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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.