Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the indigenous and northern affairs committee members.
[Witness spoke in Mohawk as follows:]
Niá:wen.
Shé:kon sewakwé:kon. Katsi’tsiarihshion ióntiats . Tyendinaga ni kiteron wakskeréwake.
[Mohawk text translated as follows:]
Thank you.
Hello everyone. My name is Katsi’tsiarihshion. I live in Tyendinaga and I am a member of the Bear Clan.
[English]
My name is Suzanne Brant. I'm the president of the First Nations Technical Institute, a member of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte and Bear Clan.
Since 1985 we have been meeting the educational needs of indigenous students. We have served 112 different indigenous communities in Ontario and 189 indigenous communities across Canada.
We are an indigenous-led and -governed post-secondary institute. We're recognized under the Indigenous Institutes Act of Ontario, which was passed in 2017. We provide post-secondary programming in the areas of social science, health sciences, governance and policy, humanities, research and innovation, and aviation technology.
Currently, we have enrolled in our programs over 450 students. Eighty-seven per cent of those students are women. The average age of our students is 36 years. This is due to the barriers that currently exist in education. We provide high-quality education that links directly to employment. We use traditional ways of knowing and learning. We use indigenous knowledge, culture and languages within all of our programs. Not only are our students gaining the skills and technology they need, but they also gain indigenous knowledge.
We braid our healing and learning together. We recognize that a lot of our students have experienced many traumas. We want to make sure that they have the opportunity to unburden those traumas while they're in our programs. We provide student success facilitators and cultural advisers in all of our programming. They're there to help support the students. This helps to build pride and confidence within our students as well. This has lead to a graduation rate of over 92% in the last three years.
We have grown our enrolment by 203% since 2015. Every one of the programs we are currently running is oversubscribed. I'll just give you an example. We opened our enrolment for our practical nurse program on March 9. Today I can tell you that we have 80 applicants, and we can only take 15 students.
There's more that needs to be done to support FNTI and indigenous institutes so we can continue to support our learners. We require resources to deliver our programs to meet the needs and demands coming from our communities. Without adequate funding, we cannot provide our students with appropriate infrastructure and fully culturally relevant curriculum and support. We cannot meet the increasing program, community and economic needs.
I want to give you another example. Bill C-92, An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families, was passed in June 2019. First nations are working very hard to set up their own child well-being agencies, and we've been asked to provide the training. We went ahead and developed a four-year degree program in a bachelor's of indigenous social work. We obtained regulatory accreditation across Canada, and now the program is accredited in Ontario. We're going to offer this program in January 2024. This morning, there were 677 expressions of interest. We can only accept 36 students.
This issue is beyond social work. Every program we currently offer, as I mentioned, is oversubscribed. We have wait-lists. We have eight other indigenous programs under development for which there has been expressed interest and community interest.
It is frustrating that we have so many interested learners who want to enrol in our programs, but because of funding constraints, we can't serve them.
Madam Chair, I want to thank you for this opportunity to talk. I welcome any questions.