The Cost of Distance: Funding, Belonging, and Black-Owned Businesses in the North
UNBC Entrepreneurship Team (left to right):
Richard McAloney, Cynthia Williams, Tracy Hall, and Fryderyk Paczkowski.
Entrepreneurship in Northern Canada carries a unique cost: distance. For Black entrepreneurs, the realities of geography collide with barriers to funding, strained trust in institutions, and the ongoing struggle to feel fully included in the national conversation about business support.
For Tracy Hall, who served as Research Associate with the BEKH North Regional Hub at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), the challenge was clear from the start. “The northern region is a little different than the rest of the country in terms of its vastness,” she recalls. “It’s not as easy to just hold an event and bring people together. Geography and travel costs alone make that difficult, and then you layer on things like wildfires and evacuations—it changes everything.”
A profile of Northern entrepreneurship
An analysis of the data from the 2024 BEKH National Quantitative Survey shows that Black entrepreneurs in the North share many traits with their counterparts across Canada. Like the national sample, they are highly educated, with more than 90 percent holding at least a bachelor’s degree. Many apply their skills in professional and technical services or health and social assistance. Others have turned to transportation and warehousing, a sector that reflects the realities of the region. In a place where communities rely on the steady movement of goods, investing in supply chain services reflects both opportunity and necessity.
Business size also mirrors the constraints of the northern economy. Most Black enterprises are small, with one quarter categorized as nano-sized and just under one-fifth as micro businesses. More than half of these ventures depend primarily on family and friends for support, highlighting the limited availability of wider networks and institutional support.
Lack of access to funding adds another layer of difficulty. Close to 40 percent of Northern entrepreneurs report being unaware of programs specifically designed for Black business owners. In the Northwest Territories, that figure rises to 73 percent. While these percentages come from small sample sizes, they point to a wider pattern: support programs are not reaching entrepreneurs in many of the most remote parts of the country, where opportunities for entrepreneurship are closely tied to building communities.
Building trust where it has been broken
Hall found that many entrepreneurs in the region were skeptical of outside initiatives. “A lot of business owners here are jaded,” she notes. “Organizations come to the North asking for information, promising support, and then disappear. That history makes it harder to build trust.”
In larger cities, entrepreneurs often turn to digital platforms to expand their customer base. In the North, businesses depend far more on close connections. “There’s a neighborly spirit here,” Hall says. “People know their neighbors, they help each other, and they guide business through word of mouth rather than social media campaigns. That’s a strength, but it also means the support structures that work in bigger cities don’t always apply here.”
Through the BEKH North Regional Hub, Hall and her colleagues at UNBC began working to bridge those gaps. Their efforts included face-to-face outreach, partnerships with institutions like Yukon University, and the launch of the Magnifying Black Voices mentorship and bursary program. Designed for both domestic and international Black students, the program combines financial support with mentorship to create a talent pipeline for future Black entrepreneurs.
More recently, in March, the Northern Hub at UNBC hosted a Regional Round Table for an Inclusive Entrepreneurial Future which served as the foundation for the development of a northern-centric entrepreneurship strategy. The current Hub coordinator, Richard McAloney shared, “serving as BEKH’s Northern Regional Hub has sparked the next stage of entrepreneurship ecosystem development in the North.”
UNBC will lead the National Invention to Innovation Network (i2I) Strategy for the North in partnership with others. “This strategy will integrate BEKH’s foundational research to ensure the ecosystem is responsive to Northern needs,” continued McAloney. The program is focused on closing the gap between research and commercialization in STEM and healthcare and expanding entrepreneurship training across the region.
Lessons from the North
Hall believes the tenacity of Northern Black entrepreneurs holds lessons for the rest of the country. “Despite the hurdles, these businesses continue to exist, adapt, and thrive,” she says. “That resilience and creativity are strengths Canada can learn from. But to build on it, we need to ensure the North isn’t treated as an afterthought.”
The cost of distance is real. It is measured in funding gaps, reflected in the industries chosen, and in the weight placed on community ties. Yet Black entrepreneurs in the North continue to build, leaning on community while calling for stronger connections with the rest of Canada. The BEKH’s Northern Hub is working to ensure that these voices aren’t lost to the distance, but supported in ways that match the realities of the region.