Yes, we are the only people who provide the refugee sponsorship training program across Canada. We had four people providing service to the entire country prior to additional funding, so you get a sense of how very quickly four people get overwhelmed.
Probably the biggest challenge with the sponsors at this point is that there are a large number of new sponsors who responded to the call for sponsorship and who decided that they were going to take this on. It is a very complicated, complex, and responsible position they've put themselves in. It's important that they understand that going in.
Now that refugee families are beginning to arrive in Canada, there's also the complication that the family is here and now they have to begin to actually fulfill their responsibilities. As I said to somebody at a meeting last week, it's like planning for a baby and bringing baby home. It is a completely different ball game. Most people can seem to get the analogy.
When the refugee family gets here, a lot of the sponsors are looking for very practical, hands-on support. We are trying, in a couple of places, to bring private sponsors together to begin to hopefully develop some self-support groups—“We solved this problem this way” or “You solved that problem the other way”—because we can't be there for everyone, certainly. We do webinars to try to get information out to a broad spectrum of people regardless of where they're located.
We do have two staff located outside of our core group. One is in Vancouver and one is in Halifax, and it's a model that we would like to replicate with additional funding down the road to have people more on the ground to do more of that sponsor support work, which is turning out, I think, to be the bulk of our work right now, and it will be the same moving forward. It's going to be a lot more of the sponsor support as they work with their refugees when they get here.