A Grant That Cares for Two Generations: Thank You, Foundation for Black Communities
By Ryan Knight, Executive Director, Afro Caribbean Business Network
There is a quiet conversation happening in Black households across Ontario right now. It happens after the children are in bed. After the workday ends. It happens when a daughter is staring at her phone, trying to decide whether to call her mother again to check that she took her medication, or whether to finally answer the email about her business loan.
That conversation has a name now. It is called caregiving. And it is being carried — quietly, lovingly, often alone — by tens of thousands of Black women in our community who are also building businesses, raising children, and holding their families together.
Today we are sharing news that lifts both ends of that conversation. The Foundation for Black Communities (FFBC) has invested in The Our Elders Initiative, our program to provide proactive, culturally responsive care to Black seniors across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. The investment came through FFBC’s Black Ideas Grant (B.I.G.) 2.0 — Catapult Stream, made possible by the Government of Canada’s Black-led Philanthropic Endowment Fund.
We are deeply grateful.
Why This Investment Matters
We talk a lot about caring for our elders. We talk less about what it costs the people doing the caring.
Later this year, ACBN will be publishing a community brief — State of the Black Family in Ontario — that puts numbers to something our community has long known. There are the women in our network who arrive at a Loan Readiness session apologizing for being late because a parent had a fall the night before. There are the men who quietly tell us they cannot grow their team because their evenings belong to a parent with dementia.
Caring for our elders is sacred work. It is also exhausting work. And in our community, it has been done largely without support, without recognition, and without a system that meets the cultural, financial, and practical realities of Black families.
That is what this grant begins to change.
What The Our Elders Initiative Does
The Our Elders Initiative is a culturally grounded, Black-led program that wraps proactive support around Black seniors and the families caring for them. With FFBC’s investment, we will deliver roughly 800 hours of service per week, reaching 100 Black seniors and supporting 50 families across the GTHA.
Three things happen at the centre of the program:
Daily check-in calls. Each enrolled senior receives a daily call — a wellness check, but also a real conversation. For an elder living alone, that call interrupts isolation. For a son or daughter who lives across the city or across the country, it is one fewer worry on a long list.
Remote health monitoring and escalation alerts. For seniors managing chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease, or respiratory illness, we monitor key health indicators and alert families or healthcare providers early — before a small problem becomes a hospital admission. Each preventable hospitalization in Canada costs roughly $8,000 and creates ripples of stress that families absorb for weeks. We are built to prevent that.
Weekly in-person companionship visits. Trained staff and volunteers visit each senior weekly for an hour of human connection — calling a family member together, listening to music, drumming, simple movement, or just sitting and talking. These visits do not look like much from the outside. From the inside, they are everything.
Alongside the direct services, the grant funds workshops on elder care best practices, culturally responsive care, and mental health support for seniors — training that builds capacity in our staff, our volunteers, and the family caregivers who attend.
The Caregiver Underneath the Care
Every hour of care delivered to a senior is also an hour of relief for the family member who would otherwise be carrying that load alone. That is the part of this work that does not always get named.
When a daughter knows her mother received a check-in call this morning, she can be present with her own children at dinner. When a son knows his father’s blood pressure is being tracked and someone will call him if a number trends the wrong way, he can pitch his business with his full attention. When a family knows trained companions are visiting weekly, they can take a Saturday for themselves without the guilt that has become part of their daily diet.
This is what the Foundation for Black Communities is investing in: not just better care for our elders, but better lives for the entrepreneurs, parents, professionals, and community leaders who are caring for them.
Thanking the People Behind This
To the Foundation for Black Communities — the entire team — thank you for building a foundation that listens to Black communities and trusts us to design our own solutions. The Black Ideas Grant is more than money. It is a model for what philanthropy can look like when communities lead.
To the Community Selection Circle members who reviewed our application as peer reviewers — thank you for seeing what we saw and choosing to back it.
To the Black-led Philanthropic Endowment Fund and the Government of Canada for making this investment possible — this is exactly the kind of long-term, community-trusted funding that creates change.
And to our community — to every elder who teaches us, every caregiver who shows up, every family member who has called ACBN to ask how to get help: this grant is for you. This work is for you.
What’s Next
Enrolment for the next cohort of The Our Elders Initiative opens soon. If you are caring for a Black elder in the GTHA — or if you are a Black senior who would value daily connection, regular check-ins, and a community that sees you — we want to hear from you.
To learn more, sign up for updates, or refer a family member, reach out to us at info@acbncanada.com or visit www.acbncanada.com.
We honour our elders. We support their caregivers. We build the future together.
Connect. Build. Grow.
Ryan Knight is the Executive Director of the Afro Caribbean Business Network. ACBN has been helping Black entrepreneurs build sustainable businesses across Ontario since 2017.
