First and foremost, we are a public education organization. If we are unsuccessful in reaching out to a larger audience, we would be failing our mandate. So you're entirely right.
Our organization is only six weeks old, but our merging organizations and programs are 12 years old. Our programs are better known than our organizations. It speaks to the very nature of what we do. Every week, approximately 130 young people participate in Encounters Canada. Since 1982, 80,000 young people have taken part in the program. More than 3,000 youths participate each year. The Memory Project reaches out to approximately 175,000 students in their classrooms each year. This year, we will be breaking the one million mark, and will have reached out to over a million young people. Since 2001, one million young people have been visited, in their classroom, by a veteran. Without the program, those visits would never have taken place. The Heritage Minutes were broadcast for more than 10 years, and reached out to millions and millions of Canadians. The work that we carry out on public opinion research is published in newspapers, broadcast on television, and reaches out to several million television viewers and readers.
Do we get the recognition in return? That's our challenge. Nonetheless, the array of our programs reaches out to thousands of Canadians; some of them reach out to millions of Canadians throughout the country, in each province and territory. Therefore, you are right; but our work does reach out to a broad audience.