Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm pleased to join this meeting with the committee. I'm joining you from Toronto, Treaty No. 13.
I'm so pleased to be able to share some of my thoughts about the supporting Black Canadian communities initiative.
The Network for the Advancement of Black Communities is a national organization. It's a systems-change focused organization, which does a lot of convening, knowledge mobilization, capacity building, research and policy. In Ontario, we also do granting. So far, we have granted more than $6 million in terms of capacity building for Black organizations, working closely with the Ontario government.
For this particular initiative, the supporting Black Canadian communities initiative, we have been retained by the department, ESDC, as the expert service provider. We have worked very closely with Black intermediaries, of whom two executive directors, Rustum and Louis-Edgar, are in this session with me.
The supporting Black Canadian communities initiative has been a transformational new initiative for Black communities in this country. It is unprecedented, in the fact that it came out of a codesign process between Black leaders. There are 33 of them, and three of us are here. We met in Gatineau in the summer of 2019 and worked with the federal government to lay the foundation for what this initiative is all about.
As you know, within it there is a capacity-building component, an institute that is going to be launched, and there was capital funding. It's a significant investment in Black communities, which we have never seen federally, at least not in my time in this sector, which comes close to 30 years.
What's unique about the supporting Black Canadian communities initiative is that it puts Black community leaders in the driver's seat, so to speak. For the first time, we have Black intermediaries who are funded to regrant dollars to Black community organizations. What's also important to note is that this happened in the context of the pandemic. We have seen a lot of grassroots organizations across the country that are close to the programs working with Black communities to address the challenge of the pandemic being able to access resources to do the things that matter to them.
One of the great things about this initiative is that it allowed of lot of its recipients to use it as a platform to access other resources. The federal government last year launched the $350-million emergency community support fund. Now, there is a big community recovery fund also. In regard to this funding that the groups have received, many of them ended up receiving additional funding from philanthropic foundations, United Way or local governments, so it has that ripple effect of enabling.
The supporting Black Canadian communities initiative is also an opportunity for us to talk about shifting the relationship between Black communities and the federal government from one of transaction to one of transformation.
I'll be happy to talk later on in the course of the Q and A about some of the things that we could do. However, a few of the things that are important to pay attention to are how we build on the codesign process that we had between Black communities and government and how we start embedding Afro-centric values into the measurement and evaluation.
One thing you heard from others who have come before you is the need to look at sustainable funding. I've always said—as I have been dealing with this space around design, funding and capacity building—that you cannot capacity build your way out of systemic challenges for Black communities. Capacity building is a good enabler, but at the end of the day, the federal government needs to consider how to sustain these changes by thinking about core and sustained funding for organizations. You have heard some of that from previous speakers—that whole area of how we work together to build on that, again, through a codesign process.
In terms of this challenge of over-reporting, maybe here is an opportunity to move from contributions to grants. The Ontario Black youth action plan works closely with the Ontario government to deploy a different system of funding that allows organizational leaders to step back, do innovation, plan more and sustain some of the work that they're doing.
The landscape has shifted. There's an opportunity through the multiple funding streams you have—the entrepreneurship fund, the supporting Black Canadian communities initiative and the announcement that was made today for the endowment fund—for us to regroup as Black leaders with the government and really reflect on how we can tweak this whole system.
Thank you for your time. I'll be happy to engage in the Q and A later.