Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and committee members.
I want to begin by acknowledging that I'm speaking to you from the traditional territories of the Coast and Straits Salish peoples, and I've been asked to give an overview of the LE,NONET project.
LE,NONET is a Sencoten word, a Straits Salish word, that means roughly “success after enduring many hardships”. It was a pilot project funded by the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, with the aim of enhancing the success of aboriginal undergraduate students at the University of Victoria.
This was a four-year research project. We developed a set of programs. We delivered them to 200 individual students, and we're currently evaluating the results.
Our programs included two financial aid programs, one a bursary program that would provide aboriginal undergraduate students with up to $5,000 a year for their education, and the other an emergency relief funding program, because we discovered that students often have to endure a temporary financial crisis to complete their education.
We had a preparation seminar that included general history on aboriginal peoples and specific information about the first nations of these territories. It prepared students to do research apprenticeships and community internships.
Research apprenticeships matched a student in our program with a faculty member, and they would work together on a research project of mutual interest to them. They received a course credit and a small stipend. Community internships matched a student with someone in a community or an aboriginal organization, again to work on a project of mutual interest and benefit.
We had a peer mentoring program that matched more senior aboriginal students with incoming students to help them navigate the university. And we had a staff and faculty cultural training component that helped our faculty and staff in their interactions with aboriginal students.
Now, in terms of the funding that we distributed directly to the students, we gave out nearly $900,000, through the bursary and emergency aid program. We gave out $230,000, roughly, for each of the mentoring, research apprenticeship, and internship programs . That works out to about $4,100 for each student who was in our programs.
The question now is how do measure the success of that investment? Was it worth it?
There are two ways you can do that. The first way, the more standard way, is to just look at graduation and retention rates: did the students who were in our programs have higher retention and graduation rates than the ones who weren't? But also, measuring success as it's defined by students and communities, did the programs contribute to the student's sense of identity as an aboriginal person? Did it make them feel a part of the aboriginal community on campus?
We had three comparison groups: 1,000 students who attended the university in the five years before our programs began, the comparison group; then our 200 aboriginal student participants who elected to take part in our projects; and 819 non-participants, that is, other aboriginal students on campus who elected not to participate.