That's correct.
From our beginnings, people came around a kitchen table to create Vancity in 1946, to pool their money together because at that time the banks weren't lending east of Main Street. They just pooled their money together to lend to one person and created it. Ever since then, that's how Vancity has operated.
The one thing we do work on with governments is to help them execute on their mandates. We've worked in the past with Western Economic Diversification Canada to be able to exercise their mandate to be effective because it aligns to our mission. So we could work in partnership and say if you were trying to get access to put this money out and provide it as a safeguard to make loans that otherwise wouldn't be made in places, we could help you do that and execute that. In fact, anytime we've done that in partnership we've shown a return. They haven't had to spend those pools of money that they've put aside because we have such trust in the community in the way we do it and we are able to do it at a much lower cost. So it saves government money, at the end of the day, by doing it, and a lot of it we just adopt as our normal practice.
We've partnered where appropriate, but we don't get it directly. It's our members or the community at large that would get the benefit of those types of things.
We've done other things on partnership around social housing issues, etc., but we work with agencies, not getting money for ourselves.
So absolutely, we're a product of self-funded.
I think that's the issue I wanted to raise as well with social enterprises—the way to transition. There's a transition period we have to consider here. What we're granting now is provided to a lot these entities or social services. They were given by government. There's a way to wean them off that, but you have to have the right structure in place. This is where we believe that social enterprise, the social cooperatives, can play a big role. There's probably a transition period when they take great pride in being self-sufficient and viable.
Atira Women's Resource Society in Vancouver is a great example of this. We've worked with them from the beginning, originally granting, etc., and now they run their own enterprises to self-fund their operations. They have hired women who used to be clients or participants, who would otherwise be in their shelters, and now have them working for them.
These are the types of innovations that get created in social cooperatives that help fuel them in the future without government money.