Yes, these initiatives are taking place in almost every mosque in every province across the country, and we are aware of all of them and are helping each other do these activities. This idea actually came to me from other communities who were doing that. We had never held these types of activities in Regina before. So we are coming forward and making sure that this dialogue and cooperation and instruction is happening and that we maintain an open forum of communication.
My husband is a psychiatrist, as I have mentioned, and he will be at the town hall as a panel member asking community members to talk to him if they have concerns about any things that are happening. We have noticed over the years a larger group of converts coming to our community than we've ever had before. They tend to come from communities that are more vulnerable. This is something new for us that we have not had to deal with in the past. They feel like they're trying to look for some purpose or for some meaning. Our mosques were not set up as social service entities. They were set up as places where our kids learned Arabic on the weekend and learned Islam.
Suddenly having this new group of people enter our communities is posing challenges, so what we are trying to do is to form social service community networks within our mosque system so that we can network with the wider social service networks in our provinces and our cities so that we can prevent tragedies such as we saw with the Ottawa shooter. He he had gone to a Canadian mosque and the mosque had recognized that there was a problem and had to change the locks to prevent him from disrupting the community. We realize that it was the best that mosque could have done at the time, and I do not blame the mosque, but we need to be more proactive. So if that ever happens to us again, we need to find those vulnerable individuals more help so these tragedies don't occur in the future.