Sankara | Online Multicultural Marketplace

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Sankara is a Black, Indigenous, Immigrant and Woman owned and operated company based in New Brunswick.

Sankara is a social enterprise which operates an online multicultural marketplace where the curious can buy cultural cuisines, grocery, arts and crafts made by local cultural vendors. Their platform builds cross-cultural empathy by allowing the curious to travel vicariously through their partner vendors’ products and services.

Their marketplace exists to empower systematically marginalized people to utilize their cultural knowledge as a profit-generating and community-making tool. Sankara facilitates radical cultural appreciation and avoids harmful cultural appropriation by allowing vendors to sell their cultures on their terms.

Sankara allows racialized vendors to build confidence, capacity, influence, and prosperity through online sales of their cultural products and services to curious community members. They are a community-driven platform and believe in genuine offline and place-based connection. Some of their past offline community-building initiatives include pop-up restaurants featuring their partner chefs, art installations, travel storytelling evenings, chef-led cooking classes and a ready-to-eat meal distribution model.

Names hold a deep meaning, value, and purpose. At their core, Sankara represents dignity, unity, self-determination and empowerment. They named their company after the late Thomas Sankara, a pan-Africanist revolutionary president of Burkina Faso who lived those very values everyday. He believed in the reclamation of identity and the power of unity to co-create an equitable future.