The organization started in 2000 out of the archdiocese centre in Ottawa with a working group for the poor. They were looking at how they could help situations for the poor. Everything fed back to housing: food bank usage, higher amounts of hospital usage.... All of these things come back to that one piece—housing—but it's also the most expensive piece to fix.
They decided to tackle it, but they decided to tackle it by engaging other faith groups to work on it. We have eight working committees. We have 80 to 100 core volunteers who work in our organization every month and who really do a lot of the heavy lifting, which helps us to keep all of our costs down.
They come to us through these faith groups. We have 70 faith groups in the City of Ottawa that have memberships with us: Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Baha'i, Sikh—I'm sure I'm forgetting some—and Unitarian. We have the whole gamut and they come in and do the work. That's how we originated. It has nothing to do with our tenants. The tenants have no religious or affiliation requirement to be in our units. These groups are just where we get our volunteers from.