Colin Corcoran (VOCM News)
Problems accessing funding is throwing a wrench into the student summer employment program.
Many groups, from churches to heritage groups and businesses, hire on students in the summer for a variety of jobs, but in recent years organizations have had trouble accessing the funds necessary to hire on a few students to get the job done.
The Community Sector Council’s Colin Corcoran says they’ve pinpointed three major challenges in the process; including application timelines, and the application itself which he labels unnecessarily complicated.
In some cases, programming that used to offer eight weeks of programming, has been cut to just four weeks.
All that means that organizations are having trouble accessing summer program funding, he says. The CSC is responding with a number of its own programs in hopes of filling some of the existing gaps.
He says they’ve expanded their Amplify program, which is funded by the province, and Ottawa funds Ascend, which provides a 100 percent wage subsidy and also provides funding for host employers to help students gain summer employment.
