Good morning.
The Regional Association of West Quebecers is situated in Gatineau-Aylmer. It's an organization that supports the English-speaking community, providing information and helping to find services in English. I have been with this association for just over a year as the executive director. Much of what is taking place is a new experience for me. It has in some cases been financially challenging.
The Association of West Quebecers, in supporting the English-speaking community, provides what we call a hub of information for this minority community in Quebec, particularly in our region. We do this through our website, which has been enhanced considerably since I arrived a year ago, and also through a quarterly newsletter and biweekly electronic bulletins. These go out to all our members within the whole of the Outaouais. They are also available to the public. By these means, people can find out about activities taking place in the sphere of culture, heritage, education, and opportunities for youth. We also present activities and opportunities originating in the city of Gatineau itself.
We receive our core funding from Canadian Heritage. The relationship we have with Canadian Heritage and its representatives has been immensely positive. I am fairly new to this whole program, and they've been very helpful, very informative, and have had great patience in explaining to me what's required, why it's required, and when it's required. This we appreciate tremendously.
We occasionally run into difficulties. Usually it's in the same areas as Lawrence dePoe indicated. We are a small organization. We are only two people. We are in the position of trying to take on new projects to serve the community, while keeping on top of our reporting responsibilities, ensuring that we do what we say we're going to do and sending in proposals for our core funding for the following year. To balance all that makes for a challenge in time and effectiveness. For me, the executive director, the months of September, October, and November are very much taken up in reporting and applying for funding for next year's core funding program. Because of this, we don't always have the opportunity to look further afield and seek out funding for other projects.
This year we found ourselves in two crunch situations: one at the beginning of our fiscal year, which is the first of April, and another at present, at the beginning of the second six-month period. These are the times when we generally receive our funding. If they are delayed, we have to hold off on projects. Some people might have to dip into their pockets to help us out.
Being a not-for-profit organization, we aren't able to receive a line of credit; we have tried that. The best we've been able to do is receive a credit card from our bank, and the total amount on the credit card is $5,000. That doesn't take us very far between funding cheques, if they are delayed.
What that does for us also is help us to be very creative and think of ways in which we can do things differently in the future so that we have a bit of a cushion and we're not operating in this panic stress mode as we come to the end of one particular funding amount.
One thing that's arisen for us, and the reason we're not able to receive a line of credit, is that we need to provide the bank with collateral. As a not-for-profit organization, we don't have financial collateral. We don't own a building; we rent space.
Again, that puts us in a position of thinking of other avenues to be able to satisfy the bank, or to do something on our own and set up some sort of collateral each year by showing ingenuity and being effective and efficient in what we do. In order to do that, we need to acquire other funds. I don't mean other funds from government groups; we need to do a fundraising campaign on our own. Again, it requires more time and more people power, individual power, to do that.
We also had a problem with bills not paid, which meant our creditors too were sitting there. We're looking less than competent because we're not able to pay our bills, and we lose some credibility.
The only reason we did not at this time find ourselves in exactly the same position as CPF did is that we had a small amount of funding for another project we applied for. That funding came in. While it's reported separately, it does go into the same bank account. It's only because of this that we managed to navigate through the funding issues. To be absolutely precise, if our cheque had been one day later, we would have been in a position where we were not able to cover paycheques for staff.
Again, these are some of the situations we find ourselves in. At the same time, I would like to be very clear that we have been very well supported by Canadian Heritage and the consultants with whom we work. This seems to be a situation that certainly is beyond their individual control.