You're absolutely right that child care is a huge issue, but all of self-employment or employment benefits are an issue for women entrepreneurs as well. The more we can extend those to women who are in unconventional career roles, the better because we're going to see more of them and we have to encourage that. Absolutely, we have to go in that direction.
We co-fund with BDC. So if a young person comes to us and makes an application for one of our loans, which doesn't require any collateral—they don't need to have a house or anything like that—BDC will piggyback on that loan application. Consequently, with one loan application a young person can get up to $45,000 without collateral. BDC couldn't do that without our doing that initial step. They are now co-funding over 65% of our loans, and last year we helped almost 1,100 businesses launch. Over 40% were led by women.
I spoke earlier to a campaign we've done to reach out to women to say that we're here to help you. With Futurpreneur, BDC has been a wonderful partner in that. They have really put themselves out as saying that they want to do more for women and that they are there to do that.
The final thing you spoke to was leveraging. Federal support has been huge for us, but we've leveraged it both to get support from BDC and the private sector. We're interested in leveraging existing capital. So we use our federal support to get a line of credit from a private bank and we're able to tap into private sector capital that wouldn't otherwise be going to women or other young entrepreneurs.