The following is for the benefit of any organization approaching the Foundation for support or collaboration in 2018. For more information about granting, please visit our Granting web pages.
In 2018, all the Foundation’s granting and investing will be aligned with the following priority areas:
1) Support for social innovation and social finance
The Foundation is integrating its impact investing and granting goals, including through the development of program-related investments (PRI’s).
At the end of 2017, the Foundation concluded its funding relationship with Social Innovation Generation (SiG); in 2018 we will help assess needs, opportunities, current assets and gaps in the social innovation ecosystem and plan our future engagement in this field.
We will continue to support social innovation networks and exchanges, chiefly through existing partnerships.
Two funds remain open to general application:
- Social Innovation Fund (supporting the scale up and growth of social innovations)
- Innoweave (sharing social innovation tools with change leaders)
2) Other responsive granting
The Foundation sometimes encounters community organizations that are on the cutting edge of their field; they are already testing promising approaches to stuck problems and are poised to scale. While we will prioritize grants that correspond to our initiatives [see below] we will sometimes consider proposals that contribute to our broader mission of engaging Canadians in building a society that is inclusive, reconciled, sustainable and resilient—and that advances progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
3) Foundation initiatives
- Cities for People (increasing equality of opportunity; strengthening the civic commons; supporting urban innovation labs and networks)
- Indigenous-focused philanthropy (reconciliation as social and economic innovation)
- Re-Code (supporting social innovation in post-secondary education)
- RENEW: Energy and the Economy (shifting the economy to a sustainable state through changes to energy production, distribution and use)
- WellAhead (school-based child and youth wellbeing)
The Foundation’s Sustainable Food granting initiative is now focused on food security in Northern Indigenous communities and on the Nourish initiative, which seeks to improve the future of food in health care, and is not considering unsolicited proposals.
Note that we receive a large volume of proposals every year and fund only a small number. We encourage applicants to seek support from a diversity of funding sources. We prefer to help take existing initiatives to scale rather than funding new ideas.