If you’re doing work that makes a big social impact in your community – whether you’re a for-profit business, a non-profit or a registered charity, we’re interested in investing in you!

Impact investing is a form of financial support which allows the Community Foundation to leverage its assets to invest for community benefit. It’s different than a grant because, through this program, we may invest or lend rather than gift funds. This allows us to use our investing power to help you and, as a bonus, we can later pay it forward to help others also working to make our community a better place to live.

Depending on the situation we may offer more than a financial investment. We may help create or improve a business plan, for example, so that we can help you work towards longer-term financial stability.

How do you know if you might be a candidate for Community Foundation Impact Investing?

We’re interested in any business, non-profit or registered charity that is working in any field that benefits our community.

The choices are almost endless: Maybe you have an online platform that helps seniors and students find housing, or you run aquatherapy for people with mobility issues, or perhaps you recycle computer parts to divert waste from the landfill. In short, if what you’re doing makes our community a better place to live, talk to us to see if we can help power up your work.

Why do we provide this giving option?

At the Community Foundation, we want to provide as many ways as possible to help people make their communities better – and we know that this work requires many different people, working in many different ways on many different solutions.

And while grants are a great tool, they also come with some restrictions that may exclude some types of projects. Impact investing provides some flexibility to us to help the most innovative and impactful work being done in a community while also maximizing the impact of our capital. We are investing our assets anyway. If we can invest in local enterprise that is making difference then we all win!

Essentially, we have the power and opportunity to invest back into the community, so that together, all of us can work in our areas of expertise to make our communities better places to live.  Contact Aaron McRann, aaronmcrann@cfso.net to see if we can make this work for you.