Thanks, Marc.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and members, for being here today.
The Memory Project is a program that's closest to my heart. I started the institute about five years ago, working with our veterans. It had its own kind of humble beginnings. The Memory Project started in Toronto with about 12 veterans who were concerned with the erosion of historical memory when it came to our military history in classrooms. They felt that the opportunity for them to go out into classrooms and share their personal stories, their unique experiences, with young people was a really important way to connect with young people and to really complement the existing curriculum, going forward, with what they already had to learn with regard especially to the Second World War.
It became our flagship program when it started around 2001, with again about 12 veterans. It has since grown to about 1,500 right across the country. We've been represented in hundreds of communities in every province across the country, and nearly one million Canadians, over the past nine years. We're anticipating probably sometime in early fall, in the next school year, the one-millionth young person will host a veteran in a classroom, which we feel is a remarkable achievement. We hope that the students from seven or eight years ago who are now in university and even getting a little older...and at one point in the future, the children of the first high school students who hosted veterans may hear veterans 15 or 20 years from now.
In 2005 we continued to have a very strong partnership with the Royal Canadian Legion, and the Memory Project became the official in-school speakers' bureau of the Royal Canadian Legion. So the important partnership that we have with the Legion allows us to go to just about every community across Canada and encourage local Legion members to join the program as speakers, and then to also include their network of schools in communities all across Canada.
Our veteran volunteers are made up of just about every conflict and experience that Canadian military servicemen and servicewomen have experienced over the last 65 years, going from the Second World War to the Korean War, UN peacekeepers, Cold War era veterans, all the way up to those men and women who have recently returned from Afghanistan. They go into schools and share their stories, which are very recent--a year or two ago--with young people in a similar way as we have our Second World War and our Korean War veterans do that.
We facilitate over 700 veteran visits every year, again to probably about 300 communities, and it seems that every year we get more requests from teachers and more interested veterans to take part. So we know we're doing something right.
The federal government has been a very important partner and funder of ours over the years, to the tune of over $1.2 million from Veterans Affairs Canada and another $500,000 to $600,000 from the Department of Canadian Heritage, to ensure that we not only encourage veterans to go into the schools, but also train them and hold orientation or training sessions to discuss what's working and what's not working in classrooms. We also prepare them and provide them with some tips and suggestions on how to do their talk effectively.
The Memory Project digital archive was a spinoff of the speakers' bureau, where we encourage veterans to share their stories and artifacts with us to create a legacy project that could live on in classrooms and in communities for many years to come. Currently, we have over 1,000 oral history testimonials from veterans and more than 5,000 artifacts, like photographs, letters, and medals, that we've scanned and digitized. They're online at our website, where we know over the past number of years schools have been visiting to do projects on veterans from their local community. We're hoping in the future to make a real commitment to be able to record and digitize the memories and the artifacts of any veteran who wants to do so, so that we know their memories will live on for generations to come.