We don't fund individuals. If somebody were to come to us and saying that they need funding because their child has special needs, we aren't set up to do that kind of evaluation. In that case we would provide the money to the Military Families Fund, which has staff who have certain criteria for determining eligibility. They also have a good sense of the need across the country in that particular area, so they can figure out a fair way of distributing the money such that they don't give it all to one person with nothing left for anybody else.
As to our process for funding the various charities, we have a couple of specific funds. One is called the Bell True Patriot Love fund. It's a partnership that we have with Bell Canada whereby every year we provide a quarter of a million dollars to community-based mental health programs that support veterans and their families. These can be anywhere in the country. We put out a call for applications. We go through all the military family resources centres. We put it online. We have done advertising in some of the military magazines. Any organization, provided they have charitable status, can apply for funding for that.
I would say that about half of it ends up in programs through the military family resource centres. There are other programs completely outside of this that receive funding too. We're always looking for more of these to come in, because we think it's an important area to fund. So there's that.
We also have a program with Scotiabank. It's a similar type of program. The focus there is specifically upon ill and injured veterans—less on the family piece and more on the veteran. We fund some of the adaptive ski programs through that program. We also do some of the mental health programs through it.
There is an Outward Bound program for veterans. There is the Veterans Transition Network, which is a program run out of UBC around the country now. There's the Prince's Operation Entrepreneur. We have set applications for those. Then generally speaking, we also run a general application process at some point during the year, when anybody can submit. The criteria are online, and there is a form to fill out. Usually it involves some telephone conversations too, just to get a better sense.
We try to work hard, because many of these are small organizations and don't have a lot of resources to put together applications. We're quite happy to work with the organizations on their applications too, to help make them successful.