In our entrepreneurship programming, the contribution agreement spells out a range of reporting requirements, so the quarterly claims come in and annual reports come in, which allow our officers to do a paper review. Then we have ongoing engagement with our recipients, so those are phone calls and regular meetings to get an understanding of what the challenges and opportunities are.
We will often bring the recipients together under an initiative. For example, the Black entrepreneurship initiative—the knowledge hub of which is at Carleton—will bring all the ecosystem recipients together for information exchange, learning, lessons and best practices. We are there, talking with them directly during the meeting, and in the hallways as well, to try to better understand the issues.
The reporting is the ultimate.... They have to account for the number of services and the diversity of clients they have, and that gives us a full accounting.