One of the greatest challenges we're facing at our institute is in fact funding—grant funding, etc. We have start-up funding from Simon Fraser University, but in terms of support for the institute, much of that comes from the researchers' grants and the ways that researchers have been able to acquire grants.
Let me just say that our institute was just accepted by the senate of Simon Fraser University about two weeks ago. It's a very new institute.
In response to the fact that our racialized researchers do not feel well supported, our students do not feel well supported in being able to be supervised as students and getting access to some of the research topics they're interested in because of the funding deficit. In fact, in terms of access to research, that is one of our greatest challenges.
As you know, Black academics are under-represented in the system and under-represented in terms of getting access to and winning research grants. Part of that is that we have a whole research apparatus that has not valued those topics and does not often see value in addressing issues of race. For example, during COVID-19, when it became really important, we saw that our scientific research bodies had not spent time looking at how COVID-19 may disproportionately impact Black communities, and we know that they were overrepresented.
The short answer is that we're hoping for targeted funding to support this under-representation, and right now that is our biggest challenge.