How the BEKH is Supporting Black Students Choosing Entrepreneurship as a Career Path in Quebec

Dwight Best, chief executive director of ACSioN Canada

For 20 years, Dwight Best has been helping Black students in Montreal overcome so they can thrive. As chief executive director of the  African and Caribbean Synergic inter-organizational Network of Canada – ACSioN Canada for short – Dwight says over the years, he’s seen entrepreneurship emerge as a path more new graduates are considering, an outflow of the organization's work around leadership and professional development.  

“Once we started focusing on professional development, we noticed an increasing inclination among the different students that we were working with and even recent alumni to consider entrepreneurship as a viable path for their own career development and self actualization,” he says. Fast forward to today and entrepreneurship has become a major plank of their programming. The hope is, once funding is approved, ACSioN Canada will support the development of emerging ventures meant to serve Afro-Canadian communities first and foremost.
“If you talk about Black people in general, we are innovators. It's just kind of how we roll, right?” he says.  “We are innovators in many sectors, and the challenge is translating that into sustainable structures that are going to continue to create value for the community. So it really starts one person at a time, one entrepreneur at a time, one community at a time, and we're looking to help bridge the gap.”
In 2018, according to Statistics Canada, of the estimated 66,880 Black business owners in Canada, 23.3% of them lived in Quebec, a significant portion of the 2.1% of Black business owners across the country. More than half of Black immigrant business owners come from five countries – one of them being Haiti (10.2%), where Montreal is known to have a large population. Dwight says the Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub has been helpful in facilitating conversations within the local entrepreneurial community.
“It’s really helped us provide roundtables where we can connect with other important stakeholders…in terms of connecting the dots, so to speak, to really understand what the challenges are in various communities and realizing how similar they are,” he says. “It's actually very important to realize there are important regional differences even within the same region. There's so many facets of our identities. What BEKH has been able to do is highlight all of that. It's actually given us the vantage point to be able to see ourselves for the first time as an entrepreneurial set of communities of African descent here in this country.”
The BEKH’s Quebec regional hub is based out of Concordia University, one of six regional hubs across the country. The BEKH's work consists of community-focused research, national in scope, meant to help bring a better understanding of the Black entrepreneurial ecosystem across Canada and the research it supports is diverse. Among the research underway in Quebec includes the validation, adoption, and sharing of the entrepreneur edition of the Black Collective Care Circles, creating a safe space for entrepreneurs to have important conversations around mental health. In addition to this and BEKH's success in creating the Black Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Map (BEEM), Dwight says the organization has given them and the broader Black business community the regional and national insight needed to build more sustainably for the future.
“Now the resolution of the image that we're getting, in terms of the reflection of the community that BEKH is highlighting, is increasing. But then what do we do with that?” he says. “Now that we have a better idea of the contours of the Black entrepreneurship ecosystem in Canada, we really need to move to words.”