What if Social Finance takes off? (Reflections on the Philanthropic Foundations of Canada conference)

What a month to celebrate, thank and dream with our supporters and friends of the Relèven as we continue to pilot new structures in #socialfinance!  Recently, we were honoured to host dozens of charitable foundation leaders from Philanthropic Foundations Canada / Fondations philanthropiques Canada for their national conference, held in Montreal. As it happened, our offer of a site visit to “Steeples, Circus and the City” was… sold out! 

The big idea was to look at the Centre St Jax as a technical case study for the scalable financing proposals of the Trinity Centres Foundation, within the broader context of emerging opportunities for social and/or impact finance.  

We began by hearing from Paul Clarke about the years of work and dozens of refugee families helped through the work of @Action Refugee Montreal.  Then, from Jenna Smith about work amongst youth and food security led by @Innovation Jeunes.  Then from Alizé Honen-Delmar and the work among hundreds of circus artists and sector-supporters with Le Monastère - Cabaret de cirque .  And finally from the Centre St Jax’ Paul Bode as he spoke about the importance of smaller community organizations as the sand and water that fills the cup with overflowing community impact.  

I then moved to explaining the wider scene for charities:

Of Canada’s 86,000 charities, nearly ¼ are religious and of those, half own a property.  Of those, at least one third have wrestled with closure or sale already, putting some $15 billion of land value into motion.  At least another third are facing such multi-year deficits, that the same questions are arising rapidly for them also….

…As we looked at non-religious charities, we see a different story - an even harder one, where both occupancy and administration have skyrocketed, faster than the pace of donations and grants.  This means that for every dollar granted, foundations are receiving less and less programme impact as a result. 

(Source: Canada Revenue Agency - Agence du revenu du Canada T3010 Data / TCF Research with Halo Canada )

How could we help address this problem?  This is where we introduced our scalable social infrastructure programme, in harmony (and built for!) the Federal #SocialFinanceFund and including our next pre-development loan fund & bond issuance as well as our wider construction and permanent financing ambitions, in combination with the excellent work of Canada’s granting and community foundations.  We cannot do this alone!  Equally, we cannot do this with the current instruments.  It’s time to build!

(Due to Canadian securities regulations which allow us to issue our current bond from our registered charity and to qualified investors, we cannot post information here, or allow anyone to profit from referring or distributing this message. However, if you are such an investor, you are warmly invited to contact me or TCF directly, to ask for our bond issuance letter)

I would like take a moment to thank our supporters. First, our earliest families and foundations, for their generous support to getting us here - many of whom have preferred to keep their support unpublished. I would like to thank the Catherine Donnelly Foundation for their earliest $500k letter of intent towards our first foundation-backed social finance instrument (shout-out to Mritunjay (MJ) S. Sinha who now appears as a social finance angel with other hats on!)  Thanks also to the various Dioceses and Congregations who have leaned in, together helping release over $30 million in local projects financing, so far! Huge gratitude to Community Foundations of Canada | Fondations communautaires du Canada , ★Michelle Baldwin and many city teams, as well as the National Trust for Canada (whose conference is this week - and we are co-presenting a seminar on financing of heritage projects) the Canadian Urban Institute L'Arche Canada , Canadian Association of Gift Planners (CAGP) and our many other collaborators and partners.  I am also thankful for growing connections with Palos Wealth Management , Philippe Marleau & Charles Marleau as we understand more about how more traditional family office and religious foundations engage and invest in this work.

Looking ahead, TCF’s future is all about #SocialFinance. 

Our work takes the existing social capital of buildings, land and most importantly place (the social, heritage and historical construct that makes social purpose real estate, social) and is creating new and scalable investment vehicles for government, foundations and individuals to support.  The instrument we’re working on currently is a pre-development loan package, aimed to provide $100 - $250k loans to groups of local charities coming around a faith property, hoping to see it re-deployed for community use. If you want to see an example of this, check out TCF’s Projects Page or today’s article about St Clement in Hochelaga, up on CBC Montreal. 

(I am delighted to see Archbishop Christian Lepine of the @Archdiocese of Montreal, being the latest Bishop to call out for this vital church/charity/social finance need!)

I could not have navigated this territory without the generous support and scholarship from the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford #ImpactFinance Programme led by Aunnie Patton Power , Alex Nicholls , Gayle Peterson , Karim Harji and their teams. The Bible describes heavenly support like ‘a great cloud of witnesses’ and that’s how I would describe all of my colleague social finance innovators, from that gang! 

Next month we’re looking forward to some exciting developments with the Parliament of Canada , MP Ryan Turnbull and more (details to come) as well as investment committee meetings with a number of our next-phase foundation investors.  

So, in conclusion… I hope that you are all filled with hope as you see this emerging Social Finance conversation evolving.  Let’s work for a better and more connected Canada. There is so much good news, ahead!   Please take a moment to leave a comment, response or share - let’s keep this conversation going!

Postscript:

After a long conference, we thought that our PFC colleagues might enjoy a bit of humour, including a look-back at this video we used to ‘pitch’ the sale of our green space at St Jax, to the City of Montreal. Check it out, below.