Stephen Dorsey is a senior-level business, brand and marketing strategist and the author of Black and White: An Intimate Multicultural Perspective on White Advantage.
Since 2020, we’ve witnessed an increase in the number of organizations taking more pro-active approaches to allocating resources to develop and increase work force diversity and representation, especially in much-needed leadership roles. For example, the Canadian Black North Initiative launched in 2020 has signed up more than 500 corporations that have pledged to increase Black leadership and board representation.
Still, most would agree that much more needs to be done to affect real change in the business sector. Black people make up less than 1 per cent of executive leadership roles in Canada (even less on boards) while representing 3.5 per cent of the population. And, of course, board members are generally selected from the C-suite roles that are filled by upstream promotion of talent groomed over many years, sometimes beginning all the way back to entry-level positions.
That highlights the challenge of achieving diversity and representation targets. Many current initiatives are focusing on areas that do not yield effective results. We cannot just conjure more Black leaders. Leaders are made. They must be cultivated over time, beginning right at the source – high schools or earlier in traditionally under-represented communities. A continuing presence in these communities can imbue Black youth with a vision of how added training and academic achievement can open up doors to career opportunities they often do not know exist.
I can relate. At a very young age, I had a love for film and television, a passion for visual media and storytelling that continues today. No one – no teacher, no counsellor – ever took the time to acknowledge my burning interest or to enlighten me that, in fact, there was such a thing as film school or that there were multitudes of creative, technical and business careers available in that industry. And no one in my community network was modelling career roles in film and television. As a result, my path to where I am today took much longer than it should have.
How can kids in traditionally marginalized communities, who may not be exposed to the many possibilities of the business world, develop a career vision for themselves if those opportunities are not discussed in their community, not modelled by family members or neighbours, or extensively promoted by educators, counsellors or businesses?
Businesses and industry sectors should reach deeper into Black communities to illuminate opportunities and outline a path to a passion career: how businesses can provide access to entry-level opportunities, foster careers and provide support all the way up to leadership roles. And these efforts should begin with upfront, strategic collaboration with community organizations that have on-the-ground experience and a deeper understanding of the specific needs among the available and potential talent in their communities.
Take the Toronto-based CEE Centre for Young Black Professionals, a non-profit dedicated to addressing economic and social barriers affecting Black youth, ages 14 plus. For more than a decade, they have successfully collaborated with government, businesses, unions and other stakeholders to support work force development programs that skill-up young Black professionals and provide them with direct access to employment, helping organizations fill labour gaps across varied sectors.
For example, the CEE collaborated with Canadian media production studios to create a custom program to train cohorts of Black youth in VFX programming (the post-production creation of visual effects for film and television content), developing a local talent pool to fill the growing labour gap in that sector. The program provided well-paying entry-level jobs that otherwise would be filled by recruiting programmers south of the border.
This is but one organization looking to scale up its effective programs through strategic collaboration and investment from business and government stakeholders.
This is what going deeper looks like – the work that needs to be done to expand the pool of diverse talent at the source so that eventually more Black professionals will make their way upstream across more organizations, encouraged through mentorship, tailored career advancement programs and purposeful effort to create more diversity and representation in the executive ranks and on boards.
Positive results will take time to fully register. But businesses need to do much more and do so with a greater sense of urgency so Canada can begin to see more tangible results sooner.