What has happened in the meantime, actually, which I think was mentioned before, is that our agency lost quite a lot of funding, so now, at a time when there is more need than ever to help refugee families, our program has been reduced. We had another funder, but then they decided to change priorities, so we lost altogether somewhere around 30% of our funding.
Our big challenge is that now more families than ever are arriving. They need more support than ever, but we have had to reduce our staff, so we don't really have that much capacity to maintain the quality of our program.
We do home visits. We meet families when they come to Welcome House and we work with the children over there, but we also continue with the home visits just to ensure that all families are connected with services in the neighbourhood and that they are not feeling isolated. As we have heard quite a few times today, there are issues with housing. Some of our families have already said that they're in permanent housing, but they know they will have to move again by the end of the year. It's actually extremely stressful and traumatizing for families to have to move again and again.
Another thing we noticed was that it is a challenge to take English language lessons, especially for women, because of the issue of child care. It's almost impossible to find any spaces for moms.
Health care is also an issue because of reduced hours for interpretation. Food security and transportation are issues, and there's a need for community orientation as well.