Challenges

There were many challenges at the Lethbridge site:

• the employment partner was not ready for the project. They are a newly formed agricultural co–operative with a new processing and storage capability. They were still working out how they were going to do business themselves and did not (as a group) have the managerial capacity to effectively work with the project. This is not to say the employment partners didn't work hard on the project, nor that the clients didn't get a quality experience – they did– however, the ultimate goal of full employment with the employment partner could not be achieved.
• many of the individual farmers had people on lay–off at the end of the project and were therefore unable to hire the participants at the end of the program;
• because the project started near the harvest time and went through to the early spring, clients did not get the opportunity to get a lot of experience in the planting cycle of a farm (they felt they should have had a full year to work with all aspects of the farm).
• the original academic instructor was hired by the College without an interview – he was on the seniority list as an "Academic Instructor". He left the program mid-stream after considerable stress and was replaced with a new, quite capable instructor. However, the time for curriculum development had been "used" by the original Academic Instructor leaving the replacement Academic Instructor in a bind in terms of how to delivery the training. By all accounts he succeeded, but only due to considerable (additional and unpaid) effort by him.
• there was considerable inter–client personal challenges and developments throughout this project which were brought into the classroom and required interventions from the Project Co–ordinator, the Academic Instructor and the College campus. This stress was compounded by the ongoing frustration of clients as they realized they would not be getting employment from the farmers at the end of the project. One individual in particular caused the vast majority of problems and should have been (and could have been) removed from the program in hindsight, but was not.
• another individual did not have the physical capacity to do many of the tasks on a farm. This was not screened for in the client recruitment and selection process.
• four out of the five sites had differential income for clients, depending upon whether they were HRE or HRDC recipients. Nowhere was this more difficult to deal with than in Lethbridge, where some clients were receiving as little as $108/week and other receiving more than twice that. This was a constant sore point throughout the project. This was a funding issue at each of the departments and was beyond the power of the Bridging the Gap team to change.