Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
It is a pleasure to be able to exchange with the members of the committee, whom I thank for this initiative and for this information gathering.
Groupe 3737 is an entrepreneurial coaching ecosystem with a focus on business and organizational development. We do this through nine programs that support entrepreneurs and organizations at all stages, whether they are at the ideation, acceleration or growth stage. We support young and old alike with a focus on ethnocultural diversity, specifically Black communities.
We are privileged to work with amanuel melles' and Rustum Southwell's teams, as well as Sharif Haji's Africa Centre in the west and Raymund Guiste's Tropicana Community Services in Ontario.
We work in a very synergistic way and we have an ecosystem approach.
We are privileged to manage the supporting Black Canadian communities initiative for the province of Quebec, a very successful initiative so far. In a very concrete way, together with the other intermediaries, we have been able to build capacity around the three priorities of improving governance, increasing human resources and diversifying revenues.
Today, I want to talk to you about statistics so that you can see the impact that this initiative has had, not only on Black communities, but also on the non-profit organizations that support those communities.
As you know, this initiative, supported by the federal government, was created in recognition of the United Nations' International Decade for People of African Descent. Groupe 3737 is privileged to be one of the four Canadian organizations responsible for the pan-Canadian implementation of this initiative and for providing constructive leadership.
I spoke about the three priorities of improving governance, increasing and diversifying funding sources, and improving operational and organizational management. This has enabled us to enter a digital transformation mode. As you know, in 2022, we cannot miss out on all things digital if we want to make our processes and support more efficient.
The number of non-profit organizations, or NPOs, that we support has grown from 58 at the outset to 206 today. In partnership with Employment and Social Development Canada, we manage a grant budget of $8.6 million to build the capacity of these 206 NPOs.
That grant also allowed us to hold a national capacity-building conference, where we hosted not only the 206 Quebec NPOs I just mentioned, but also organizations from across Canada, including Ontario and Halifax.
We were able to put in place a support plan that involves the coaching ecosystem of these NPOs to document the impact of the initiative's funding on capacity building and to quantify in a concrete way the six results expected by Groupe 3737 for Employment and Social Development Canada. The plan allows us to measure the impact of these measures on capacity building, to be accountable, to quantify the effects and to determine how many and which NPOs have made the most progress in the four main categories we will see later.
In order to manage the total budget of $8.6 million in grants that Groupe 3737 received for Quebec NPOs, we put in place a rigorous process.
We started with the applications and the NPOs. We selected organizations and then held one-on-one meetings with representatives of each of those that passed the first phase of the process. We then analyzed all projects for due diligence and signed memoranda of understanding with NPOs that passed this second stage.
These organizations also had to assess each other, so we developed a technological tool for this purpose. The approval was then given through a common platform for the four intermediaries, SM Apply. Finally, we signed off the contributions for the sub-recipients before distributing the cheques.
We have therefore put in place a rigorous process to manage the allocation of these funds and create a context for capacity building.
The first of the six expected results is to increase the capacity of these 206 NPOs. In addition to the total funding of $8.6 million that I mentioned earlier, we have a team of six staff members who support these NPOs by providing them with individual support throughout their process, as well as a digital support platform for them.
The second expected result is the improvement of the overall attractiveness. To this end, we have carried out more than 2,500 interventions and held 36 monthly workshops, not to mention the national congress I spoke about, which brought these organizations together. We toured the regions and distributed the projects among six administrative regions of Quebec as fairly as possible.
Our committees show regional and cultural diversity. In these six administrative regions, we are in contact with Black communities from Africa, the Caribbean and host communities here in Quebec. Each committee has 28 members and—