Last July, I was making my way through downtown Toronto to an address near the Scotiabank Theatre, thinking about what a beautiful day it was for a stroll. I had heard through the grapevine that some of Toronto’s most active Black community members would be holding a press conference at the Streets to Homes Assessment and Referral Centre, a first stop for unhoused people looking to be directed to shelter and other services. The press conference was organized to address the worsening homelessness crisis among recently arrived African migrants in the city. I was aware of the issue, but nothing prepared me for what I saw when I finally reached the centre: dozens of Black men, women and children sat on the steps. Many were asylum seekers from Africa; some lay down by the entrance, while others paced around the area anxiously.

As journalists, advocates and others trickled into the area, waiting for the press conference to begin, the sense of tension grew into palpable feelings of solidarity and anger. Kizito Musabimana, the head of the Rwandan Canadian Healing Centre, a PTSD support and advocacy initiative that I previously worked at, stood before the crowd and began to talk. The minute his East African accent burst through the speakers, I could see even the most ambivalent asylum seekers poke their heads up to see who was talking, surprised that he sounded like them. After weeks of listening to—and not being heard by—city officials and intake staff, it seemed to me that they finally felt seen, by a brother from the motherland. In his speech, Musabimana called on the government to support the migrants, and for community members to leap into action.

That summer, a small crowd of African asylum seekers had been left to sleep outside the intake centre. The scenes of vulnerable people sprawled on the streets of Canada’s largest city ignited Black Torontonians into action, leading several Black community groups and faith organizations to hold the press conference. Their message was clear: the Black community and its allies wanted all levels of government to step up and protect the hundreds of Black folk who had come to Canada looking for a better life.

The conference inspired further coverage of the crisis by major news outlets like CityNews and the CBC. But the situation was desperate, and federal, provincial and municipal institutions weren’t responding quickly enough. Judith James, founder of the Beautiful Foundation, a nonprofit focused on support and empowerment, decided that if the government wouldn’t do anything, she would take action herself. Two days after the conference, James used her foundation to house her fellow “kings and queens,” as she calls them, at Revivaltime Tabernacle, a Black congregation in Toronto that James is also a pastor at. The first night, 190 people were taken in; over the course of the summer, James and her foundation housed more than a thousand migrants. 

Between July and September, the Beautiful Foundation connected around four thousand people with resources like shelter, laundry, food and a variety of other life-affirming activities. With counselling and sports tournaments, the foundation created space for Black joy and celebration. “We didn’t just house them, we empowered them,” says James in an interview with Maisonneuve. She recalls one special day that she still keeps close to her heart: a young Black couple approached her, asking to bring the asylum seekers out for a karaoke night. Instead, she suggested that they host the event in the church. That night, the building exploded in song and dance as migrants from across Africa sang Afrobeats and gospel songs. “I said to them, this is literally a week to the day that you guys were in the rain, and now you’re in a home singing, dancing, meeting people from Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana,” James recalls. 

The Beautiful Foundation was not the only Black institution to step in to fill the gaps created by government inaction. Black faith organizations near Toronto, like Pilgrim Feast Tabernacles church in Etobicoke, and the Uganda Muslims Association of Canada and Dominion Church International in North York, took in thousands more migrants. Community groups like the Jamaican Canadian Association, the Black Opportunity Fund and a Black-led carpenters union also delivered support. With the help of these organizations, migrants who had arrived in the country with only a few garbage bags full of clothes were not only being taken care of; they were finding community. “I miss it,” says James. “We never slept. We barely ate … But being able to take care of [our own] was the most rewarding experience of my life.” 

Along with that joy came the financial costs. By housing, feeding and providing services to the asylum seekers, Dominion Church International and Pilgrim Feast Tabernacles took on debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars, only fractions of which have been reimbursed by the city so far. James’ Beautiful Foundation took on a debt of close to $400,000, and has thus far been reimbursed just over $100,000.

In early March, James and other community leaders met with Toronto mayor Olivia Chow to discuss further reimbursement and ensure that such a situation never happens again. Last July, the federal government promised $212 million to support refugee shelter needs in cities across Canada, with $97 million set aside for Toronto. By the end of this March, Toronto City Council finally approved the use of funds to further reimburse these Black institutions for the debts they took on.

This funding has not yet been distributed, and James remains nervous, since other promises have previously been made that have not been fulfilled. However, she knows Black organizations and institutions will continue to provide support. “If the city is going to turn [its] back, [if] the government’s going to turn [its] back, it’s not okay, but we will find a way. We are strong, we are wise, we are wealthy within our community,” says James.

This is a realization that’s starting to take hold within the Black community in Canada, as groups across the country try to build networks of support that can fill in the gaps created by governmental failure. As a top-down structure, the Canadian government is disengaged from the lived realities of poor and racialized people, as demonstrated by how it has reacted to crises like the one in Toronto last summer. In order to survive, the Black community must re-engage with indigenous economic traditions that are grounded in solidarity and community, rather than in the interests of private capital. Moreover, Black community initiatives need to be liberated from Canada’s strenuous and complicated bureaucracy. If cities across Canada give special statuses and financial considerations to our housing projects and economic initiatives, we would be able to create what we need to help the most vulnerable thrive.

Political conversations around redevelopment rarely include Black communities, even when it’s our neighbourhoods that are disproportionately redeveloped. The nonprofit group Black Urbanism Toronto (BUTO), which was founded in 2018, aims to change this. While initially focused on knowledge-sharing, BUTO has since shifted to the more radical approach of seeking to hold properties in Little Jamaica, a strip near Eglinton West Station in central Toronto. The plan is to place the properties into a land trust, a nonprofit that owns and manages land. The group hopes this will restore the social vitality of the area and resist gentrification.

Toronto’s lack of affordable housing is a critical issue for all residents; in Black neighbourhoods like Little Jamaica, gentrification is making that issue more urgent. “We know most Black historical neighbourhoods or neighbourhoods densely populated with Black people are going through development,” says BUTO’s head of communications Anyika Mark. “Whether that’s Regent Park, Lawrence Heights, Jane and Finch and Mount Dennis—it’s gentrification.” In Little Jamaica in particular, the impacts of construction for the Eglinton Crosstown Light Rail Transit since 2011 have been a major headache for the community, which has been ostracized from conversations around the development.

Land trusts could help solve these issues by giving the community direct control over the space. While Metrolinx, the Ontario transit agency that’s in charge of the light rail, is not required to consult with renters on mitigating construction-related issues, as landowners, Black community members can demand to be taken seriously. BUTO believes that only through direct ownership of its own land and institutions can the Black community control its destiny.

Some Black community organizations are already attempting to do just that. Musabimana, the leader of the Rwandan Canadian Healing Centre, is also the head of the African Canadian Affordable Housing project (ACAH), an initiative that seeks to build housing for the Black community. After meetings with Toronto city officials in February, Musabimana and the ACAH declined to pursue running a city-owned affordable housing project. The city’s proposal would have required the ACAH to manage municipal land for residents who are chosen by the city. The group rejected the proposal because it would have meant working according to the priorities of the city, not according to the ACAH’s goals and values. The ACAH's rejection reflects the emergence of a more radical imagining of how we can take care of one another. Musabimana is now considering raising money to buy land for the ACAH outright.

James, along with a team of experts, is taking on the challenge of building a land trust in Toronto that would be capable of providing space for the growing number of Black migrants arriving in the city. They began planning to create the land trust after the events of last summer, and have been in exploratory talks with developers, including Dream Maker Realty, a Black-owned property developer in Toronto. James sees working with other Black organizations as an important form of mutual aid. “There’s this concept that iron sharpens iron. So as we’re sitting down and having conversations and the iron is sharpening iron, we’re now coming up saying, we can do this. We can actually do this,’’ says James.

The best thing the government could do for groups like BUTO would be to remove the legal and political hurdles to land acquisition. According to a 2018 study by economic consulting firm Altus Group, government fees on the construction of new homes in Toronto account for about a quarter of the final price of housing. High fees discourage new developments, like those that Black community groups such as BUTO and the ACAH are interested in pursuing.

For these groups, the solution may be simple. In Vancouver, First Nations groups are using the tax and legal exemptions that they have on their territories to build new housing; the Squamish Nation, for example, is building eleven towers with six thousand units on its land near downtown Vancouver. It’s initiatives like these that Black communities in Canada, who are also historically disenfranchised due to colonialism, should have access to as well.

Half a millennium since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, the lack of trust between the Black community and the institutions of Western states has still not been healed. Since the moment the first African stepped onto Turtle Island, now called North America, successive white governments have taken every opportunity to disempower Black people. The redevelopment of Africville, a small, primarily Black community formerly in the north of Halifax, is perhaps the most infamous example in Canada. In the 1960s, residents were relocated by the municipal government and the settlement was razed. Even in modern times, this pattern of disempowerment continues, as the utter disregard for African migrants on the streets of Toronto last summer demonstrates. What we need to overcome this disempowerment is financial liberation. With reduced tax and licensing fees, Black organizations could be empowered to create the homes and conditions for sustainable livelihoods that the community needs.

All levels of government in Canada have shown just how little they care about Black people. This has left us to our own devices and radically transformed how we choose to relate to financial and political institutions and property. University of Toronto Scarborough associate professor of global development Caroline Shenaz Hossein’s theory of the Black Social Economy (BSE) is based on traditional African practices of cooperation and community that have been expanded by Black radicals in the West. In her paper “A Black Epistemology for the Social and Solidarity Economy: The Black Social Economy,” the BSE is defined as an approach that builds policy from the politics of Black people’s lived experience.

The BSE can be found in a broad arrangement of community-focused social institutions, like Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs). In ROSCAs, people, typically women, pool economic resources to help each other with activities like purchasing equipment for a business or buying food. Systems like these differ from formal banks because they don’t charge fees, and instead prioritize equality and sustainability in financial access. Different iterations of this can be found across Africa and the Caribbean: in Somalia, people had to rely on informal cooperative financial systems like hagbads after the collapse of the government in 1991; in Jamaica, susus are rotating savings clubs that use collective pools of money.

Transformed through their encounters with the transatlantic slave trade, Black North Americans and Europeans built up the BSE in the West to function as an alternative system to dominant financial and political institutions. Radical groups created bottom-up initiatives, prioritizing a practice of “by the people, for the people”: for instance, in 1973, the Black Panthers created community education programs in Oakland, California. From Africa to the Caribbean, there is a rich history of progressive social institutions grounded in the BSE, and these traditions require our attention.

The BSE can be found in a Canadian context, too. In her work, Hossein discusses how, in Toronto, Black women who informally refer to themselves as “Banker Ladies” are transforming Canada’s financial landscape and facilitating access to economic resources through feminist ROSCAs. In a country like Canada, where the financial industry is run by an oligopoly of five major banks, many Black people find they cannot access financial resources; and when they do, they can be treated rudely and maliciously. Racial profiling at financial institutions runs the spectrum from cultural insensitivity to unnecessary police calls, which can be lethal.

Working collectively, the Banker Ladies can remove all interest and service fees and base their system on the needs of the group, not on profits. If one person needs help, the group will provide a loan without requiring a credit score check. In a short documentary about the Banker Ladies, produced in 2021 by the Diverse Solidarity Economies Collective—a group created by Hossein to build up community-based economic initiatives—the members describe working with other racialized women to design their initiatives to help them reach financial success.

Economist Karl Polanyi’s idea of the “double movement” theorizes that the development of a market-based society has been shaped by two interconnected movements: the establishment of the private market, and the subsequent efforts by society to protect itself from the potentially destructive effects of that market. The BSE could be the protective force; while neoliberalism has often worked to centralize wealth, control and information, the BSE works to expand our ability to choose how we want to live, outside the profit incentive. It operates according to the belief that the ability to sustain our communities is something no politician or bank can give us; we must build it ourselves.

Like with Black housing projects, Black financial initiatives are held back by onerous bureaucratic policies. Without official status as financial institutions, the funds collected by the Banker Ladies and other ROSCAs may be liable to seizure by the police. Asha Mohamed, a Banker Lady from Somalia, had her funds taken by the Toronto Police Service after they assumed the money was drug-related.

To be formally recognized as financial institutions, these groups are required to follow the codes of conduct set out by federal and provincial authorities that regulate how groups must operate and implement services. Small ROSCAs may not have the administrative resources required to comply with these authorities on their own. The burdens associated with these processes shouldn’t be applied to local Black economic initiatives; instead, exemptions from seizures can assist them in building up wealth within the community.

The Black community, while powerful, is nonetheless a small demographic in Canada. Building solidarity with other groups who are similarly left behind by government inaction is a necessity. When we work together under a practice of mutual aid to create bottom-up initiatives that are by and for our communities, we can all rise above systemic oppression, together. Liberated from the top-down institutions only meant to entrap and disempower Black, brown and poor Canadians, we can transform our institutions of housing, finance and more so that they fit our lived experiences, and create a more equitable, empowering world. ⁂

Likam Kyanzaire is a writer and journalist based in Toronto. His work is focused on sustainability, economics and politics.