Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My thanks to the members of the committee for being here today.
My name is Cynthia Huard and I am the president of the Institut Guy-Lacombe de la famille. I am also the mother of three girls, who are one, three and five years old.
To lighten my presentation, I will use the acronym IGLF to designate the Institute. That's what we use in the community. Our mission is to help families in Alberta make the most of their knowledge, skills and abilities in French in order to achieve wellness. On a daily basis, we are referred to as a parental support centre, and we work directly with children aged zero to five, as well as with their parents. We are also working with school-aged children, but for today, I will focus on the early childhood services we provide.
Our mandate is to provide families with support that targets their growth, be it personal, social, cultural, identity-related or linguistic. We also provide training in parenting skills. We have a resource centre and a wonderful francophone library. We are working to integrate and reintegrate French in the home in terms of identity and culture. We are also doing some significant work on developing the sense of belonging, and promoting mental and physical health. We work in all these areas on a daily basis.
Since we are now dealing with the mandate issue, let me take this opportunity to highlight some facts. Unlike our anglophone counterparts at the Parent Link Centres, which have more than 50 centres across the province, we only have two parent support centres to work with francophone families. Our organization has a dual mandate. Let me explain what I mean by that.
Like all the Parent Link Centres, we need to provide support and resources to families with children who are five and under. So we are talking about a wide range of programs, activities, parenting skills workshops, child development questionnaires, and so on. We work in many areas.
However, our linguistic situation as a minority group also makes us work hard to transmit the culture and language, and to develop a sense of belonging to the francophone culture. We therefore have a dual mandate. However, the second part of the mandate—the transmission of language and culture—is not officially recognized by the provincial government. We receive no additional funding for this second mandate. In addition, the grant we receive from the Ministry of Children's Services at the provincial level is pretty much the same as for all other English-language parent support centres.
Furthermore, since our organization was recognized as a parental support centre by the provincial government, the government has put in place a moratorium on the creation of such centres. For 10 years, the province has created no new parental support centres. It goes without saying that this moratorium hinders the expansion of our services. As you know—Mr. Nolette talked about it—the francophone population is growing in Alberta. In 10 years, many things have changed and the needs are not what they used to be.
For your information, last year, the IGLF provided services to approximately 2,500 individual participants. This year, we hope to see this figure exceed the 3,000 mark. While we are very proud of those numbers, we know that, unfortunately, we are reaching only a minority of francophone children in Edmonton and the neighbouring communities. We do not want to leave out other families, but unfortunately, for lack of resources, both financial and human, we cannot provide them with the high-quality services they deserve.
Anglophone families all have a parental support centre nearby. There are in fact Parent Link Centres in almost every ward in Edmonton. In contrast, francophone families only have access to two centres in the entire province, one in Edmonton and the other in Calgary. The IGLF hopes to expand in the capital itself to reach out to those francophone families, across the city of Edmonton. Unfortunately, many of them are penalized because our services are centralized in one single centre.
I would also like to add that the IGLF is really at the heart of the community, as we work hand in hand with schools and daycares. We want to become the reference of choice for parents who do not know where to turn. Through our parenting workshops, parents feel supported and listened to, and we find that those workshops have a direct impact on children.
Do I still have time?