Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you today.
As you mentioned, my name is Anna Marenick and I am the director of community relations and value proposition here at Irving Shipbuilding.
Irving Shipbuilding is one company in the J.D. Irving group of companies, with 15,000 employees across its divisions. Most of our businesses are in traditional space: forestry and forest products, construction, transportation, shipbuilding, and marine, are some examples.
JDI is committed to increasing the number of women in STEM careers. We are investing in not only entry level jobs but in advancement of women throughout our organizations. A woman currently leads our white pine lumber operation, the largest of its kind in North America, and the president of Engineers Nova Scotia is a technical director here at Irving Shipbuilding.
Today I want to focus a little bit on some work we're doing at Irving Shipbuilding. It's something called the Irving Shipbuilding Centre of Excellence.
In 2012, following the 2011 award of the combat vessel package under the national shipbuilding procurement strategy, Irving Shipbuilding began a partnership with Nova Scotia Community College to build something called the Irving Shipbuilding Centre of Excellence. We are investing $250,000 annually at NSCC over the life of the NSPS with the mandate of the centre being to create pathways and opportunities for Nova Scotians to participate in shipbuilding with a specific focus on under-represented groups: women, African Canadians, aboriginal persons, and persons with disabilities. Currently women represent 4% of Irving Shipbuilding's trades workforce, a small number to be sure, so this investment sets out deliberately to change that.
From the outset the community told us clearly that this 30-year investment in shipbuilding was something they saw as game changing. The long term nature of NSPS allowed us really to critically examine what barriers existed for under-represented groups to get into STEM.
The centre of excellence is managed by a steering committee with representation from industry, provincial government, academia, organized labour from Unifor, and community representatives like Doreen Parsons who's here with me, and you'll hear from her momentarily.
The phrase we heard again and again from the community was to build this with them in collaborative partnership. Initially, I will tell you, this was met with incredibly great skepticism. While the community felt strongly that capitalizing on NSPS and its impact on Nova Scotians was important, they also worried that no tangible outcomes would materialize. This would be yet another committee, yet another report, and another make-work project. But the time horizon in front of the opportunity was such that we could really take our time to get it right.
In 2014 we held a full-day strategic planning session and we identified three main areas for focus. The first one, and I know the one that Doreen will talk about more, is early pathways to create an environment where women and other under-represented groups could even see themselves in a trade like this. What are the barriers that preclude STEM careers from even being an option for under-represented communities? These barriers existed long before jobs were advertised. This is why, from my perspective in industry, it's critical to have partners in the community who can help identify those barriers and work to overcome them.
The second area of focus is moving to learning to make sure that we are creating a diverse and inclusive learning environment. The third focuses on the workplace itself is to ensure that the workplace is appropriately welcoming for a diverse and blended population.
From that strategic planning session we began our first funding activities. We fund an organization called Techsploration, which works with grade nine girls in Nova Scotia schools to introduce them to mentors in STEM careers. The centre of excellence funded five schools from diverse communities to participate in the Techsploration program.
We are funding 12 two-year bursaries to Nova Scotians from diverse backgrounds to attend NSCC in shipbuilding trades with several teacher investments to come later on this year. But most notably is our partnership with Women Unlimited, a very established program in Nova Scotia that you will hear about more in a moment.
As we speak, 20 diverse women are sitting in a classroom at NSCC on a targeted path for employment at Irving Shipbuilding. You will hear specifics in a moment. Through the centre of excellence, participants in this program receive bursary funding for up to 50% of their tuition costs.
After we made the announcement that the centre of excellence would fund 50% of the women's cost of tuition, two other worker partners voluntarily came forward to support these women, one to support the other 50% of their tuition and the other to cover all of their program-related tools and equipment. These were unsolicited requests and, to me, go to show that there are lots of organizations who want to do more work in this space and who recognize that getting more women into trade careers benefits us all.
This $250,000 investment is one that Irving Shipbuilding will make over the life of the contract in support of increasing diversity in our workforce. Changing buildings and processes are one thing, but changing the lives of 20 women and 20 families in Nova Scotia is game changing, like the communities said in the beginning.
I will also say that getting to this point took several years of hard, dedicated work. Under-representation in any career and fixing that is complicated. We worked hard at creating an environment at the centre of excellence steering table where everyone felt comfortable being honest with each other, to support the same end goal.
I'm quite sure this work won't always be easy, but our position is that having good partners at the table, doing it collaboratively, is the only way it will work. Experienced partners are and will continue to be at the centre of this strategy.
Now I'm going to turn it over to Doreen.