Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to start by saying thank you to our witnesses for being here today. You know, we're here as a committee to look at this initiative, to find out what's working, where we can make improvements and to tap into your expertise, and I just want to say thank you to both of you for the work you're doing to advance many issues that relate back to the Black community and the general public as a whole.
I'd like to talk about Nia, the organization that Ms. Hall represents. I want to take a minute to share some information with this committee. That organization started almost 15 years ago, I believe. The Youth Challenge Fund in Ontario was set up by Dalton McGuinty and Pinball Clemons in 2006 with an allocated amount of money and involved 33 Black-led organizations. Of those organizations, I believe only three exist today. Nia Centre for the Arts is one of those organizations in Toronto. It's one of the few Black spaces for the arts, if not the only one, in the entire province, if not the country.
One of the things that came out of the Youth Challenge Fund was the fact that, if organizations don't have the ability to build capacity, if organizations don't have resources to build better governance and to put in place better board structures, the basic backbones that are required for organizations to do well, they often fail.
I just want to acknowledge the work that the Nia Centre has done to survive over the last 15 or 16 years by going in all different directions, provincial and municipal, and by working with partners and anyone they could find to survive, and they're here now providing us with advice to build public policy. To me, that is capacity building, and that's one of the intentions of this initiative. You know, one of them is to contribute, to build capacity, to contribute to better public policy building, so I just want to say thank you for the work that you're doing and the work you continue to do.
Ms. Hall, I have a question to ask you.
From your perspective, why is it important to have Black-led organizations participate in the decision-making on how funding flows to organizations that service and provide support to Black communities?