Yes, absolutely.
When the organization was incorporated and we wrote our five-year strategic plan, which we just came to the end of last year and we're now entering our next strategic plan, one of the main missions was that the organization would always draw funding from Canadians, from corporations, from the charitable sector, essentially because a part of our mission statement was that it is not just the government's responsibility, but also Canada's responsibility to care for these individuals because they have served us. That's certainly something we're going to continue to do.
It's great that the funding from Veterans Affairs Canada is accessible. It's been a huge part of helping us grow across Canada, but a lot of our difficulties in dealing with Veterans Affairs as a service provider are very similar to what Mark has spoken about in terms of the accessibility.
We know that the support is there. In my previous work I've had contact with many fantastic case managers who are well intentioned and want to do well for their clients, but they are hamstrung by a very bureaucratic system that requires a lengthy process to generate a pre-authorization for someone to attend our program.
Two weeks ago a veteran called who wanted to attend our program. It was starting in two weeks. He approached his case manager and essentially the case manager told him there was no time to generate a pre-authorization within two weeks, so he couldn't go. The veteran became quite distressed. We called him back and told him that regardless of what happened, we were going to put him in the program whether it was on Veterans Affairs' dime or on our dime from the money we raise from the public.
About 50%, maybe fewer, of the veterans who have a claim with Veterans Affairs that would extend to cover our program do not get an approval in time for their attendance to be funded. That's been a big difficulty for us.
Whenever Veterans Affairs' funding may be available for a veteran to take our program, we do our best to get that funding because that means more of the community funding that we raise will go to more programs and to more individuals who have not approached Veterans Affairs, which again is about two-thirds of our force clients.
In terms of assisting our organization if anything can be done to make that approval process easier so we can turn more of these potentially funded clients into funded clients, that would be enormous in helping us expand our reach and provide more of the funding from the community to those who haven't been to Veterans Affairs, because there is a lot of need there. When we don't get these approvals turned around, that limits our ability to help veterans.