2023 First Quarter Newsletter
National Partners Group meeting
On January 26th, we successfully hosted our second National Partners Group meeting to connect members of the community together. It was an interactive session where some of our partners; African Caribbean Business Network, Black in Saskatchewan, The Council for Black Aging Community of Montreal Inc, Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub and Onyx Initiative, shared the amazing work that they do for the Black Canadian community.
This was the second national partner group meeting we are hosting, and our next meeting is on April 26th, 2023, at 5 pm PST / 8 PM EST. Would you like to become a speaker? Email brian@fbcfcn.ca for more details.
Immunization Partnership Fund
We partnered with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) through the Immunization Partnership Fund to help close the vaccine gap among populations with lower vaccine uptake.
This project had three objectives: A community micro contribution project to provide several Black youth groups the opportunity to further engage the community and address Covid-19 misinformation, report back to our national community on our Resiliency Through Covid19 (RTC) Research work, and a Covid-19 Booster and Vaccine Clinic Mapping and Awareness Campaign.
We hosted an event on healthcare equity featuring a panel discussion and presentation on resilience through Covid-19. The event had 83 attendees with 200 registrations. We also compiled a list of booster shot locations and launched a social media awareness campaign.
The Micro Contribution Award recipients were the African Youth Growth Foundation, Racialized Students in Healthcare, Jaku Konbit, Saskatchewan African Canadian Heritage Museum, and Restore International Foundation.
Black Entrepreneurship Program (BEP)
We received a grant of over $1.3 million from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario and hosted our first in-person event since the pandemic. The BEP launch event was held on February 21st at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.
Thanks to the BEP Ecosystem Fund, we are partnering with the University of Toronto, Scarborough to support and mentor over 170 young Black entrepreneurs across Canada. We kicked off the first cohort on March 22nd and registration is currently ongoing for the second and third cohorts.
Student Support for Learning Program (SSLP)
We are excited to announce that we launched the Student Support for Learning Program (SSLP) in February to support over 120 high school youth across five provinces. The program will allows FBC to provide educational bursaries to several hard working youth from among the provincial cohorts.
The funding is being provided by the Student Support for Learning Program (SSLP) within the Federal Government’s Service Canada department. Founded in 2017, one of FBCs focus areas has been to eliminate systemic barriers in all levels of education, which is in line with the SSLPs goal to make sure students have the educational support needed for future success.
We partnered with Skills For Life to launch the first cohort in Brampton. Each week the students had a 1-hour learning session followed by a 1-hour basketball session. Their graduation ceremony took place on April 2nd and the students received their certificate of completion and $1500 each to support their education. Registrations for the Alberta, Ottawa, Saskatchewan, BC and NWT cohorts are now open.
