Black Opportunity Fund Launches $150M Capital Initiative To Boost Black Entrepreneurship And Homeownership In Canada
The Black Opportunity Fund (BOF) — a Toronto, Canada-based community-led charity — has launched BOF Capital to expand access to business and housing capital for Black entrepreneurs.
The initiative includes two primary fundraising goals: a $100 million private equity growth fund to support Black-owned businesses and a $50 million shared equity housing fund to help Black Canadians purchase homes, according to The Globe and Mail.
While fundraising is still in its early stages, BOF Capital intends to have both funds secured by the end of 2025.
“We know where we are going for that first $150 million and now what we are doing is bringing them in and having conversations with those anchor investors to get everything papered and do the due diligence,” BOF’s CEO Craig Wellington said, per the outlet. “We have essentially been holding them back, some of them for three years.”
Leaders on Bay Street — based in the center of Canada’s financial sector in Toronto — founded BOF in 2020 to help dismantle anti-Black racism in response to the murder of George Floyd, according to its website.
At its launch, BOF set a $1.5 billion, 10-year fundraising goal, The Globe and Mail reports. While the $150 million target represents just 10% of that, the organization’s focus has evolved from stockpiling cash to achieving immediate impact, prioritizing the fast deployment of funds, Wellington said.
The initiative addresses systemic barriers Black Canadians face in both entrepreneurship and homeownership. As of 2018, only 48% of Black Canadians lived in privately owned dwellings, compared to 73% of the overall Canadian population, according to Statistics Canada.
BOF Capital’s launch comes amid a rollback in corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, a move Wellington said could boost fundraising efforts by clarifying where consumers should shop.
“When you look at the wealth gap, the key driver of that is not the 80 cents on the dollar that Black people make versus the rest of the population, it is the discrepancy in home ownership,” Wellington said, The Globe and Mail reported. “That means that a significant amount of wealth that is used to invest in entrepreneurship is gone.”
BOF Capital will operate as a for-profit entity offering market-level returns, separate from the not-for-profit BOF, with its own governance and leadership. Gajan Kulasingam, who will serve as BOF Capital’s first managing partner, added that the two organizations will have agreements in place for licensing and profit-sharing.
Kulasingam said the goal is to start deploying capital as early as late September or early October, with 80-85% of the growth fund allocated directly to established, revenue-generating companies and the remainder to Black-led venture capital funds.
“It could be a co-founder, a senior executive at the company is Black, or it could have some affiliation where the business has a certain level of impact in the community,” Kulasingam said in response to what constitutes a “Black-led business,” he told The Globe and Mail.
Kulasingam added that the company has a broad mandate to invest in impactful businesses, but it gives itself the leeway to “allocate capital fairly broadly.”
