Thank you, Mr. Chair and the committee, for making time for this important discussion.
My name is Alica. I'm the executive director at Nia Centre for the Arts. We're a Black-led and Black-serving charitable organization based in Toronto. We support young people through career development, mentorship and employment in the arts. We also support emerging artists to perform and showcase their work so that they can build viable careers and tell the stories of our community right across the country.
After over a decade of supporting the creative capacity of our community, we're taking on this transformational project to renovate our 14,000-square-foot facility into Canada's first professional Black arts centre. I give you this backdrop because we have received a couple of grants through the supporting Black Canadian communities initiative in the past two years. This has really been helpful to support us in building our organizational capacity to prepare for this transformation from being a smaller grassroots group into running an arts institution. We have received support to do things like build out our digital infrastructure, and to do Wi-Fi planning to ensure that we have a safe and secure building and can process payments online. We've received support for HR planning to ensure that we have the right staffing model at the right times in order to run the facility, and of course fundraising. Before the pandemic, we had just one monthly donor. Now we have over 150. We've been able to work with the consultant to build out our stewardship plans and recognition to support those who are contributing to the organization.
Why is this kind of support needed? Just last year, the Foundation for Black Communities, in partnership with Carleton University, did a research study. They found that only 7ยข of every charitable dollar in Canada goes to a Black-led and Black-governed organization. So we know that there's a significant gap. The philanthropic sector is huge. Canadians are sitting on a wealth of money, billions of dollars, and yet that money is not trickling down to our community. Government resources are really key to help us do things like build our organizational capacity and deliver services, because we're not getting the same kind of support from corporations or the philanthropic sector's major donors. I just went through a $10-million capital campaign, and I can assure you of that.
The other consideration is that at the municipal level and the provincial level, we know that the existing funding programs are quite focused on service delivery and staffing that directly supports service delivery. So core roles, core staffing roles.... I've had an operations manager just for the past year. She's been leading a lot of these strategic initiatives that help us to deliver our services more effectively and efficiently and prepare, as I mentioned, for the transformation that we're going through. But not many grassroots Black-led organizations have an operations manager. The challenge we face is that the existing funding landscape doesn't support the kind of keep-the-lights-on resources that are needed to ensure that there's a charitable landscape that's supporting the Black community across the country and that has the resources to do so.
As the federal government is looking to address anti-Black racism, address the proliferation of hate in our communities, and integrate immigrant communities across the country, there needs to be a strong network of charitable organizations supporting this work, particularly for the Black community. You have so far planted a number of seeds through the SBCCI program. We need to ensure that those seeds are able to grow and flourish, and that these organizations are able to continue doing this important work.
I have two suggestions on building the program as you look to implement the final couple of years of funding. One is to steer away from this project-based funding. A lot of smaller organizations don't have core funding support through their existing funding structures, so project support for six months to do this kind of work becomes really difficult. A number of staff are wearing multiple hats. They're doing service delivery. They're addressing all these issues that have come up through the pandemic. We're seeing increased focus and requests, as my colleague mentioned, for Black-led organizations. They don't have the staffing support to actually do this work.
The second thing I would mention is that there needs to be more support for core staffing and operational resources. That's because of the gaps at the other two levels of government, as well as what I mentioned around the need for that for particularly Black-led organizations.
As you look at redesigning and restructuring the SBCCI program for the coming fiscal years, I think it's really important that you think about long-term support for Black-led organizations and more unrestricted funding.
Thank you so much.