Tinker co-founded the organization in November 2022 with Renee Hess, who established the Black Girl Hockey Club in the United States in 2018.

Tinker, an analyst for PWHL games on CBC, said the Ice Lionesses were invited to the BGHC Canada camp after she received a message from Joseph, who saw a notice about the camp on social media.

“‘I hope I can come to camp one day,’” Tinker recalled Joseph’s message saying. “And I was thinking about it, we have funds and whatnot. And I said, ‘Why not come this year?’ So we made it happen very quickly, and we got them here.”

BGHC Canada receives support from the NHL Foundation Canada, which seeks to strengthen communities and improve lives across the country through hockey. BGHC Canada was one of five nonprofit organizations that recently received grants for Fiscal 2025 from the foundation.

“We had just received confirmation that we got the NHL grant and that allowed us to realize that our bank account is going to continue to keep going up so we can continue to spend money on bringing players here,” Tinker said. “As long as companies are supporting us, like the NHL, I think it just shows they are invested in the game, invested in the women’s game specifically, which I think is awesome now that we have the PWHL. The NHL funding helps us continuously. We wouldn’t be able to put programs like this on without it.”

Ali, Joseph and Likiza arrived in Toronto looking to improve as players but to also gain knowledge from Tinker and BGHC Canada that they hope will help them establish a women’s and girl’s hockey program in Nairobi that could someday compete internationally.

“Not only will this help them get the skillset to set up and found a formal women’s team, they’ll also obtain knowledge and ideas around running a foundation, running a team, what you have to do as a mentor and a leader to do that,” said Tim Colby, a Canadian expat in Nairobi who is general manager and coach of the Kenya Ice Lions. “It’s not a task we’ve assigned to them. It’s a task that they assigned themselves.”

Kenya was granted associate membership into the International Ice Hockey Federation on Sept. 26, 2024, and became the fifth IIHF country on the African continent along with Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and South Africa.

Kenya’s players skate on a square rink inside Nairobi’s Panari Hotel, currently the only indoor ice surface in East and Central Africa. It’s about one-third of the size of an NHL rink. About 90 percent of the country’s players are boys and men, Likiza said.

“I want to empower girls so that they come to play,” Likiza said. “We want them to be like, ‘I want to be like Carol, I want to be like Hana, I want to be like Saroya.’”