There are a number of different programs, but in the last number of months, our focus by and large has been on ending violence against women, and, more specifically, targeting vulnerable women, that is, aboriginal women and girls, and women in our immigrant and refugee communities.
We've done that by doing outreach, not only by announcing funding in these particular areas. We're also doing outreach and targeting these communities and asking them to come forward. Whether it's by holding round tables or by Status of Women officials going into regions to meet with different women's organizations, we are proactively asking them to come forward.
We've also changed the way in which we evaluate our projects. I mentioned in my opening remarks that we're moving to a continuous intake process. The reason for this is that a lot of women's organizations have very little capacity. Many of them are run by volunteers and don't have large budgets. Putting together complex proposals can be very challenging for them, so we have changed to a continuous intake process, which allows the officials to work on an ongoing basis with women's organizations to address some of the challenges they have in putting forward proposals to the Government of Canada.
This allows us to work with them and not just shut the door on a particular project. We help them along, giving them concrete advice on how to shape their proposals. In the end, we all have the same goal, which is to support good, solid projects that will provide services to women and girls across this country. That change has been very successful.
As you know, we have our three priorities of ending violence against women, encouraging economic security, and promoting leadership in women and girls. Those are the three target areas that we have been focused on.
As I mentioned, recently we opened up a new way in which we're looking at projects. It's called the blueprint project and has been incredibly successful. We just announced it a short time ago and already have about 320 proposals for projects in front of us. This specifically asks women's organizations to come forward with projects that increase the recruitment of women in non-traditional work; that retain and promote women in non-traditional and under-represented sectors, such as construction, engineering, and science and technology; and that increase women's involvement as decision-makers in community-based organizations.
As I said, these projects provide organizations with just another way in which they can come forward and another funding mechanism to allow them another opportunity to access funding from the Government of Canada. We're trying to be innovative and we're trying to be flexible, and we have found ways to do that in the last number of months. We're seeing a huge uptake from women's organizations.
I think these changes have been positive. They've been well received and successful. We'll continue to find ways to be innovative and to adapt these kinds of ready-made ideas so that we can accept more good ideas from women's groups.