Bringing Black Business Leaders Together to Rethink How Canada Supports Entrepreneurship

In recent years, support for Black entrepreneurs in Canada has expanded, with new programs and organizations increasing access to capital and advisory services. As this support grows, the Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (BEKH) is bringing Black business leaders together to examine how those supports are designed, coordinated, and improved over time.

A major driver of this expansion was the launch of the Black Entrepreneurship Program (BEP) by the Government of Canada in 2021, during the economic recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic. The program brought together financing, ecosystem support, and research to improve access to capital and services nationwide. At the time, however, comprehensive national data on Black entrepreneurship did not yet exist. Programs were being developed while the full scope of need, regional variation, and effectiveness of different approaches were still coming into view.

More recent data has begun to clarify that picture. Findings from the 2024 quantitative study indicate that nearly one in five Black entrepreneurs reported having connected with, or received support through, BEP-funded initiatives at the time of data collection. This level of engagement reflects the early stage of the BEP’s development, and the time required for organizations to establish reach across regions and sectors. As awareness grows, more entrepreneurs are expected to engage with the program, increasing expectations and placing new pressure on how effectively support performs in practice.

“As the ecosystem grows, it becomes more important that organizations have ways to learn from one another,” noted Dr. Gerald Grant, Lead of the Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub. “That shared learning is what allows support to improve over time, rather than starting from scratch with each new effort.”

In response to these conditions, the BEKH is pursuing two complementary approaches to rethinking how Black entrepreneurship is supported in Canada.

The first is the convening of organizations funded under the BEP. These convenings focus on system-wide questions, including how to reach underserved entrepreneurs more effectively, how to support businesses at different stages of growth, and how to measure impact in a consistent and meaningful way across programs. By bringing organizations together around shared priorities, these discussions help surface common challenges and strengthen coordination nationwide.

“The challenge isn’t a lack of activity in the ecosystem. There’s a lot of great work across the country,” observed Dr. Muna Osman, Senior Research Scientist at the BEKH. “However, without shared evidence and coordination, we can’t improve these programs in a sustained way.”

The second approach builds on this foundation by going deeper. Community of Practice focus on challenges that require sustained attention, comparison, and shared reflection over time.

Through the Community of Practice, the BEKH brings Black business leaders, organizations that support entrepreneurs, and subject-matter experts together to work through specific and persistent challenges entrepreneurs face as they grow and scale. These Communities of Practice function like a mastermind, with participants returning to the same questions over time to compare experience across regions and sectors and work through issues that cannot be resolved in a single discussion.

The challenges explored include sector-specific issues, such as access to supply chains in food and manufacturing, regulatory and certification barriers in emerging industries, and capital readiness in technology and growth-oriented firms. They also include practical questions faced by organizations themselves, such as adapting programming to regional realities or tailoring services to different business models.

“As more entrepreneurs rely on the ecosystem, the question becomes how well that ecosystem is functioning,” Dr. Osman noted. “If organizations are not learning from one another, then support remains fragmented, even when resources exist.”

Rather than focusing on individual entrepreneurs, the Community of Practice concentrate on the decisions organizations make about program design, service delivery, and problem prioritization. Participants return to shared questions over time, identifying recurring gaps and learning why certain approaches succeed in one context and fall short in another. The aim is not to arrive at a single solution, but to build collective understanding through ongoing, informed conversation.

As the BEKH prepares to launch its Community of Practice, the work signals a broader shift in how Canada approaches entrepreneurship support. As programs scale and expectations rise, improving outcomes depends on sustaining conversations long enough for experienced leaders to learn from one another and refine how support is delivered.

As Dr. Osman summarized, “A healthy ecosystem is one where organizations are connected, where learning is shared, and where support doesn’t depend on any one organization working in isolation. That’s how you build something that can grow, adapt, and endure.”