Lawyer Rob Centa has been an avid fan of the Raptors for years.
After seeing players and Raptors media personalities use their platform to raise awareness of racial injustice issues, he was inspired to take action himself.
With the NBA playoffs beginning Monday, he and a group of other lawyers are pledging to donate to organizations fighting for racial justice every time the Raptors win a game in the post-season.
“We started with a core group of six lawyers who tweeted it out this morning simultaneously,” Centa told the Star.
“We thought that if we worked together, we could get a message out to our community that we hoped people would pick up on and engage with and join the pledge.”
Centa is pledging $200 for every Raptors playoffs win (and more, if the team makes an early exit). Within hours, his tweet Monday morning promoting the idea gained more than 1,000 likes and nearly 300 retweets.
“The players themselves from the bubble made it clear that they did not want the return of the NBA to be a distraction from the fight for social justice. They wanted to use the NBA as a platform to further the struggle against racism. We took that really seriously,” Centa said.
The lawyers are planning to send their donations to three local organizations focusing on legal justice.
They include the Black Legal Action Centre, a legal aid clinic for Black Ontarians with low or no income; the Campaign for Cannabis Amnesty, an advocacy group calling for the automatic expungement of cannabis-related criminal records; and the Sentencing and Parole Project.
“There are a ton of great organizations and if people have their own favourite, they should definitely support them. But these were three organizations that we thought were doing really important front-line anti-racist work in the justice system,” said Centa.
The Sentencing and Parole Project provides enhanced pre-sentence reports for Black people going through the criminal justice system to fight the overrepresentation of Black inmates in Canadian jails.
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“We provide direct intervention to help reduce the over-incarceration of Black people that’s breaking up Black families, leaving too many young kids without their fathers and creating significant economic challenges,” said lawyer Emily Lam, one of the project’s co-founders.
Lam said the group relies on private donations as well as grants from larger non-profits like the Laidlaw Foundation. But those grants are only for one year, which means the group has to rely more heavily on private donations for longer-term funding.
“In order to see systemic change . . . we need a few years,” said Lam. “Initiatives such as the one that’s started now for the Raptors playoffs is great in making people aware of what we do.”