 Hi everybody. I'm Peter Clausi and welcome back to Investor Intel for a very special performance. Today is not about a company. Today is not about mining or rare earths or high-tech or COVID. Instead, something happy to talk about with Colin Lynch. Hi Colin. Hi Peter. Thanks for coming in. Today we're talking about the Black Opportunity Fund. Please tell us what that is. It's an initiative to provide sustainable, supportable, long-term funding to businesses and entrepreneurs into charities and nonprofits right across Canada to help them do what they would like to do but even better by providing them with that tool, with that support, with that financial capacity to build Canada so that we all succeed. That's such a fantastic paragraph. There aren't enough charities aimed at doing this kind of work. So why do you think we need this fund? Well, there's a lot of stats and those stats have shown that whether you look at Black entrepreneurs that have been chronically underfunded from an equity sort of venture capital perspective or from a debt lending perspective, whether you look at education rates and you disaggregate that and you look at the propensity of individuals to be educated is actually highest according to stats Canada in the Black community. But the propensity of individuals that believe that they will get educated for instance at the university level is the lowest and so there's a gap there and we want to sort of help that exactly. And you can go on and look at so many verticals whether it's healthcare outcomes or whether it's ability for entrepreneurs to scale up or ability for entrepreneurs to receive the capital they're looking for. All of them point to need and what we're just trying to do is provide one tool to help solve some of those problems. How long have you been around? We've been around since formally for two years now. We became a registered charity late last year. I began the conversations with some peers on the Black Opportunity Fund in 2019. So early in our journey and we've been really, really working hard. How are you funded? Well, we are funded today largely through contributions from corporations such as TD made a big announcement but there is also other banks like CIBC and National Bank and other about 40 corporations so far have come to the play. We also have had contributions for individuals but that being said we're early. The federal government announced the 200 million dollar philanthropic endowment fund and we're certainly going to be applying as part of that process to receive some of those funds and we think overall in the long term we'll have funding from three sources individuals and families, corporations and government. Why a whole of Canada problem needs a whole of Canada solution? A global problem but let's focus on Canada for now. So individuals get a tax slip? Yes. And since you're a registered charity of audited financial statements? Correct, exactly and the governance is super important. You're talking to the right guy. How do you find opportunities in which to invest? Yeah, we have had a lot of opportunities come to us from a couple reasons why we've generated a lot of opportunities. One is that we have had town halls and we've had multiple town halls as an example. Our business town hall has had over a thousand participants in and those town halls, yes, they surface issues, they surface potential solutions and when we design the Black Opportunity Fund in terms of how we receive application, evaluate applications and provide capital, we use the feedback from those town halls and I just point to the business one but we've had ones focused on a lot of other areas as well, healthcare, education, arts, criminal justice, etc. So that really helps and helps us get the word out to the community. How do you drive traffic to the town halls? Well, we use whether it's social media we use there's a ton of word of mouth and there's a lot of excitement about that. We have over 250 volunteers from across the country and they help to sort of drive town halls and then as organizations have come to support the Black Opportunity Fund, worried about the Black Opportunity Fund filters through those organizations. As an example earlier this morning I talked with somebody in TD who's in one of the branches that said we need to hear more about this. We need to tell our clients and our entrepreneurs about this information. How do we get more information about the BOF out? So we're still in that journey and I think as more people learn about the fund we'll get the word out even further and we'll have further interest in receiving help. You'd think that you could leverage the bank's infrastructure to communicate with some of the bank's clients who are borrowing from the bank to get them some equity so they can grow. Exactly. That's exactly what we're working on right now and as you know with large organizations it's easier said than done but there's a huge opportunity and so we're working on that right now. Good. Well I wish you all the success in the world. Once we're offline I'll give you a few leads to follow up on. It's wonderful to meet you and I'm looking forward to following your story. Well thanks for having me here. So this is Colin Lynch from the Black Opportunity Fund funded in part by the TD Bank so thank you Green. I'm Peter Clausi signing off from Investor and Tell with a good new story for the day. Bye all.