Good morning, everyone. My name is Dorothy Williams.
I am here today to share with the committee some of the issues we face at our organization. I'm program director at the Black Community Resource Centre. I have worked there since 2007 and have seen the organization through ups and downs. As program director, I function as a project manager, office manager, grant writer, and community liaison person. This entails finding funding, developing and writing projects, reporting, hiring, supervising, and networking.
It is a challenge to build a viable community organization within a struggling, underserved minority community. BCRC is unique amongst other black organizations in the city because our lens is on the entire community rather than on the concerns of the immediate district we live in.
We, and by that I mean specifically myself, spend a lot of time looking at the larger issues that impact blacks on the island, indeed throughout Quebec. It is incumbent upon me, at that point, to look for models and programming that can try to ameliorate or address these global issues. I would say that most of our engagements, particularly networking, revolve around such larger roles and issues. Like other functioning black associations, or BCAs, as we call them, we strive for the betterment of the members in our community.
The BCAs include BCRC and ethnic and fraternal organizations. All of us face challenges. Some of those challenges are systemic and endemic, due to the unique cultural differences, the diverse ethnic origins, and the multilingual make-up of the various black communities in Quebec. In our case, as an official language minority community organization—OLMC—BCRC must also deal with several other distinct challenges. Some are actually roadblocks to our quest to create a forward-looking, vibrant community landscape. Specifically, we find ourselves living from paycheque to paycheque, or, in our case, from project funding to project funding.
What this means for BCRC is that we cannot, despite our best intentions, really engage in long-term initiatives. Sure, we have our own five-year plan where we've identified key strategic areas crying out for intervention. We're not fooling ourselves. The systemic issues, such as social exclusion, racial profiling, job insertion, underemployment, education, health access, etc., all require long-term concerted program interventions.
Unfortunately, without core funding, in a given year we're able to address only those issues where funding is available. The lack of core funding also means that the development of non-profit human resources is retarded. We spend an enormous amount of time training volunteers and project staff. However, the payoff for organizations like BCRC is immediate but of limited duration, as we have to release them, particularly staff, when projects are terminated.
Concomitant with engaging staff for projects, their hourly wage is tied to project funding, yet they are implicated in the resolution of BCRC's long-term strategic areas. This knowledge transfer and expertise that we build up is sadly lost when this young staff is terminated or they transfer to higher-paying, more secure jobs. This is a waste of resources, human and financial, all the while slowing down our own internal capacity building.
Another area of concern, and certainly one requiring a full review, is that OLMCs are not rewarded for success. By this, I mean when we have identified and facilitated a successful program in the community, funding rules prohibit repeat funding. Even in our case, when a project has been evaluated as successful, the participant and stakeholder feedback is sometimes off the chart, but there is no chance that it will be funded again unless it is modified to fit within some criteria in another program. I've seen the results of failed projects treated much the same as successful projects, with little regard or interest in maintaining successful interventions in the community. Why? Because the success of projects is solely tied to the project's immediate results, which we meet, but not to the long-term overarching need to have sufficient funding in order to ameliorate social, cultural, and economic outcomes, or to fill a gap, or to enable communities to be sustainable, and this is a goal of BCRC.
Funding in Canada is silo-based. For real change to happen, this type of funding must derive from diverse sources.
Our organization addresses multiple issues from a more global perspective. We call it the holistic approach. Our youth and their families are often waylaid by more than one problem at a time. Difficulties they face in one area tend to be magnified because there are additional overlapping problems in other areas. For instance, if your family has lived in poverty for decades, it is unlikely you will have networks to acquire meaningful employment, be knowledgeable about health access, or have acquired sufficient economic capital for educational empowerment or entrepreneurial initiatives.
Such access is taken for granted when one has access to a certain level of household income. Underserved youth may need long-term mentoring or coaching, or just a push in some cases. Any support that is offered needs to take into account the totality of the individual, their protective factors, their characters, their environment, and such. You don't put people on their feet just by giving them better health access. You need to assist them in multiple ways from multiple perspectives at the same time.
I mentioned earlier that in a given year we were able to address only those issues when funding is available. This brings to mind another issue about funding, and it is that organizations like mine, that serve unique, isolated populations where there is an issue that we identify, often have to wait until new funding streams come on board, even though we may see these new issues bubbling under the surface. Because we must respond only to those priorities identified years earlier—for instance, 2008, the previous road map that we're in now—we find ourselves having to shelve some ideas because they just don't quite fit the volet.
The road map needs to ensure that funding is pertinent: it is sensitive and encourages the push towards building stronger and sustainable communities, and, by doing so, building stronger and relevant organizations. That is why, Chairman, I invited Gemma Raeburn-Baynes of Playmas Montreal, because she is a partner with BCRC in this drive that we have here in Montreal and to represent the organizations that BCRC supports.