Good morning, everyone.
I'll just tell you briefly about Northwood Neighbourhood Services, and then I will talk about five areas: the impact to the agency, the impact to the community, the impact of the cuts to our clients, the cost to the country, and some research-based statistics.
Northwood Neighbourhood Services is a multi-service neighbourhood centre. Of course, the program that was affected by the CIC cut is the settlement services. We have eight settlement counsellors who speak over 28 languages, and they serve, of course, those clients. Last year we served 1,800 clients, people who came for the first time or for subsequent visits.
We have two child-parent programs in the neighbourhood in Toronto, one in Wards 7 and 8 and one in Wards 9 and 10. These are for parents and children from ages zero to six. We have seniors' programs. We serve seven ethnic groups--individually, of course. A lot of seniors have language barriers, so we cannot mix them up, except for one program, because we run it in a seniors' building. We serve the Albanian seniors, Latin American seniors, and the one I mentioned, the multicultural seniors program, because it is in a seniors' building at Arleta and Sheppard Avenue. We serve Sudanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and South Asian seniors. These programs are one day a week.
We have two violence against women programs--we call them “cook and talk”. We have a green program, educating the public; we do workshops and seminars and one-on-one counselling to go green. We are also sponsorship agreement holders. We have a financial literacy program that's also funded by another department, HRSDC. We have employment and self-employment programs, volunteer training and placement. We take a lot of volunteers from the neighbourhood, a lot from Ontario Works, and also from the colleges and universities. And we have English conversation classes. There are a lot of ESL classes, but some people cannot fall into these categories, so we have English conversation circles based on groups, and we have five groups currently.
I'll tell you about the impact to the agency when we got the letter on December 10. There is a liability to the organization because we have a five-year lease and we are in year three. We also have staff members who have worked with Northwood, at the least for four years, and I have a couple of them who have worked for 10 years with the organization.
On the impact to the community, for an organization that has served and was funded by CIC since 1986, what can we tell our clients--don't come anymore, our doors are closed?
For a lot of these people...little things that we take for granted, whether they're newcomers or Canadians.... Some of the people, you cannot imagine, they come in, and when we offer them a cup of tea and we say good morning, they are so happy. At times they tell us we are the guardian angels because there is nobody to talk to them, nobody to guide them and to show them where to go and where to find services, to refer them to the available mainstream services. So that is the impact to our community.
The other thing I want to talk about is the impact to partnerships. We have private sector partnerships. We have other NGOs that we partner with. Just the cuts of CIC incapacitated the organization. It represented 30% of our budget, which is $400,000. Not only will the settlement services be eliminated, but also, CIC funded our core infrastructure, which allowed us to partner with colleges and universities, with other non-profit organizations, for services that have nothing to do with newcomers, such as the Learning Disabilities Association, the Margaret Frazer House. Part of the CIC application for this year was to partner with CIC to look into the mental health issues of women.
The one thing that I would like to mention is some research that was done by the Canadian Policy Research Networks in 2002 called Mapping the Non-profit Sector--Human Resources in the Non-profit Sector. The non-profit sector contributes $102 billion to the Canadian economy. It's the second largest in the world. The non-profit sector employs two million employees in Canada, and out of the two million, one million are in Ontario. So what is going to happen to the sector? I just worry about the third sector, the non-profit. I feel that the recognition for this sector is absent when CIC just randomly sends us a letter, after we've been funded since 1986, to say they're no longer going to fund us.
Is three months enough? Were we prepared? Was the sector prepared? And what is the cost to Canada? What will happen to these clients?
Well, I don't have to tell you what Canada preaches around the world and what we appear to be. Are we walking the talk?