Sure. We have Status of Women funding for—and it's ridiculous that I don't have the exact numbers at my fingertips—a three-year program, I believe. It's a substantial piece of funding. What we are doing is creating a mentorship network. There are two broad components to it. One is creating a site that I'd describe as having sort of a little bit LinkedIn, a little bit Facebook, and an awful lot of what I've described as “SCWIST love” in it. It's an online place where men and women can sign up to have conversations around skills.
The notion we started out with was to have mentors connected to mentees. We realized that is actually not what people wanted. People wanted to be both mentors and mentees. Having that unidirectional passing of wisdom was not what people wanted. What they wanted to do was to share skills. The website, which is up now at makepossible.ca, is an opportunity for people to sign on, choose their skills—skills they have, skills they want—and connect with others around skills they want to share with each other. I'm biased, but I think it's beautiful. It has a pretty darn good population on it already, considering that it just went into beta within the last few months. It's a brand new website. There was an awful lot of work done on the front end, trying to figure out what people wanted that would be different from what already exists and challenging some of our own assumptions, like the mentor-mentee relationship, challenging our own assumptions about what was required.
I think this is another thing that was a little bit of a surprise. The other part of that funding has supported a number of face-to-face workshops and workshop series. We have an HR inclusion workshop coming up to talk about HR professionals, about ways to combat bias, really high-quality stuff that's brought to us by the WinSETT Centre. We're working with it. Because we are able to do these sort of face-to-face mini-conference or workshop opportunities, it's a way to actually build capacity in terms of mentorship, having conversations about women in diverse fields, or gender diversity in various fields, I guess, in general. So the other piece of it is the face-to-face component.
Given how many mentorship programs there are, and how many girls in science and girls in tech programs there are—so many of them—the long span of the program and the substance of it, has allowed us to partner with other groups and to really figure out who those partnerships are. WWEST, west coast women in engineering, science, and technology, the local NSERC chair in women in science and engineering.... We've been able to pull all those groups together and collaborate on projects. The data sheets that I keep flipping to are a co-production with WWEST. The workshops are a co-production with the people at WinSETT. The SCWIST outreach programs are plugged into Make Possible. We have a networking evening, a huge one, for undergraduate women, and it's plugged into the Make Possible network as well. That's what the funding has allowed us to do: integrate locally. It would be awesome if we could integrate in a larger way. I think we'd be able to share best practices a lot better.