We can get back to the issue of costs.
The Assemblée communautaire fransaskoise is a community-level governing entity. It is composed of 15 members, elected from each one of the communities, and a president elected by universal suffrage. I think we are the only community-based structure in a minority setting to operate this way. We are leading this movement or this way of operating outside Quebec, among francophones.
I am here with Mr. Denis Desgagné, Director General of the ACF. We will both be available to answer your questions.
Following the adoption of the Dion Plan, the Franco-Saskatchewanian community made great progress. We took on many projects which were successful. We work on a whole range of issues in several sectors, with target groups, to ensure community development in the global sense of the word. For instance, we work with the sectors of health care and immigration which are growing increasingly more important, early childhood, on the creation of bilingual companies and government services and at the provincial and federal levels. We also work on enhancing our community's image, marketing it and raising awareness of it with government and the anglophone community. Those are the sectors we are working on and within which we had success over the last few years.
We have also focused a great deal on new approaches to reach our goals. I am referring to the merging of services as well as to our work within community organizations in order to make them as effective as possible, reduce costs and make better use of very limited resources. The Coalition pour la promotion de la langue française et de la culture francophone en Saskatchewan, mainly, works on outreach.
Increasingly we work in partnerships. We have gone beyond simply asserting our rights and we are now attempting to establish partnerships with all community partners and those that affect our community, in order to be as effective as possible.
We find ourselves in a difficult position in all of these areas. We need to take action in new areas of interest and sometimes it can be difficult for us to take action in some areas because of a lack of capacity. Obviously, we have recently had to deal with some budget cuts. I am referring for instance to the Innovation Fund and to the Dion Plan.
These cuts and our increasing work load have put a serious strain on financial and human resources, and this is of great concern to us. We wonder about our capacity to respond to meet the needs and to establish partnerships with those who have the greatest impact on our community's development.
I wanted to mention this because it is something we all have to address over the coming years. There is still a great deal to be done, and a great deal of resources will be needed to do this.
We have also focused much of our energy on establishing community service centres. In the past, we worked to establish cultural centres in Saskatchewan and have moved towards community school centres. I was discussing the matter with Mr. Murphy from New Brunswick a moment ago. We have community school centres in Saskatchewan, but given the increase in our workload and the request for services from Franco-Saskatchewanians we have had to move towards what we refer to as service centres, which bring together government, community and association partners to do two things: first, meet the increased need for services; and second, meet the service delivery needs.
It goes both ways.