Ten Canadian projects fighting anti-Black racism you should know about

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Since the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, there’s been a larger spotlight on anti-Black racism in Canada. More people are spending time learning about anti-Black racism at a systemic level — and paying attention to the work being done by Black-led groups that counter it. 

In the world of social impact, corporations have promised big donations to Black communities (even if they didn’t always deliver on those promises), coalitions of Black-led organizations have banded together to demand change, and earlier in February the federal government announced the Foundation for Black Communities would administer a historic $200 million philanthropic endowment in support of Black communities across Canada for the next decade.

This Black History Month, Future of Good is highlighting ten Black-led projects advancing Black racial equity. The projects are based in different parts of Canada, and range from local to provincial to national focuses. Each project is countering systemic racism in different ways, be it in business, finance, and health institutions, or food and criminal justice systems.

Melanin Linx Project

A study by the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness reported young Black people who are part of the 2SLGBTQ+ community more prone to experiencing violence and homelessness than their white counterparts. Some of the reasons listed as to why this was the case was not being accepted in their household as well as school environments. Supporting Our Youth, a community development program under Sherbourne Health in Toronto runs the Melanin Linx Project, which aims to address this issue. The project, which began in 2019 and is free for mentees, matches Black LGBTQ+ youth with an LGBTQ+ mentor who will help them “with developing life skills, building resiliency and strengthening connection to their various communities.” Mentors in the project are over 24 years old, and the mentees are under 24 years old.

Black In Quebec

While Black people are a visible minority in Quebec, the data and research on how the community is treated in the province is scarce, academics argue. This is why the Black in Quebec Project was launched: to fill in the research gaps with in-depth reports on the history and well being of the English-speaking Black community in Quebec, while also raising issues on what the community has faced and still faces today. It was launched by the Quebec-based Black Community Resource Centre in 2020. Since its launch the project has collected data through surveys, interviews and questionnaires, presented several reports which include an analysis of information gaps on the history, demographics and wellbeing of the English-speaking Black community in Quebec as well as the socio economic issues they face, and engaged with communities across the province about their findings through social media campaigns and focus groups.

The AYA Project 

In 2020, PROOF Food Insecurity Policy research found that Black households had some of the highest rates of food insecurity in Canada, with 28.9 per cent of households identifying as food insecure. To combat food insecurity for Black households in Toronto, the Black Coalition for Aids Prevention created The AYA Project, which launched in 2020. According to the Coalition, it’s Canada’s first food aid program of its kind for African, Black and Caribbean communities. Through the organization’s connections with the Black community living in these lower income neighbourhoods, the project’s goal is to deliver food packages to low-income households in Toronto. There are two types of food packages (family and individual food packages). To advance Black food sovereignty, each of the packages will sustain a household for two weeks and will bring culturally relevant food items, like black-eyed beans and basmati rice. There’s an ongoing donation page where the AYA Project hopes to raise $50,000.

Combatting Anti-Black Racism through Litigation and System Navigation (The “Project”)

According to Statistics Canada, Black people above the age of 18 are continuously overrepresented in provincial correctional services, despite representing 4 per cent of the country’s population. The Black Legal Action Centre (BLAC), created this four-year project to counter this overrepresentation. The “Project,” which began on November 9, 2022 is funded by Canada’s Justice Partnership and Innovation Program. The first two years will focus on litigation, where BLAC will offer legal professionals information and data that they can use while arguing anti-Black court cases, such as criminal, child-protection, education and prison related cases. This includes systemic anti-Black racism in “criminal, immigration, child protection, education, prison and civil matters.” The second half of the project will involve supporting Black people who have low to no income and are facing legal issues. “We are confident that this project will have a far-reaching impact,” says Moya Teklu, executive director and general counsel, when the project was launched. 

Advisor-Led Start and Scale Development Paths

Black entrepreneurs, especially women entrepreneurs, continue to face systemic barriers when it comes to starting and sustaining their businesses. This is due to discrimination, and a lack of access to business knowledge and financial support (it’s reported that Black women entrepreneurs are more likely to self-finance their businesses). Foodpreneur Lab, an Ontario-based non profit that supports for Black food entrepreneurs, has been facilitating the Start and Scale Development Paths since 2020. The project aims to mentor 200 Black food entrepreneurs in the province’s south-west region by 2024. The executive director of Foodpreneur Lab, Janice Bartley, sees the systemic barriers Black food entrepreneurs face, such as finance and industry knowledge, which she hopes to dismantle with her project. “My role is to try to make people [in the food business industry] pay attention to those gaps and bridge them. At the end of the day if we don’t address this, we are back to the starting line and all efforts would have been in vain. I’m doing my best to ensure that doesn’t happen,” Bartley says. At the same time, Bartley wants to make sure culturally-relevant foods become more popular in the food market across Canada.

Each path offers different support, the start path offering ways entrepreneurs can start their food business from concept to creation, and the scale path offering ways entrepreneurs can grow their already established food business. The mentorship is nine months long for each path. While the project is currently four years long, Bartley is looking for ways to make it last longer. “When I look at the willingness of the participants, the efforts and ambitions, how can I not make sure that we continue this? It has changed lives in so many ways,” she says.  To date, the project has mentored 100 entrepreneurs and has created popups at city markets for entrepreneurs to sell their food products.

Black Start-Up Project

This is another regional project that’s aiming to fill in the systemic gaps that Black entrepreneurs face in Canada. The Tribe Network, a non-profit that focuses on making the business and innovation sector accessible to BIPOC people, created the Black Start-Up Project, which launched in 2022. The project provides a mentorship program to Black entrepreneurs in the Atlantic Region. It focuses on Black entrepreneurs starting and building on their businesses, with the “Start” portion of the mentorship including a 12-week course where entrepreneurs can plan out their business goals. The “Build” portion of the mentorship program includes creating a network of Black peers who have similar goals and problems that they face when creating their businesses. There are also bi-weekly workshops from people in the industry and sessions that teach entrepreneurs how to deal with stress and burnout in the “Build” portion. To date, 280 Black entrepreneurs have been registered in the program. 

Black Arts Fellowship 2023 – 2024

Canada is known for its diversity, yet there is little representation of art created by Black artists that depict the lives of the Black community in major galleries. Toronto is no exception. With a 2020 study finding that there is little representation of visual art by Black people, especially in commercial art galleries in the city. The Toronto-based Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism, which is run by Black Lives Matter Canada, created the Black Arts Fellowship to give Black artists in the area more opportunities to excel at their art, while also giving them a platform to highlight their work. The fellowship offers 12 months of paid residencies, workshops and mentorships for Black artists. Artists are encouraged to combine their history, activism, “knowledge of ancestral and contemporary Black struggles for liberation;” into their art, while also imagining their work as tools to advance decolonization and experiencing joy in “moving with, for and fully alongside other Black kin.” There are currently eight fellows who are taking part, with 13 fellows taking part in the previous year. This will be the second year the fellowship runs. It’s currently supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and Toronto Arts Council. 

Black and Rural

The British Columbia Black History Awareness Society is also trying to amplify Black artists, especially those who live in rural areas, while also showcasing stories of Black people in Canada through its Black and Rural project. Founder of the project Shayna Jones, who lives in Kaslo, British Columbia, launched the project in 2020, which has now expanded in Saskatchewan. Jones welcomes any Black person living in a rural area to tell their stories in a variety of ways, such as poetry, videography, visual art and prose. The stories are then kept in a digital gallery. 

Pathways to Care Project

The Black community in Canada “has been placed at a disadvantage when it comes to their mental health, given their subjection to trauma through enslavement, oppression, colonialism, racism, and segregation, much of which extends to the experience of mental health care inequity today,” reported the Mental Health Commission in 2021. To top it off, a lack of understanding from mental health practitioners and financial barriers makes mental health care even less accessible, especially for Black youth. The Black Health Alliance, a charity that aims to counter anti-Black racism in the healthcare sector, is running the Pathways to Care Project, which aims to make mental health support and addictions services more accessible to Black children and youth across Canada. It does this by advocating for addressing Black people’s needs in Canada’s health care policies. The five-year project is currently in its last phase, which is called “Knowledge Into Action.” Here, the project publicizes its research through mental health summits, presentations to local organizations, and mental health training, workshops and online webinars administered to communities across the country. Since its launch, Pathways to Care has made multiple reports on how mental health can be more accessible for Black youth, as well as Black youth in Ontario specifically. It’s also created an online search portal  and interactive map for people in southwest Ontario to look up mental health and addiction services.

Black Business and Farm Incubator

The owner of Sundance Harvest, Cheyenne Sundance, created this free incubation program for Black farmers that she believes is the first of its kind in Canada. “There are lots of organizations that provide opportunities for gardening but there’s not one that actually provides a structured opportunity where [Black farmers] get paid each week to grow crops that they sell, as well as learn skills like bookkeeping,” says Sundance. Farmers also get access to all the tools they need to grow their crops as well as 1/8th acre of land at Sundance Harvest in Toronto. While this is the program’s inaugural year, Sundance feels confident in seeing the farmers from this program start their own farms in the future, especially due to the demand she saw from young Black farmers in the farming community across Canada.  “[Prior to creating a formalized incubator] two out of three of my staff have already started their own farms after working for Sundance Harvest,” she says. 

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