Thank you.
One of our challenges is that we're not only trying to help individual Yazidi women, children, and families, but also trying to assist them in rebuilding community. We think that's important in settlement, both in terms of support and a feeling of security within a very strange and foreign environment.
One of our problems in terms of logistics is that we spend a lot of time looking for sponsorship agreement holders who have available quota to allow us to sponsor private families. That is a bigger challenge to us than raising the required funds to provide them with the year's support that's necessary. We need more sponsorship agreement holders in major centres where there are already Yazidi communities in existence. We need more quota as well. We have sponsorship holders who don't have quota. We understand they're having challenges getting more quota or even maintaining the quota levels they have. To us, that's a large challenge in terms of the success going forward of private sponsorship.
We would also like the government to encourage private sponsors to be more active in sponsoring Yazidi families. I know that the focus of this committee lately has been the issue of women and children who have been damaged through the activities of ISIS and the disruption and loss of family members. But in order to build a strong community, there has to be a foundation for that community as well. We believe that increasing the number of families who are available to come to Canada will help build that foundation.
The other thing we are recommending is that in settling families in any cities, strong consideration should be given to cities with existing and thriving Yazidi communities. We should avoid settling new families in cities where there is no Yazidi community to assist them in the settlement process. In many cases, municipal settlement agencies are lacking the resources to provide adequate levels of settlement assistance. When we were here a little over a year ago, one of the recommendations we made was for a hybrid program between the government and private sponsorship organizations like Operation Ezra so that we could work together in an agreement to assist these government-sponsored families who need more help than government workers are able to give them on an ongoing basis.
Right now we're filling that void, but one of the difficulties we're having is that we can raise funds specifically to sponsor refugees, while fundraising for private organizations is difficult to cover off operational costs. Most people who give money want to see actual results of where that money is being spent. One of the difficulties we have is that we could do a lot more if there were some form of partnership between the government and private sponsorship agencies so that we could hire people to help—not to replace government workers, but to enhance the work the government is able to do with these people.
We're committed to rebuilding communities, particularly in Winnipeg, where we've had private families come. We've tried to settle them close to each other so that their children are attending the same schools together and the families have an ability to interact. Unfortunately, our hands are somewhat tied. We don't have any funds to really do this. We're relying almost entirely on volunteer help. We'd like to be able to have some professional assistance on a full- or part-time basis to assist these families.