Reexamining The Value Proposition of The Black Non-Profit Organization
In the ground-breaking book Why Nations Fail, Harvard professor Daron Acemoglu and MIT’s James A. Robinson, the authors, provide an evidence-based analysis of the Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty — tackling some of the most pressing questions regarding socioeconomic development and human behaviour. Questions surrounding how civilizations develop and thrive, the nature of leadership and responsibility, entrepreneurship and growth. Communities and intergenerational wealth creation, opportunity and the role institutions play.
The ecology of the universe has underlying systems of organization and relationships — this is the human nature of things. Hierarchical structures of mutually beneficial relationships form and seek domination over their extended groups. Creating exclusive networks that drive their narratives for their own power objectives — the organization evolves in its own self-preservation interests.
Fundamentally, all systems are human-driven, and both problems and solutions come down to human decisioning. Therefore, the formation of institutions or organizations is simply a power play — organized access to power centres of influence. So the nature of power in the universe revolves around small groups of individuals having a significant amount of power over other people’s lives.
Therefore, understanding networks and human systems quantitatively, both in the macro and micro environments, is important in understanding how power flows and how the world really works. Economic power leads to political influence, privilege, and better overall outcomes for those in power.
So real power comes from the bottom up, through economics (entrepreneurship/wealth) not from the top down (government).
As in ecology, organisms tend to expand and dominate the more powerful they become, human systems are very much the same. The organization superimposes power structures around capital, information, and opportunities — that’s what it’s all about.
So whether it’s about nations, governments, institutions, or organizations; they all share similar characteristics concerning success and failure.
When it specifically comes to organizations like the Black Business and Professional Association (BBPA) losing its way, with the recent allegations of misappropriation of funds and its board behaving badly. It is important to keep in mind that this is not unique to Black organizations. It comes down to leadership and how leaders choose to lead their organizations.
For example, the book explains how the tiny African nation of Botswana, was able to become the world’s fastest-growing economy from 1966 to 1989. Botswana today remains one of the best-run and most prosperous countries in Africa and the world (it was the inspiration for the Black Panther movie). Many other African countries are still struggling to establish and sustain well-functioning inclusive democratic institutions.
The common characteristic found in the book’s research highlights that authentic and capable leadership is responsible for good outcomes. Also how vision and strategy play a major role in inclusive institutions. Good organizational management is what continues to separate Botswana from other struggling African countries.
Rwanda is another good example. Thirty years after tribal wars — the Rwanda genocide — nearly one million ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed as the international community stood by. Rwanda has risen to become one of the fastest-growing and most dynamic economies in the world. Today Rwanda is generating and negotiating its own deals and on its own terms, outsmarting former colonizers like Britain on the regular. Creating competitive environments for foreign investors wanting to invest in its economy.
Therefore, there is no definitive destiny for Africa or Black people, it comes down to what leaders and their institutions/organizations do next. It has nothing to do with culture, geography, or even the weather. It always comes down to authentic leadership in the end. Those who can put aside their ego and greed and put systems in place instead that promote and underpin well-managed inclusive organizations.
Therefore, the BBPA lacked critical authentic leadership and good institutionalized governance systems — vision and strategy. Without that architecture, the organization’s structural integrity was vulnerable, and when overly stressed, it collapsed.
This is what effectively happened to the BBPA. The catalyst was the quick infusion of 5 million dollars in grant funding from the federal government, for the “Black Entrepreneurship Program.” An ill-conceived program and one designed for political expediency in the COVID environment where government money was flowing everywhere. So without any good management pillars and characteristics, or systems in place, BBPA leaders behaved badly — irresponsibly and selfishly.
Smoke and Mirrors
If you look at the ‘About’ section on their website, https://bbpa.org/history/ there are a lot of words but no compelling mission statement. It reads more like the the BBPA’s purpose is effectively running an awards show; the Harry Jerome Awards.
In speaking with the founder of the BBPA recently, legendary pioneer businessman, B. Denham Jolly. His founding vision was to support each other and promote Black businesses and professional progress…creating a voice for Black Canadians. Jolly added that without a drive for entrepreneurship and economic independence, there can be no socioeconomic advancement or power in the future.
The latter comments are also intrinsic to Mr. Jolly’s overriding vision and strategy in founding the BBPA. Today, however, the BBPA has strayed from Jolly’s strategic vision and principles. To one of leadership hubris and entitlement, with a thirst for control and power.
To lead change, there must be a transparent and fact-based reexamination of the BBPA and many other post-George Floyd and DEI-inspired Black organizations. We can’t just accept the narratives these self-declared Black nonprofit organization leaders tell us. We just can’t acquiesce our future to organizations, we must be a part of the decision-making.
Since the horrific George Floyd event, many in the Black community have delved into the emotional state of Wokeness. What has followed has been an intensified, emotionally driven push for social justice, and economic and political empowerment. The newly coined term Anti-Black Racism has driven the phenomenon of a new Wokeness culture and supportive industry. Like a new religion. Where quick reactive and emotionally driven responses dominate the discourse, and like pop stores, new non-profit organizations came into existence.
In Canada, many newly formed nonprofits were specifically created to take advantage of the flowing federal government grant money, and money from other corporations and banks too, that have corporate ESG and DEI agendas. There was no compelling purpose and drive for many of these organizations that came into existence in record time. It was about getting free government money! Unlike of course how Denham Jolly authentically founded the BBPA.
Look at the Black Entrepreneur Ecosystem Fund grant recipients for a minute: https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/black-entrepreneurship-program/en/ecosystem-fund.
Please tell me what any of these social nonprofit organizations have to do or know about creating profit. This is upside down, pure nonsense. What it has done is created a big distraction away from the proven method of how individuals, groups, and societies have created wealth for centuries. It has pushed many uninformed Black entrepreneurs away from the bottom-up reality of how wealth and power are created in the universe.
What can the Aspire for Higher Elite Basketball organization do for entrepreneurship, for example? Regardless, this youth basketball organization got $977,070.00. The Afro-Heritage Association of Sudbury (AHA) got $1,150,000.00 —???
Please click the recipient list link above and see for yourself.
We immediately need some serious common sense here! Intellectualized and critical thinking, supported by research and data science-driven analysis.
It is simply illogical and void of any applied intelligence and evidence that detaching Black entrepreneurship from mainstream entrepreneurship will somehow close the racial wealth gap. In an ever-increasing intelligent technologies-driven world, globalization has added tremendously to the hyper-competitive environment and the complexity of doing business. So isolating Black nonprofit organizations to lead in a profit-oriented world, is plain stupidity!
If Black folks are not competing in the mainstream and playing the same capitalist entrepreneurship game everyone else is playing, they will not participate in the global wealth curve?
Reexamination and new renaissance thinking are required here. The very purpose and utility function of “Black nonprofit organizations” getting involved in leading wealth must be examined.
The BBPA has come to prove itself not to be an inclusive organization, but an elitist one. Exhibiting, for example, real stupidity in handling the present scandal on allegations of misappropriation of funds. Instead of confronting the allegations with transparency and humility, they have chosen denial and intimidation, tactics like shutting down the membership portal to try and silence critics. And the former CEO is all over social media pretending nothing is wrong; well something is very wrong, and hiding in plain sight will prove not to be the most intelligent strategy.
In the end, good outcomes come down to the quality of the decisions made and the credibility of those making them. So in reexamining Black organizations like BBPA, concerning whether or not it can still be useful in the future to Black entrepreneurship development, the decisioning process must be both robust, tight and transparent.
The first move must be one toward creating an inclusive organization with a grass-roots-driven vision reflective of the 21st-century challenges Black Canadians face. A data-driven decisioning framework must be articulated to provide a foundation for identifying challenges objectively and setting priorities.
In Why Nations Fail, the authors point out that “…poor countries are poor because those that have power make choices that create poverty. They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but by purpose.” The same goes for the BBPA, they have been purposeful about serving their power interests rather than the interests of their members.
Denham Jolly, amongst many others, believes that the only way to save the BBPA and limit the damage is for the entire board and management to resign. I wholly agree with Mr. Jolly’s wisdom. You can’t regenerate and move forward effectively with a lingering virus in the system.
Next, we must remove the self-appointed non-profit elites from being the paternalistic arbiters of our lives. Create a process of open discussion with mechanisms for surveys and data collection to give a real voice to members/community.
We must move to democratize these organizations, and intelligent technologies can assist greatly — with digital technologies in abundance this will be easy to do. A simple intuitive portal on the BBPA website is the starting point.
Executing Change
Some of the critical questions that must be tackled are as follows.
Understanding the new economy and globalization challenges, and defining the solutions best suited to help our community thrive in the 21st century.
Economic growth discourse — proper understanding between basic bottom-up versus top-down pursuits are critical. If we don’t fundamentally understand models and approaches, it will be challenging to evaluate and select the right approaches to progress and prosperity.
New innovative idea generation — getting away from the same old stale and regurgitated ideas. We need to construct relative to the context of the 21st century.
How to innovate, create and utilize intelligent technologies to enhance our human value in the marketplace, to gain competitive advantages for winning.
Monitoring and measuring solutions to evaluate the impact of various government programs thrown at Black non-profits. Reconciling these programs objectively and quantitatively against the real self-articulated needs of Black communities.
Understand power dynamics — how money is a tool used by governments, banks, corporations and organizations to influence — a nuanced form of domesticated neocolonialism.
Examine the Black dependency and victim culture these organizations have inadvertently pushed. How it’s counterproductive and harms.
Examine how Black organization leaders are influenced by the money/grant sources and how it may skew their judgment. This must examined objectively assisted by data science.
Systems must be institutionalized and firmly supportive of future success to prevent unscrupulous corrupt leadership from derailing progress made. We the people must make more of an effort and do our own research and be better informed on core issues, not to get suckered into harmful reactive schemes like the Federation of African Canadian Economics (FACE) loan program.
The Black Entrepreneurship Loan Fund, a component of the Black Entrepreneurship Program (BEP), is a partnership between FACE, the Government of Canada, the BDC and private sector financial institutions. The Fund provides loans of up to $250,000 to support Black business owners and entrepreneurs across Canada and lay the foundation for future success and long-term change. — FACE website.
In other words, it’s a top-down program fully funded by the federal government in collaboration with Crown agencies, i.e., BDC, and further collaboration with the Canadian banks. So FACE is a vessel, its leaders have no real say, and they are essentially administrators for the government.
FACE website says: it administers the Black Entrepreneurship Loan Fund as the first lever to wealth creation and a catalyst for Black generational wealth creation. They are agents for the government to keep order and used as proxies to gain political votes from the Black community.
Anyone who knows anything about entrepreneurship, finance and wealth creation, also knows that the primary driver of real entrepreneurship is equity financing. It’s a bottom-up investing process, whether friends and family or venture seed and multiple series funding rounds. Loans are for more “mature” operations with decent cash flow to service the loan effectively.
So if entrepreneurship growth is the objective of FACE, then the Black Entrepreneurship Loan Fund is counterintuitive, a contradictory approach. To add insult to industry, Canadian banks are involved in entrepreneurship— from startups to various staged financing pursuits. So why is it Black entrepreneurship is steered and saddled with loans?
See for yourself: RBC Ventures https://www.rbcx.com/ventures/.
Therefore, in the mainstream, wealth has always been created bottom-up and primarily via equity investing — not loans. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but if I were, this might raise many conspiracy narratives. But more seriously, the bottom line is that this is illogical, and counterproductive in believing that social nonprofit organizations can lead entrepreneurship and wealth creation. There is absolutely no credible evidence that it has or that it even could; the evidence shows the opposite reality.
The CEO of FACE, Tiffany Callender, came from running a social community organization in Montreal. The Executive Director of the Côte-des-Neiges Black Community Centre.
It is even crazier when you sit and think about it for a minute — none of the people on FACE’s management team appear to have any experience in running venture funds or business development investment funds.
This program, therefore, is putting Black entrepreneurs at a disadvantage and harming them by keeping them out of the mainstream. How many tech millionaires and billionaires do you know that started with government loans instead of equity funding?
Coincidentally, Nadine Spencer, former CEO at BBPA and the one at the heart of the BBPA allegations of misappropriation of funds. Spencer is being directly accused by a group of concerned members, via their lawyers Miller Thomson, of allegedly taking 1.5 million dollars for herself out of the 5 million given by the feds. Spencer also happens to be on the board of FACE, and coincidentally Callender was given this year’s “Chair Award” at the Harry Jerome awards gala.
Organizations must be aligned with the future, not the past, and not with flaky government programs that lead nowhere. Purpose and strategy are required.
A corporate and governance strategy with a strategic value methodology
A business strategy with the effective use of intelligent technologies and data ecosystems to bring fact-based decisioning to the forefront, with transparency
Functional strategy for effective value functions within the organization
Operational strategy for the efficient and effective operations of the organization
Organizations must be guided by facts and not ego, with defined operating structures with enterprise monitoring and enhancement software systems in place, to stay on track and for the avoidance of strategy drift.
The goal must be to select organizational leadership, strategies, and genuine processes, from the bottom up. Grassroots driven…away from the self-declared Black elites with their phony leadership. We the people must be smarter, more skeptical, and more mathematical in our thinking and approaches. Doing the math to see if things add up before making decisions or accepting things from others.
“When we build working constitutions we often do so with an expectation that people will be good and well-intentioned in the future, so we forget to build in protections against dishonesty and bad behaviour.”
— Denham Jolly
Independence and self-determination
At the end of the day it’s only through economic independence said Jolly that we can achieve real power. This is how the real world works.
So if we decide after careful examination and re-imagining that we still want Black organizations like the BBPA to represent us, we must build systems that will facilitate and promote authentic leadership, growth, and good governance.
If Black organizations want to thrive in the future, in the best interest of those they represent, they’ll have to prepare for that. It doesn’t happen on its own. Also, Black organizations will have to become more proficient and business-like in raising the majority of their funding directly from their community. Post-2025, it is unlikely that many of these organizations primarily funded by the government will be in existence.
Black organization leaders must also become entrepreneurial and their compensation packages must have a performance component.
Black populations must lead change. It’s not the government’s responsibility. We can’t look to the government and others to do for us what we must do for ourselves! No more lame excuses. It’s up to us to maximize our resources and organize and invest in Black entrepreneurs. The truth is, many Black people in our community don’t invest in Black entrepreneurship, and often deflect when asked to, using the government grants excuse for not risking their own capital. It’s a shame but it is true.
Dependency and woke culture will only keep us way behind the wealth curve. However, self-belief, self-reliance and resilience, underpinned by courage and adherence to how the world works, is the only path to sustained prosperity.
Life-long learning, realignment, adaptation, change and transformation are all fundamental to the human condition and our story of progress, inherent to self-determination. It’s no different for Black people, don’t fall for the contrived construct of race.
“There is no such thing as race. There’s just the human race, scientifically. Racism is a construct, a social construct.” — Toni Morrison.
Everything is of your own doing, says Aristotle, if we can accept that, then we have a basis for achieving great things.
And in the profound wisdom of Marcus Garvey, “Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden.” So let’s apply our intelligence in the present to ensure that our future generations will not have to carry the burden.
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