We, as individual members and WEOC, our organization, have entered projects into the competition for dollars under the women's entrepreneurship strategy, which I'm sure you're aware of, into which the government has put $1.7 billion, I think, for the development of women's enterprises. We're very grateful for that.
Right across the country, each of our organizations, as well as WEOC as the umbrella organization, have developed project proposals that are in the arena of trade support, additional peer mentorship opportunities, training advisory services, increased lending, and a whole slew of interventions that we have found, in our own organizations in the 20 or 25 years that we've been around, have been very effective and which we have not had the full resources we needed to completely develop. We're in waiting mode to see what the outcomes of some of these projects are. They're highly competitive and oversubscribed, so we're hoping that our organizations, which have a proven track record and certainly a great deal of deep experience in this area, will have the opportunity to develop additional supports to actually meet that requirement to double the number of women in enterprises, because it is certainly an under-resourced sector.
I would also add that the work we're doing as WEOC, the umbrella organization, could be very helpful in this area as well, because whereas for many of the mainstream organizations, such as Community Futures and others, there is a national membership, a national association, to help provide the glue to pull them together to share best practices, etc., our women's enterprise organization is a volunteer organization with essentially no funding to do that.
I would ask that if any of you who have any influence at all in this are could put your names on a list and give us a boost in this area, we would be more than grateful because we are definitely the tools to make this happen.