Coalition aims to raise $1.5 billion

A coalition of Black Canadian business executives and leaders is looking to create a $1.5-billion pool of capital to support and empower Blackled organizations and companies across the country.

On Tuesday, the coalition released a report outlining a plan to establish the Black Opportunity Fund (BOF), which will make long-term investments in Black-led community organizations and businesses in an effort “to dismantle the barriers created by systemic racism.”

The goal is to attract investment from philanthropists, governments and foundations to grow the fund to $1.5 billion over the next decade.

The coalition is asking the federal government to contribute $800 million for a permanent stand-alone fund and to initiate a request for proposal process to select an organization “to administer the proposed fund on behalf of the Black community.”

In turn, the fund is expected to permanently support upwards of 450 communitybased organizations and fill funding gaps for thousands of Black-owned businesses.

Rustum Southwell is the CEO of the Black Business Initiative and part of the BOF steering committee. He said the fund will help Black Canadians catch up to their nonBlack counterparts in various

areas such as business, education and health care.

“The Black Opportunity Fund was created to react to the status of the Black communities across Canada because, perennially, we’ve been behind,” Southwell told The Chronicle Herald.

“There’s a lot of catching up to do. I think our employment rate is lower than in the mainstream community and access to capital for businesses has been a challenge for a while.”

In Nova Scotia, Southwell said community organizations like the Health Association of African Canadians (HAAC) would be able to benefit from the fund. The HAAC was formed in 2000 to specifically promote and improve the health of African Canadians.

According to Southwell, various organizations already support Black initiatives, but their funding is typically short-term and limited. The BOF is designed to make sustained investments in Black initiatives and by extension, Black Canadians..

“I think it’s visionary to look at the fact that the Black community has always been supported, but has always been on the line, like just enough to get by. So having the decision to say, let us do something big so we don’t always have to be going for this small funding is visionary,” he said.

UNCONSCIOUS BIASES

The proposal for the BOF comes after a series of town halls, interviews and consultations that included more than 1,000 diverse Black voices from across Canada.

Halifax-based Charles Milton, founder and CEO of Bursity, attended two of the town halls.

As someone who has participated in multiple different accelerators in Canada and the U.S. for start-up companies but has “always felt alone in the room,” Milton said he’s been searching for something like the BOF for “a long time.”

“There’s finally a movement happening in 2020 where people are recognizing that if nobody is going to do it for us, let’s come together and to do it for ourselves,” he said.

Milton has tried to access funding from venture capitalists, pre-seed investors, grants and subsidies in the past for Buristy, a social venture that helps underserved and marginalized post-secondary students find and apply for financial assistance.

He believes “it’s not easy for anybody” to get financial backing, but that there are some unconscious biases when it comes to dealing with marginalized founders in particular.

“We don’t always have the leisure of having the experience and sometimes we don’t even have the leisure of the expertise based on our own education and the like. Those things are things that people are going to factor if they think, ‘Can I back this venture?’ or ‘ Can I back this business?’” said Milton.

If paired with training and building bridges between Black organizations and companies and their non-black counterparts, Milton said the BOF could go a long way.

“As much as I think ($1.5 billion) is an astronomical number, I think it’s a number that founders of colour and marginalized people need, deserve and if they can get access to it, it can change the underrepresentation of founders of colour not just in Atlantic Canada, but Canada in general.”

For more information about the BOF, people can visit blackopportunityfund.ca.

Rustum Southwell, founding CEO of the Black Business Initiative and a member of the steering committee of the Black Opportunity Fund.