Answering Your Questions
What is your connection to Community Living Kawartha Lakes? Do they provide you with funding? Do you have the same clients?
Job Quest is a division of
Community Living Kawartha Lakes. Community Living Kawartha Lakes
has been serving the community for 47 years and has grown to become
the largest not-for-profit social service agency in the City of
Kawartha Lakes. The one hundred and five staff members of Community
Living Kawartha Lakes provide quality services to over 500 people
with intellectual challenges and other special needs, and their
families.
Job Quest’s funding source is not annualized but rather is
outcome-based. Upon start-up, we operated Job Quest for a year as a
pilot project to ensure that it would be self-sustaining. When we
succeeded in turning over a profit in our first year, Community
Living Kawartha Lakes decided to continue developing Job Quest, but
we receive no funding dollars from Community Living.
Job Quest is responsible for all overhead costs that are incurred by
the program, including staffing, facility and administrative
expenditures. In our three years of operation, Job Quest has never
run a deficit and we have well achieved our goal of
self-sustainability (although we continue to develop partnerships in
this area).
While we do share some clients (about 5% of those we support) with
Community Living Kawartha Lakes, 95% of the people support by Job
Quest struggle with mental illness or learning disabilities.
Job Quest serves approximately 100 new people each year in addition
to clientele who are carried over from the previous year (30 to 50%)
and are still receiving services (for example, employment training
and job maintenance services). In the past year, we supported 130
people.