54% of Us Are Caring for an Aging Loved One. We Wrote a Brief About What That Means.
Introducing State of the Black Family in Ontario — a new community brief from ACBN
There is a load that Black families in Ontario have been carrying for a long time. Most of us have never named it out loud. We just keep going.
It is the call from a sibling at 9 p.m. saying mom isn’t herself. It is the hospital discharge that lands on a Thursday afternoon when you are supposed to be pitching a client. It is the quiet decision to skip the networking event because there is no one else to sit with dad. It is the spreadsheet in your head that tracks medications, appointments, rent, payroll, your kid’s permission slips, and the date of the next family meeting all at once.
This week we are publishing a community brief that finally puts numbers and language to what so many of us have been carrying. It is called State of the Black Family in Ontario: The Sandwich Generation Building Businesses While Caring for Parents.
You can read it now. We hope you will.
What the Brief Tells Us
We surveyed our members of the Black community in Ontario. What we heard was clear, and it confirmed something many of us already knew in our bones.
More than half — 54% — are caring for an adult loved one in some form. Some of those loved ones live in the home. Some live across the city. Some are parents, some are aunts and uncles, some are the elders who raised an entire neighbourhood.
12% are full sandwich caregivers — managing the needs of both children and adult dependents at the same time, in the same house. This is the generation that is holding up everyone else.
81% told us they want a more affordable, culturally responsive senior care option in Ontario. That number is not soft. It is a community telling us, with one voice, that the care options that exist today were not built with us in mind.
Why This Matters Beyond the Survey
ACBN’s database is more than 6,000 Black entrepreneurs strong. 74% of them are women, mostly between 35 and 50 — the exact demographic profile that Statistics Canada identifies as most likely to be sandwich caregiving. When we apply our survey findings to our own network, the picture comes into focus quickly: an estimated 3,200 Black entrepreneurs in our community alone are caring for an adult loved one while building a business.
Across Ontario’s 27,500 registered Black-owned businesses, that number climbs to roughly 14,800.
These are not statistics. These are our sisters, our friends, our members, our partners. They are the women showing up to Drop-Ins after a long day with a sick parent and a child to feed. They are the founders who keep building anyway.
The Compounding Load
For years, ACBN has talked about the Four Strikes™ that Black entrepreneurs face when trying to access capital and grow: small teams, talent acquisition gaps, industry concentration, and systemic barriers. Caregiving is the unspoken fifth pressure — and the way it interacts with the other four is what makes it so structurally damaging.
The brief unpacks this in detail. It also lays out four specific things we believe need to change — together, across funders, government, healthcare, and economic development — to support the families who are quietly keeping our community whole.
Who This Brief Is For
If you are a Black entrepreneur, parent, sibling, or friend who is caring for an aging loved one — read it. This is your story, on the page, with the numbers behind it.
If you work in philanthropy, foundations, or government — read it. The communities you fund are carrying loads that your program designs are not yet built to hold. The brief shows you where, and what to do about it.
If you work in healthcare, social services, or family supports — read it. There is no equivalent Canadian dataset breaking out caregiving by race. That gap is part of the problem. We hope this brief is the start of closing it.
If you are a journalist, researcher, or policy thinker — read it. We made it for the public conversation we know our community deserves.
Read the Brief
[Download the brief →]
The brief is 12 pages. It includes our full survey findings, extrapolations to the broader Black entrepreneur community in Ontario and Canada, the cultural context of caregiving in African and Caribbean families, the connection to the Four Strikes™ framework, and four specific calls to action for funders, government, and partners.
It is free. It is meant to be shared.
A Note on What’s Next
Publishing this brief is one half of a larger commitment. The other half is doing the work.
We recently shared news of a grant from the Foundation for Black Communities that allows us to expand The Our Elders Initiative — a culturally responsive program that provides daily check-in calls, remote health monitoring, weekly companionship visits, and caregiver workshops to Black seniors and their families across the GTHA. The data is the case. The Our Elders Initiative is the response.
If you are a funder, healthcare partner, or community organization who wants to be part of what comes next — including the properly resourced, representative study we are calling for — we want to hear from you. Reach out at info@acbncanada.com or ryan.knight@acbncanada.com.
Help Us Get This Read
If this resonates, share it. Send it to a sibling who has been holding things down. Send it to your cousin who runs a business and cares for a parent. Send it to the program officer at the foundation you work with. Send it to your MP and MPP and City Councilor.
The conversation about caregiving in Black families has been happening in private for too long. It is time to bring it into the open.
[Download the brief →]
State of the Black Family in Ontario: The Sandwich Generation Building Businesses While Caring for Parents was published in Jan 2026 by the Afro Caribbean Business Network. ACBN has been helping Black entrepreneurs build sustainable businesses across Ontario since 2017.
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