You mentioned that right from pre-school we all know the deplorable conditions our communities are under with respect to the entire education systems that have long produced troubles for our community members.
I'll come back to the thrust of my discussion this morning. Part of our agreements create wealth for our communities. This wealth is being driven back by our leadership into scholarship programs, into post-secondary funding, into access to the programs and jobs at the higher level, the value-added jobs. That's where we want to be too. The blue-collar work is fine. We certainly take every advantage of all the job opportunities available. However, it's our goal to have our folks sitting in the boardrooms and at the executive positions within the mining companies.
The other thing that our agreements do is open those opportunities to our communities. We have direct conversations with those mining companies about how our folks can participate at the executive level. For the most part, those companies are encouraging us to do that. I think it looks extremely good for the industry if they can promote indigenous participation at the highest levels of their management.
We work closely with the training institutions, both universities and colleges. Through federal grants and programs, we could perhaps amend the systems to include special access programs for first nations citizens looking to access mining programs. We have the Haileybury mining school located close to our communities. There may be a way to connect us to training institutions.
I think there are a number of opportunities, again driven through a direct conversation between our communities and the industry.