Thank you, Mr. Chair.
What do I believe worked well? The Sioux program was relatively accessible. It bought us the time to reinvent our programs and to relaunch. I think the Sioux program was particularly important for charitable organizations. Because of their financial structure, we very often had difficulty raising overhead, administrative funding that pays for our salaries. The Sioux program was of particular benefit. Additionally, the veterans organizations emergency support fund was very quick and easily accessible. We received $200,000 at the end of last year of a $300,000 request. That application was very well aligned to the needs of veterans organizations.
What I feel has not worked well is the emergency community support fund, ECSF. Although it was obviously a gargantuan effort on the part of the government and the community foundations of Canada—I think it probably met the needs of the charitable sector in Canada quite well—this fund was poorly adapted to meet the needs of veterans organizations, both in terms of the amount of funding it gave the veterans organizations and in terms of how it was structured.
In total, less than $250,000, from what I can tell, seems to have gone to veterans organizations, which is roughly 0.1% of the total funding. This is despite the fact that veterans organizations were listed as a vulnerable population in the application package.
In round one, the application was not well constructed to meet the reality of how veterans organizations function across Canada. This meant fragmented applications that had to go out to multiple different places in order to get small amounts of support to programs like ours.
However, I feel that I shouldn't be too hard on the program as our organization was lucky enough to receive a significant portion of the amount that did go out. We raised roughly $75,000 through the ECSF.
Finally, I'll move on to my concerns for the future.
Both before COVID and during COVID, we have seen trends where the internal processes at Veterans Affairs are making it more and more difficult for us to receive funding for Veterans Affairs clients who attend our program. As of last week, they have completely disallowed funding for veterans who are attending our programs across Canada, even though we are a Veterans Affairs service provider. This threatens the stability of our organization because our partnership with Veterans Affairs helps us raise the funds that pay for our administration and overhead, and allow us to use donor money specifically to put veterans through the program who are not covered by Veterans Affairs and who do not have a claim. This trend is quite worrying.
I have two final points.
I do believe that in the coming year we will see a contraction in the veterans service organizations space as this pandemic continues, with fewer financial resources in place to prop up organizations. In particular, I believe smaller organizations that do not have staffing resources to leverage the available supports will suffer a great deal more.
Finally, we are hearing from a number of funding organizations across Canada that they're setting an expectation that in 2021 they will start to reduce the amount of funding that they distribute because of the effect of COVID on their finances.
I'm probably over time, so I apologize. Thank you.