This new organization will investigate the power imbalance between Canadian funders and marginalized communities

When it comes to detailed research on race, ethnicity, disability, or sexual orientation in social impact, Canada is a data desert. 

There simply isn’t a lot of disaggregated data — or data divided into subcategories, especially based on attributes like race, gender, or disability — to back up experiences of systemic racism among the staff of non-profits, charities, philanthropy, intermediaries, and impact investors, as well as the marginalized communities they serve. “We point to U.S. disaggregated data to make that argument in Canada,” says Narinder Dhami, managing partner at Marigold Capital and founding partner of New Power Labs. 

Set to launch in September, New Power Labs will try to identify and address systemic financial inequities through workshops, a forthcoming curriculum, and acting as a matchmaker service of sorts for organizations looking to improve their own equity processes. But its most important contribution may be the original research it will be conducting on grantmakers and financiers of the social impact sector itself. 

In the most recent federal budget, Canada promised to spend $172 million over the next five years to fund a Disaggregated Data Action Plan as a way to improve data collection on diverse communities across the country, although this is still in the works, and the federal government hasn’t promised to collect data on the philanthropic, social finance, social enterprise, and social impact sectors specifically. 

Meanwhile, last December, a research report prepared by Carleton University’s Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership Program and the Network for the Advancement of Black Communities, Unfunded, found that for every $100 given by grantmakers, Black-led organizations received just seven cents. 

But Dhami says the Unfunded report, while important, is just one perspective. “That conversation is taking one really critical data point within one key space,” she says. “There’s a number of other data points. There’s other communities that are excluded from philanthropy.” These include Indigenous-led organizations, as well as organizations led by people of colour. “We actually don’t have the full research behind those two data points,” Dhami says. “Being in the sector for over a decade — I can tell you very little about both.” 

The relationship between power, capital, and equity inspired New Power Labs’ creation. In 2020, Marigold Capital partnered with the Ontario Trillium Foundation and DUCA Credit Union to test out New Power Labs’s approach: bringing people together to explore how power shapes the flow of capital. Dhami says these conversations were meant to be workshops accessible to powerful figures in the social impact and social finance worlds: philanthropic leaders, venture capitalists, impact investors, and asset managers. 

Dhami believes discussions around power and capital are already happening, but thinks they’re taking place in isolation. “I feel that those conversations continue to be very siloed, especially when we’re talking about capital and philanthropy, or venture capital, impact investing, or bank loans,” Dhami says. “But what you’re seeing is a commonality of exclusionary practices that leave out women, that leave out Black people, leave out Indigenous people, that leave out people of colour, disabilities, and so on.” 

According to 2017 data from Transparent Collective, a U.S. based non-profit, only eight percent of venture capital-funded startup founders are women. Just one percent are Black. And only 0.4 percent are Latinx. With a couple of exceptions, such as the Unfunded report and another recent report on systemic racism within Black entrepreneurship in Canada, Dhami says there isn’t a lot of Canada-specific data — and New Power Labs is trying to fix that. 

One of their current projects, due out in September, is looking at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in impact investment funds, accelerators, and incubators. Dhami says the research focuses on everything from the diversity of leadership teams to internal and external equity practices to an organization’s diversity promises. By examining available research in Canada and partnering with research universities, she hopes New Power Labs will be able to start shedding some more light on inequity in the social impact world. “We’re going to be hopefully getting a strong baseline of where diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are in this space,” Dhami says. 

Research aside, New Power Labs is also working to analyze and interpret their data in a way that anybody — not just a social impact professional — can understand. “I don’t think that a PDF, 30-page report is getting to enough audiences,” Dhami says. New Power Labs’ ‘platform’ for doing so is a humble website, but Dhami says they’re also looking at a variety of different ways to present their findings in an accessible and digestible format, from online posts to audio storytelling. 

Just offering data may not necessarily provoke change. Look at redlining: the practice of banks denying (or offering ridiculously high-interest loans) to predominantly nonwhite neighbourhoods has existed for decades in both the U.S. and Canada. Despite a myriad of academic studies, anecdotal evidence, and even a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper in the 1980s, redlining still exists in a variety of sectors. 

But Dhami believes the major anti-racism demonstrations of 2020 made an impression on the social impact sector. She believes the sector’s leadership is committed to the idea of improving their own inclusion practices, although that isn’t enough. “Even with the best intentions…we’re really not living up to the opportunity of being inclusive in our work and equitable in our work,” she says. 

Plenty of social impact professionals believe they are good people by virtue of their work, Dhami adds — and that means they may not always be aware of their own exclusionary practices. “That doesn’t mean we’re not racist, that doesn’t mean we’re not sexist, that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to work on all these things to truly build an inclusive workplace and an inclusive approach to our operations,” she says. Overcoming these blind spots and finding a way for social impact professionals to work together on DEI practices are two of the most important imperatives for New Power Labs. 

Dhami doesn’t believe the current push towards anti-racist action within the social impact sector is a fad. “The movement of people demanding equity is not going to go away,” she says. “We all have a role to play in it, and there’s no one who’s already checked the box — and that includes me.”

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