks would be immensely beneficial. College and university students, in particular, are often seeking employment for a longer duration during the summer months. Offering those grants for a broader time attracts more of those students, allowing a more comprehensive summer experience in their related fields and increasing their skill development.
In conclusion, we're looking at how immensely beneficial it is and just offering opportunities to expand that. It provides a very meaningful opportunity, both for the kids that we serve in the community and also for those students for whom we're looking to try to increase the amount of job experience and employable experience that they get moving forward.
Thank you very much.