Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone.
I am speaking from Mi'gma'gi, the ancestral home of the Mi'kmaq nation, otherwise known as Nova Scotia, which is also the home of the historic Black community that's been here for over 400 years. I'm very pleased to be part of the panellists today to give you a bit of a story of the impact that investments such as the SBCCI are having in the Black community and the Black community grassroots organizations across the country.
The BBI is a targeted business development initiative created in 1996 in the province of Nova Scotia to address the unique needs in the African Nova Scotian community. The idea was for us to change and impact Nova Scotian and Canadian business landscape by promoting and assisting in the development of Black-owned businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs. We help accomplish this through a cohesive framework of several goals and initiatives, such as economic independence for individuals, an improved standard of living and wealth creation, career options for youth, and pride in communities.
We believe our purpose is changing lives by enabling economic independence. After 25 years, we have seen a considerable amount of success, which is one of the key reasons why we were selected as one of the intermediaries for the SBCCI. We've invested in agencies and organizations, such as the Black Loyalists—we helped to develop its museum by creating grants and investments—the Africville church, the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, and the youth organization known as Hope Blooms.
We've done the work that's necessary, as an intermediary, to not only provide access to the capital but also to provide wraparound services and other kinds of consulting initiatives.
In terms of being part of such an exemplary group that's created results in a short space of time, as Louis-Edgar has outlined, and working with others, like amanuel and Raymund with Tropicana, as well as the Africa Centre, we've actually seen a successful outreach to grassroots communities.
Louis-Edgar has pointed out that his number is over 200, and we also have similar numbers in Halifax. We've done over 250 projects across the country, with about $8.5 million in direct investments in organizations that otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity to get funding. What we are seeing—and we saw that last week at the presentations—is that folks are now sufficiently competent to create their own sustainable strategies in terms of governance improvement and improvements in the quality of their organizations, but also in going for funding for other agencies.
We do that in several ways. We have some 60-plus subagreement holders whom we've invested in with wraparound services to help them improve the delivery of their services on the ground and strengthen their organizations. We've also gone ahead and created a base camp, which created a platform for several hundred of the organizations we invested in to problem solve and discuss issues, hence getting a better quality of Black organizations on the ground servicing their communities.
The projects that BBI has supported are really similar to the ones that Louis-Edgar identified: diversification of funding resources and strengthening the organizational governance through leadership, stewardship, continuous growth, communications and transparency. This is to help these organizations have a balance and compete equitably in the business and not-for-profit community.
We are not only helping organizations to develop, but we are filling the gaps where Black organizations and communities have found it difficult to compete. In fact, the world is in the fourth industrial revolution, the digital age, and in many cases our organizations are left behind. We also have the opportunity to use digital capacity resources. We've actually helped organizations, for example, who did not have a charitable status.
We've invested in organizations to do that because many grassroots organizations are without charitable status, and we know that can create a better capacity base for where those organizations would end up.
We see the SBCCI and the work that BBI does as advocates and confidantes for these organizations, where we can support organizations across the country. We've done that in several different areas and we will continue to do so. We believe that this initiative is not only groundbreaking; it is also impactful and it is definitely transformational.