With my 25 years' experience, I honestly believe that governments, for years and years and years, just keep doing the same thing, keep doing a lot of the same things over again in looking at social issues. It's not just provincial; it's federal also. They are often scared to ask the tough questions. As was just presented, they don't want to embarrass their minister. They don't want to embarrass anybody. Oftentimes it comes at the expense of young people.
I have a story I'd like to share. It's really quick. One mom who came into Sweet Dreams was gang-involved, and her child was in care with a family member. She had an addiction to crystal meth and suffered from severe anxiety. Today she's a functioning member of the community who has completed treatment, attends school daily, works with counsellors, attends play therapy with her son regularly, and is a mentor to her peers. Since coming into the program, she's acquired her driver's licence, bought a vehicle, and has worked diligently to build trust and to repair damaged relationships with her family and with her community.
When I heard the first presentation, I was taken aback. With our program and with these kids, we need that motivation. We spend billions and billions of dollars trying to help those who don't really want help, yet we're scared to help, or we don't want to really invest in, those who need help to help deal with what they need to deal with. They want to become contributing citizens. We're sometimes so often chasing our tails.
We got a lot of flak from government because we used the motivational approach versus an assessment. It was actually one of our investors who said, “You can't use these assessments. They're disrespectful to women.” It was all negative and about why they took their children.
To go back to the first presentation, it was kind of interesting when they were talking about knitting classes. I have pictures. I'm sorry that I only made three copies.
The initial investment in the social impact bond was $1 million, and now the total investment is worth about $3.5 million with the day care. It's kind of cute. We have an action to employment program that works with young people, and we have young people who provide services to seniors. It gets no government funding, but a lot of these young women went into the homes when we were doing the renovations on the old part, because we didn't have any funding for the old part except for community people like Home Depot. They came in and they ripped out the flooring and they did the painting. That's the thing with a lot of our thinking on women and indigenous women, and I see that all the time: our expectations are really low on what their possibilities are. They should be taking the same thing as men. You know what? We had these kids working in this house for about seven months. Two of them went into trades school. They wanted to be carpenters.
I don't know if I answered your questions. I get off the target sometimes; sorry.