Black Garden
Founders: Jessica Hardy-Henry, Daniel Quainoo, Kojo Hayward
Website: https://www.blackgarden.ca (external link)
We are a community garden.
Each of us is a flower in bloom.
Let’s tend to our people.
The Black Garden is building an ecosystem that simultaneously empowers black youth while challenging the narrative around diversity.
We believe that an inability to participate fully in the labour market due to problems related to access and networks has severely limited the black community’s capacity for economic success. In economic inequality literature, this problem has been dubbed the opportunity gap (the other half of the better known wage gap).
The Black Garden leadership team is composed of young professionals spanning the financial and legal sectors. In developing our model, we looked to the literature, our peers and our lived experience and observed that those members of the community who overcome the opportunity gap have access to mentors and resources that provided unique resources and skills necessary to access unique networks.
The Black Garden’s theory of change requires an early intervention that exposes black youth to a wider range of opportunities, inspires them to contribute meaningfully and connects them to a powerful network of people and resources. The model for this platform will by a dual channel service.
The first channel will be the Sprout Academy. The Sprout Academy is a learning platform that will include programs such as The Come Up Club and Growing Sprouts each dedicated to a particular cohort of students. The programming will be aimed at providing students with skills unique to the black experience, such as workshops on anti-oppressive practices, managing micro-aggressions, and intercultural networking skills. It will also feature industry specific workshops such as legal and financial literacy training.
The second channel of this model will include programs and services for partner organizations at conferences, schools and camps. This channel will leverage our skills in legal and financial analysis to generate revenue which will in turn feed the enterprise. In the long run, we aspire to develop an incubator model focused exclusively on members of the black community.
In a world where black Canadians are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and underrepresented in the post-secondary education system, it seems self-evident that black Canadians are not being fully served by our social systems. The Black Garden seeks to close this gap and be a medium for long-term sustainable change in the black community, by inspiring, motivating and teaching young black Canadians the skills they need to thrive.
All Canadians deserve an opportunity to succeed. Closing the opportunity gap facing the black community serves the interests of the broader society by creating responsible citizens and agents for valuable economic growth and positive social change.
