The moniker “changemaker” is often achieved after decades of work. But just two years into the creation of The Black Academy, and six years after launching not-for-profit B.L.A.C.K., co-founders Shamier Anderson and Stephan James have more than earned the title.

Last September the Toronto-raised actor-producer brothers launched the televised Legacy Awards on CBC – billed as the first major Canadian awards show to celebrate  and showcase Black talent – paying it forward behind-the-scenes with a skills development program for Black creatives.

The Legacy Awards were produced by Boat Rocker’s Insight Productions as well as the brothers’ Bay Mills Studios banner, under which the duo have “a robust slate of projects” aimed for Hollywood.

Playback: What are your thoughts on the significance of the Legacy Awards?

Stephan James: It’s even exceeded our expectations as far as the impact that we wanted to have in our community. That gives us validation, when you have different individuals reaching out to us – whether they were a part of the show, went to the show, or saw it on television – saying that it impacted them… that they had been in the  industry for 20, 25 years and have never experienced a night like this and have never felt seen in this way.

What are your goals for The Black Academy Skills Development Program, which launched in September to help Black Canadians enter the screen-based industry?

Shamier Anderson: The expansion is about trying to go coast to coast, opening up those verticals, hiring more people. It’s the follow-through. It’s like you do a jump shot and you get the ball in the net; the ball in the net is the Legacy Awards and the follow-through is the skills development program.

What are your overall goals for The Black Academy?

SA: I would love in the lead-up to the award show that we’re doing activations in Vancouver, Calgary, P.E.I. I think it’s important, especially in some of the rural parts of Canada where people who look like us may not feel like they even have a voice.

SJ: If there’s a way to continuously use all the opportunities we have as producers to help get people jobs that they wouldn’t have otherwise, it’s going to be really important. But also, having conversations with the unions, whether it be ACTRA, or conversations with other productions that we’re not attached to and seeing if we can find a way to blend the skills development program within [other avenues].

Speaking to the Academy as a whole – more programming, other ways to continue to reach out to the community. We started the Monologue Slam a few years back, and  that got hit with the hurdle that was COVID in 2020. But that’s something Shamier and I are actively looking to bring back. The youth are important to us in our mandate. Something that we were planning this year was the Black Summit, in which we would have different programs take place over a period of maybe a couple of days.

You’ve been coproducing a limited series on late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, which has been in development at Boat Rocker, where you signed a first-look deal in August. Tell us your strategy at Bay Mills Studios.

SA: Our strategy is commercially viable content. It needs to be entertaining, however we’re looking for something to say. So it needs to feel like a chocolate-covered vitamin. We have different verticals, TV – scripted, unscripted – and movies. We’ve got a robust slate of projects that have not been announced yet. We really want to take  incredible Canadian filmmakers and artists and use our platform to catapult them into the big business of Hollywood.

When it comes down to submissions, we have first-look TV deals, so we develop from the seed stage of a project – whether it’s an idea, whether it’s a deck, whether there’s a writer attached, a producer attached, a director attached. We’ll come in at any stage on the TV front. If we really engage and respond to the project, we’ll bring it into [development] through our deal. What that will look like is we’ll finance development at 100%. The copro aspect is something that we’re always open to.

On the film side, we’re wide and open. We’re looking for projects at any stage as well, but with an eye towards a really strong package. What that means is a strong filmmaker at the helm, a really notable writer, someone who’s getting a lot of buzz. We’ve got a team – VP of development, Holly Hubsher and Tse Daniel, our director of development – and they work closely with us in picking projects.

What does being a changemaker mean to you?

SJ: It’s giving people jobs, a literal source of income, livelihood; giving people skills that no one could ever take away from them; putting them on stage, giving them awards so they could share their testimony with Canada and with the world. That’s the stuff that excites us even more so than our day jobs.

SA: Be the change you want to see, that’s a changemaker to me. Growing up in Scarborough – Bay Mills, Birchmount and Sheppard – living in Toronto Community Housing with our immigrant mother from Jamaica, I didn’t see the things that I see now. I didn’t grow up on Black awards shows in Canada. I didn’t see the Black academies – and even if they were there, [there were] barriers to entry. That’s the change – it’s making it tangible.

This interview has been edited and condensed

This story originally appeared in Playback‘s Winter 2022 issue

L-R: Shamier Anderson and Stephan James; photo credit: O’shane Howard and CBC