Well, it's interesting. You can do two things as a government. One is that you can decide that you have all the solutions and only fund people according to a fixed amount. That has not served children very well in a diverse context across the country. The other is that you can do something different--that is, you can look at the particular needs of the children within the context of their family to find out what their concept of a healthy child is and then determine how you achieve that within the context of that community and that culture. Then you fund not by program, but by principle.
We are working with the British Columbia government on something called the Touchstones of Hope project. It's a project that involves working with first nations communities for their own visions of what healthy children and families are. We actually get all the community members into a hall, including the children themselves, as well as elders, youth, and parents, and we vision out what a healthy child is and what a healthy family is, because remember: one of the things that was taken from us during colonization was our ability to dream for our own children. Governments dreamt for us, and we've all seen the consequences of that, but here we are calling on communities to vision again what a healthy child is and what a healthy family is in their community, to identify the indicators of that and to look at the now, and then to look at what resources are needed to go forward.
The Province of British Columbia, I have to say, is a regular bureaucracy, much like your governments are, but they were convinced that having 80% of the children in care who are first nations in that region was no longer acceptable. It was a reason to break the rules as we had done. Now they're looking at funding those plans not according to what the Government of British Columbia thinks is a good idea for everybody; they're looking at funding those particular community plans on the basis of principle, which allows consistency across government funding but also allows for innovation at a community level that makes sense.
The Touchstone principles are these: a respect for self-determination, culture, and language; holistic response, which means working with the child not only at his or her age level, but across ages and within a context of their family, community, and nation; structural interventions, which means dealing with the factors that are beyond the ability of parents to control on their own; and non-discrimination, which we've been talking a lot about today.
That is going very well, actually. They are two years into this project. So far, the British Columbia government has noticed that we haven't quite got the number of children going into care tailing off, so we still have more work to do there, but what's happening is that the children are going home much sooner.
Why is that? Well, before, you would have four child protection workers squirreled away in an office trying to manage the situation. Now you have 100 or 200 people who came out to the session and who can now see a role for themselves as community members and as citizens to be actively engaged in the well-being of those children, and they are definitely stepping up to the plate.
We are not seeing, in any way, first nations communities sweeping under the carpet some of the real concerns in communities. In fact, we are seeing an unbelievably vital determination to conquer those, to embrace our own accountability, and to move forward. However, the underfunding by government is a definite barrier, and it needs to be addressed.