We do, absolutely, through the federal opportunities fund. As part of our model in Sarnia, we have a pre-employment workshop called jobPath. It assists people with a disability to.... Because many people who have a disability have never worked, there's a certain amount of trying to figure out what they're good at, career exploration and those sorts of things.
We also really focus on employability skills or the “how not to get fired” skills. It allows us as a service provider to get to really know people in order to make good job matches. When you're working with the business community, that's really what it's all about: making a good job fit for folks.
That's funded through the federal government through the opportunities fund. It has become more difficult as of late because, for 60% of the funding, we're now required to come up with in-kind funding or in-kind donations. That's something that has changed.
What we've been able to do is to get business folks in Sarnia to sign on as partners and say they would hire people without using wage subsidies. In fact, this is where it's really difficult because the majority, if not all, of our employers tell us that they prefer not to use the wage subsidies, and that they don't want the paperwork, the hassle, and all this other business of dealing with them. On the other hand, the way the model is set up, we are actually penalized in terms of our funding if we don't use wage subsidies. That's something again. If we could move away from that....
There is also our summer jobs model. That's the one we went to Vienna with. We were at the United Nations presenting on that one, and we won an award for it. We're funded through the federal summer career placement. We hire college and university students, and the college and university students act as peer role models and mentors. They actually go out and find the jobs for these students who have the disabilities, and then they provide them with supports.
That model is now being adopted in other places in the world and the reason it's so critical is that, as two very important U.S. studies in the last couple have years have stated, the most important indicator for workforce attachment is whether someone with a disability had a summer job or student employment while they were going to school. So it is critical.