Thank you for that.
We've been in place for more than 35 years. We have 58 financial institutions from coast to coast to coast helping Inuit, Métis and first nation entrepreneurs. We incubate business. I call it the largest social finance network in Canada, if not the world. It's an OECD best practice that says this is how indigenous people should expand themselves.
The government is launching a social finance fund that's going to be rolling out soon, which, by all indications, looks like it might compete with us a bit, because the market for that social finance fund is indigenous businesses. We've developed this market for 35 years. We don't need competitors in this space.
We've been asking for support through the aboriginal entrepreneurship program to ensure that we have the right support, because you need to invest in something in order for the money to be deployed, and we've always had a lack of capital. We created an indigenous growth fund to be the solution for that access to capital by creating an institutional-grade investment tool to give the private sector an opportunity to invest in our communities, because we give out those loans for members and our members give that to the entrepreneurs.
However, you have to enable that capital to get to that entrepreneur, and we have not seen an increase in that support. We're asking for about $100 million a year. That will enable us to create and build out that ecosystem to ensure that we're giving the opportunity to every entrepreneur who needs it.
Half of our members are CFs, and right now, ISED is creating a barrier for our members to even use their loan portfolios to access our loan. ISED helped us create it, but it's preventing our members from having access to it. Therefore, we need some help to have the minister allow CFs—community futures development corporations—to access our growth fund.
Thank you.