Yes, thank you.
I thank you for your insight into the ongoing issues and concerns that I think all of us face with typically limited blocks of funding for short-term projects. We all recognize what needs to be done. I think the first step in order to accomplish anything is sustainable funding. This happens on the front lines every day. We can trace this back to the lack of trust that has come out of the residential schools, that's come out of colonialization.
We just establish programs, be it safe shelters or be it education programs, and we gain the trust of the community members to take part in it, to begin their healing journey, when the money dries up and we have to start again. Each time we have to literally reinvent the same wheel, it takes away the trust that the people in the communities have in organizations, in the government as a whole, because there's not that stability.
We can relate that back to various funding opportunities that have been out there, particularly recently, with the announcement of the cut to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. With the amount of work that went into creating the reputation and the successfulness of that project, which is now gone, we're hearing people in our communities say it didn't take five years to create the problems we have today and it's going to take a lot longer than five years to fix them.
When, as aboriginal peoples, as indigenous peoples, we have been put aside historically as lower class citizens, the impacts of having funding opportunities and program sustainability taken away from us has a much deeper effect than what I think we believe to happen on the surface. So it's not only bringing the money in but keeping the sustainability of programs going.
Be it money for shelters, be it money for education programs in the schools, it has to be ongoing. That's the only way we are truly going to be able to bring about a difference in abuse, in missing and murdered children, in family violence. We need that sustainability.