Chris Boucher’s story is as improbable as they come. Born in St. Lucia, the Toronto Raptors power forward immigrated to Canada with his mother when he was 5, and grew up in poverty in Montreal’s north end. He dropped out of school at 16, and faced homelessness while working as a dishwasher at a St-Hubert restaurant. Eventually, he found a way into the NCAA, but went undrafted due to a torn ACL.
Today, despite all those obstacles, he’s an NBA champion.
Now, Boucher wants to do all he can to help other kids beat the odds like he did. So he’s teamed up with G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education at Toronto Metropolitan University to launch a new scholarship aimed at helping five students of Caribbean descent achieve their academic goals.
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The SlimmDuck Scholarship will provide financial assistance to one student each year for the next five years, specifically supporting those who have incomplete admission requirements for a conventional pathway to a university degree.
“Just thinking about how my story went and how lucky and blessed I got, I don’t want to forget and be ungrateful,” Boucher tells ET Canada. “So I felt like it’s my job to give a chance to other people to have similar opportunities and get to do better for [themselves], for their lives and just to get better just in general, because I feel like [they] never got help like that before. This was the first time for me to be in that position to help people. It was something I’ve always wanted to do.”
Boucher’s scholarship — made possible by a donation to the school from his SlimmDuck Foundation (the amount of which wasn’t disclosed) — will be available for students accepted into TMU’s Spanning the Gaps program, aimed at removing barriers to post-secondary education, beginning in August.
The 30-year-old Raptors star wanted to make the scholarship available to students with Caribbean backgrounds because he can relate to their challenges, being a first-generation Canadian from St. Lucia himself. “I know how hard it was; I saw my mom struggling for a long time, just making the change from going to the island to the city,” he says.
— Photo: Cole Burston/Getty Images
“My pants would be too short or I wouldn’t have the newest video games, obviously, because we didn’t have the money. Just having those struggles, feeling like you’re under everybody. And going home and not seeing your mom for a minute because she’d have two jobs and she had to work for everybody. You know, it’s a lot of struggle that is kind of like a trauma for a minute. You don’t realize it but when you get older, you’re like, OK, wow, all that stuff that I’ve been through, it’s a lot for a kid to go through. If I can help another kid to not go through this, that’s the mission.”
Boucher says that between the ages of 16 and 20 — after friction with his mom over her new partner — he had no home to call his own, occasionally crashing at his cousin’s place or sleeping on public transit. Having given up on academia, basketball offered a ray of optimism; he’d play pick-up games with friends at parks and recreation centres around Montreal. “Nothing was going right, but I knew that at 5 p.m., I’d be at the park playing basketball until midnight, that would be my fun time,” he says. “Even though I didn’t know where I was going after it, I knew from that time I was going to have fun. I got lucky to be seen. But guess what? If I wasn’t doing something that I loved, nobody would have seen me.”
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The 6’9” forward was eventually invited to play in an annual Hang Time tournament in Little Burgundy, where he made such a good impression he was recruited to play at Alma Academy, a school designed to help inner-city teens. That proved to be a long and winding pipeline to the NCAA, which led to the G League, and eventually — after innumerable hours of relentless grinding — the NBA.
Last year, Boucher signed a three-year, $35.25 million extension with the Raptors.
His message to youth feeling directionless? Find the thing that lights you up, and hang onto it for dear life. “There’s definitely one thing that you like to do that brings you joy,” he says. “There’s something that you’re good at. There’s something that you like to do that people probably don’t even think you should do. Try to push it as much as you can.
“I mean, obviously the doors are not open everywhere, but people see talent, people see passion and people see when you’re genuine in what you do. I feel like this is something that will always bring a light at the end of the tunnel if you’re pursuing it and especially if you actually strive and try to get there, because obviously, there’s ups and downs, but if you give up on the first door, you’ll never know.”
Boucher is the latest of the Raptors to lend financial support to educational initiatives in and around Toronto.
Last year, Pascal Siakam made a donation to TMU allowing a dozen students “to gain meaningful and paid work experiences with several organizations working towards positive social change” over the summer.
Scottie Barnes announced over the summer he was teaming up with Skilled Trade Colleges of Canada to launch a scholarship program worth $250,000 over the next three years.
And Fred VanVleet partnered with the University of Toronto’s Rotman Commerce program to launch a four-year scholarship for Black or Indigenous students, worth over $57,000.
Boucher says he was inspired by his teammates’ contributions to the community, and knew it was something he wanted to do himself once he was able to. Even more so once he saw how big the Caribbean community was in Toronto.
“I’ve met the most St. Lucian people here in Toronto,” he says. “It’s a small island, obviously. I didn’t know how much of us were in Canada, but apparently, there’s a lot. We had a Caribbean night and that was one of the craziest nights that I’ve had at a Raptors game, just to see all the island people and all the joy. And Caribana is the best time I always have. It feels like they bring the culture back from the island all the way here. That’s something that always brings me back home.”