I’m about to leave town. I am going on a well deserved break. By the time I return, Black History Month will be over. I plan on having fun. My flight is boarding. Before I go, I want to get something off my chest. It’s something that has been bugging me since I first heard about it in 2021, and it was recently confirmed by Canada’s Ministry of Housing, Diversity and Inclusion.

No doubt, to coincide with Black History Month, the government recently put out a call for concepts for a $200-million Black-led Philanthropic Endowment Fund. All good so far, you may be thinking; how generous; that’s a lot of money; at last; Black people deserve this. Well, not quite!

Here’s where some may view me as ungrateful and downright hard to please. Perhaps I am, but there’s validity to my thoughts. The Brits say, one should never look a gift horse in the mouth. But some gift horses do warrant scrutiny. And this is one of them. 

This rising conscious moment of EDI geared towards Black people was globally ignited by a brutal dehumanising act that followed millions of brutal dehumanising acts towards Black people in North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and the African Continent throughout our history. Much damage has been done and much is needed to restore our universal civil rights. How those rights are restored is up for debate, some say training for white people, some say reparations, some say confronting, some say funding. I say Black economic empowerment is the best solution. But what happens when a $200 million EDI fund wears the cloak of Black economic empowerment, but may actually disempower Black people? 

This fund is the result of government thinking. It probably began with the question, "what can we do to make Black People in Canada happy, and if not happy, then maybe show them we care – a bit?" The answer came with a word salad of a call that is as lofty as it is vague:

“This call seeks to innovate ideas from Black communities to ensure the Fund meets their expectations and addresses the unique challenges they face…Announced in Budget 2021, the Fund is dedicated to supporting Black-led charities and organizations serving youth and social initiatives and will create a sustainable source of funding to improve the social and economic outcomes in Black communities.”

In other words, we don’t know precisely what this fund may fund, but we hope it benefits Black people to do whatever it is Black people do with funding – social initiatives serving youth, addressing challenges and all that good jazz.

The pledge of $200 million to Black people is a lovely idea, until we look deeply into the horse's cakehole. Without meaning to sound harsh, my idea is to scrap the idea of a Black Philanthropic Endowment Fund altogether! There, I said it! Why did I say it? Well here are three reasons and fundamental flaws that confront this fund when it is eventually awarded: 

1. The Math Does Not Work

There are 1.2 million Black people in Canada possibly even more if we consider undocumented people. In theory, if this $200 million fund is shared equally among us, every Black person in Canada would potentially end up with $2.50 each. But hold on, there’s a catch. That $2.50 will not be placed directly into our hands. No, it will go to a privileged investor who will tuck it into his/her/their investment portfolio and dole out (if we are lucky) 5% of our $2.50 per year, infinitum. That’s a whopping 12.5 cents for we lucky Black people every year. Let’s not spend it all at once. It will likely be another year before the next twelve and a half cents will come our way.  Supposing we have a repeat of 1981 when Canada’s Black population grew by 596 per cent?  I can’t do the math on that, but I bet it equates to less than a penny for each of us on average.

2.  It Creates Competition Instead of Collaboration

Audre Lorde put it best when she said, “In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.” In the Black community, we are all too familiar with the effect of divisions within our community. Black people needed to be divided during times of slavery, so they would not conspire against the interests of slave owners. Colonization of the African continent occurred through a system of divisions between people groups and tribes that were pitted against each other. It’s not lost on me that this fund is established by the Ministry of “Inclusion” with criteria that creates competition and exclusion. It has all the traits of divide and conquer. In this winner takes all euro-centric approach to gift giving there can only be one “victor” and there must inevitably be “losers”. In an effective EDI framework, the idea would surely be to prioritize true equity, diversity and inclusion using a collectivised approach to administer the fund so that the community as a whole wins, not just one organization. This is what community-centric fundraising is all about.

3.  It Lacks Imagination and Ambition

As a Black tax-payer in Canada, I am miffed as to why the Canadian government would essentially immobilize a $200 million fund through an endowment, when the interventions sought by the Black community are so immediate, so urgent and so long in coming.  We know that the urgency of economic empowerment runs contrary to the drop-by-drop intention of an endowment. We need imaginative investments that can accelerate the pace of progress. An immediate cash fund with the intention to invest in projects that catalyze the most ingenious ideas for community transformation and economic empowerment would be fantastic. Our communities need jobs, access to credit, and the dismantling of racist systems that the government itself constructed. A few such imaginative approaches would be to support Black people to own their homes, acquire tax credits to overcome systemic ant-Black racism, and for Black students to clear loan debt.

To my mind, this endowment fund needs some re-imagining. It is a reflection of some  institutional approaches to EDI. Often EDI ideas seem great as they are conceptualized, however, all such ideas must bear further scrutiny before turning them into practice.

EDI is not about gimmicks and sound bites; pie in the sky or bluster. EDI is about honestly staring at the problem and collaboratively working with communities to affect solutions that are authentic and not tokenistic; ethno-centric and not purely euro-centric; immediate, rather than long-term.

I hear the final call for boarding. I’ll end my thoughts by stepping down from my soap box and wishing you a wonderful Black History Month, along with the challenge to re-imagine your EDI strategy so that it is more contemplative and ambitious. Thereby closer to the transformation we all want to see.

Olumide Akerewusi

Founder and CEO

AgentsC Inc.

mide@agentsc.ca

P.S. Please forgive my typos and grammar!