Did you happen to catch the recent National Philanthropy Day supplement in Toronto’s The Star?
It’s a terrific salute to philanthropy, including the efforts of two Community Foundations of Canada members!
There’s a great piece about Toronto Community Foundation’s use of Vital Signs to direct strategic investing, and another about Hamilton Community Foundation’s strides in impact investing.
Well worth a read!
By Rahul Bhardwaj
The Economist magazine says we are the fourth most liveable city in the world.
PricewaterhouseCoopers ranks Toronto second among 26 globally competitive cities surveyed in intellectual capital and innovation, as well as health, safety and security.
International visitors pick Toronto second after only New York as their preferred destination in North America.
And today we are the top Canadian choice for immigrants. Toronto’s immigration levels grew by 11.5% in 2010 after three years of declining numbers.
We’ve assembled the hearts and minds of people from all over the world making us among the most diverse cities on the planet. We’ve established neighbourhoods where we can live peacefully. We’ve grown businesses that provide jobs for many and prosperity for most.
Rahul Bhardwaj speaks during the launch of Toronto's Vital Signs 2011. Photo by Erik Putz
But before we get too smug, there are cracks appearing in our social and economic structures that will spread if we neglect them. Toronto’s Vital Signs tells us this. Our Community Foundation’s annual report measuring the state of the city’s quality of life exposes who we are today – and where this might lead us.
In Toronto today there are over one million people living in low and very low income neighbourhoods. If these trends continue as predicted, by 2025 low and very low income neighbourhoods will cover 60% of our city.
We draw young people from across Canada and around the world to our nine post-secondary institutions, yet upon graduation, their prospects are few. The youth unemployment rate in the Toronto Region was 22% above the national average in 2010. For the 80,000 highly skilled, well-educated immigrants who arrive here in search of opportunity, they are twice as likely as Canadian-born to be unemployed.
And our transit system, the skeleton that frames us, continues to rank poorly when compared to other major metropolitan centres. Chronic underinvestment in transportation has been identified as our greatest threat to global competitiveness. Our commute time is one of the longest and when compared to 14 other major international cities, we spend the least on public transit.
This is not the time to dismantle the structures we’ve established. Instead, we must recognize what makes Toronto great and build upon it. Especially now, when rewarding short-term thinking and quick fixes are in vogue, we must construct a vision for our city and commit to the long-term. We need to build the city we all want – smarter, healthier, more inclusive, more creative, more prosperous – simply put, more Toronto.
We believe what’s more important than what we stand for is what we stand up for. It’s time to stand up for Toronto.
Rahul K. Bhardwaj is President & CEO of Toronto Community Foundation
When it comes to this recipe, there can’t be too many cooks.
The success of Recipe for Community lies in its collaborative nature – it’s a neighbourhood revitalization initiative that builds on residents’ ideas, as well as being a partnership between Toronto Community Foundation and the City of Toronto, with support from community and corporate sponsors.
“We are working to build the city we all want – one neighbourhood at a time. Thanks to our Vital Toronto Fund donors, we can make strategic community investments,” says Rahul Bhardwaj, the Community Foundation’s President and CEO.
After a successful pilot in Alexandra Park, the program expanded to St. James Town, a downtown area that is home to more than 17,000 people in one city block.
After a successful pilot, Recipe for Community has expanded to a second Toronto neighbourhood, with programs including bike repair.
It responds to Toronto’s Vital Signs 2010, which showed Toronto’s young adults lack a sense of belonging to their community: while three out of four youth aged 12-19 (76.7 per cent) feel they belong, only one out of every two young adults aged 20-34 (52.9 per cent) feel the same.
Initiatives include a refurbished outdoor basketball court; a bicycle repair and maintenance program; and a carpentry, painting and maintenance program offering basic skills, practical experience and information about additional education and training opportunities in the trades.
Residents are acquiring valuable skills, while helping to beautify their neighbourhood and getting to know each other. In dense high-rise areas like St. James Town, this goes a long way to improving safety and a sense of connectedness in the community.
Plans are underway to identify the next neighbourhood in need of a Recipe for Community.
By Rosalyn Morrison
Even before the 2015 Pan/Parapan American Games bid was won, Ontarians were talking about the tremendous opportunity the Games provide for building stronger and healthier communities.
Toronto Community Foundation President and CEO Rahul Bhardwaj was particularly interested in bringing community, business, and government leaders together to discuss the idea of aligning our common objectives.
“Social and economic prosperity are always the twin pillars used to secure major, international games hosting opportunities, but these very real opportunities are seldom fully realized. The Toronto Region has an historic opportunity to raise the bar in this regard,” says Rahul, who is also the volunteer Chair of the 2012 Ontario Summer Games.
Traditionally, major multi-sport events have focused mainly on developing the physical infrastructure and delivering the Games on time and on budget, while neglecting the corresponding social infrastructure. Considering the trends we were seeing in our Toronto’s Vital Signs® Report of a deeply divided city, a diminishing sense of belonging, and sedentary lifestyles, we wanted to lead a region-wide dialogue on developing social capital towards and beyond the Games.
Last year, the Toronto Community Foundation was appointed Lead Social Capital Partner by TO2015, the host organizing corporation.
Our Community Foundation initiated several discussions with private, public and not-for-profit organizations on vision, goals and resource alignment. We struck a partnership with Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario and the University of Toronto – Faculty of Physical Health and Education, now supported by the Ontario Trillium Foundation, to hold three community dialogues across the footprint of the Pan/Parapan Games – Ajax, Toronto and Hamilton.
This spring, the initiative was branded as Playing for Keeps to insert some fun into this big idea and at the same time some gravitas, realizing the work ahead and the importance of the endgame.
Over a few months, the partnership grew to more than 20 organizations. The collaborative hosted more than 330 individuals representing private, public, and not-for-profit sectors at three fun and creative planning workshops in May and June.
Toronto’s Poet Laureate encouraged us to imagine “a way of life predicated on the principles of collaboration, shared delight, and teamwork, principles without which no community or city can be built.” Participants surfaced broad areas of social capital interests including: health, sport, recreation, active transportation, environment, education, arts, housing accessibility, and social development – cohesion, employment, and belonging. What does success look like was a big part of the discussions and the University of Toronto – Faculty of Physical Education and Health is spearheading a Sport Legacies Research Collaborative to research the concept of legacy and develop metrics to measure success.
We have a lot of people pulling for us!
In addition, another fantastic opportunity has come our way. In 2012, Torontohosts the Ontario Summer Games. Playing for Keeps plans to distil the many ideas developed in the convenings and identify programs and/or develop a model program that captures the spirit of Playing for Keeps, and test-drive it through the Ontario Summer Games.
The synchronicity of ideas, objectives and the desire for transformative change provides us with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make something big happen – the ball’s in everybody’s court!
Rosalyn Morrison is Vice President, Community Initiatives, Toronto Community Foundation. She has been appointed Chair of the Legacies Committee of the Ontario Summer Games.
The Ballarat Foundation, a community foundation in Australia, has published the region’s first Vital Signs report.
The initiative took 18 months of planning and three months of research, according to the report’s collator, Emeritus Professor Wayne Robinson. He called the report a holistic snapshot of Ballarat, located in the province of Victoria, about 105 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, according to a story in The Courier.
The Vital Signs report, which Robinson said he hopes will serve as a roadmap for the future for the small city’s leaders, was inspired by Toronto’s Vital Signs report.
More information on Ballarat’s Vital Signs report is available here.
By Jini Stolk
Creative Trust’s recent survey of nearly 3,700 audience members – intended to help performing arts companies enhance their audiences’ experience and stimulate attendance – did all that and more.
The most powerful result was learning how very deeply people who attend live theatre, music, opera and dance care about the work they see on stage.
The Audience Engagement Survey – a first-time, collaborative initiative by 20 mid-size and small creative companies – made it possible for participants to hear directly from their audiences.
It found a healthy overlap in attendance at a variety of performances; reinforced the importance of early participation in the arts on future attendance; emphasized that audiences are becoming increasingly interested in hearing more, primarily through the web; and, busting through walls separating “high” and “low” culture, revealed that 50% of dance audiences enjoyed watching dance competitions on TV! Not a big surprise to us So You Think You Can Dance Canada enthusiasts.
Then came our follow-up interview sessions, which found artistic and administrative staff from 18 companies hearing face to face from more than 80 respondents about their audience experiences. The lessons learned are too numerous to document here, but they are invaluable for all involved.
One that will no doubt resonate with the community foundation movement involves the importance of a collaborative approach, across disciplines, to audience development. Encouraging and facilitating new experiences, with your own company or another, is clearly a good investment in Toronto’s cultural development.
Creative Trust has been using collaboration and shared learning to help performing arts companies build capacity, audiences and spaces since 2003. The Toronto Community Foundation was an early contributor to our work, and we went on to win a Vital Ideas grant in 2007.
With the Audiences Project, we are helping Toronto’s creative performing arts companies remain sustainable during a time of significant political and social change.
And we hope we are contributing to making Toronto a truly creative city, where the transformational power of the arts is understood, deeply valued and – most importantly – available to everyone.
More details can be found in our profile on the Toronto Community Foundation’s Community Knowledge Centre or on our website.
Jini Stolk is Executive Director of Creative Trust
The Toronto Community Foundation prides itself on practicing “the art of wise giving,” and no where is that more evident than in its Vital Toronto Fund.
This community endowment allows the foundation to contribute to and partner on targeted strategies tackling the city’s most pressing issues – with guidance from Toronto’s Vital Signs, of course.
Meanwhile, its Vital People Program supports and recognizes valued leaders who are making outstanding contributions at not-for-profit organizations.
Know somebody who fits the bill? He or she could be eligible for up to $5,000 for formal training or other development opportunities.
TCF has also launched a Collaboration & City Building Guide, with accompanying video trilogy, in response to a growing number of requests for information about its cross-sector collaborations.
And, naturally, all roads lead to Vital Signs. Keep up the great work!
By Rahul K. Bhardwaj
How should you give away your money to charity?
Some people who have the wealth and generosity to give back to their community apply their own experience and values to those they want to support and to what form that support should take. This is only natural and can work well for everyone concerned. But, often, it doesn’t work as well as it should.
Let me explain why. Broadly speaking, cities in the developed world are being built on three pillars: the public sector, the private sector, and the philanthropic sector. Historically, each of these has had a very different bottom line. For business, it’s been profits and money. For governments, it’s security and social cohesion. And for non-profits and charities, it’s the quality of life.
But, in the past 20 years, each of these three sectors has begun to merge and align with the others. Governments are much more focused on the bottom line. Many corporations, meanwhile, have a mission to satisfy more than their shareholders and customers; they need to prove they’re good community citizens.
The world of philanthropy has changed, too. It used to only deal with charities and the people and organizations that supported them. Today, however, philanthropy is not only playing a larger role in society, it’s become the meeting place for government and business and donors.
Just ask Bill Gates and Warren Buffett if the worlds of business, government and philanthropy are aligning. They’re not just giving back extraordinary amounts from their own vast fortunes; they’re changing what it means to give. In doing so, they’re reshaping the very definition of philanthropy. For many people of means, living the good life has changed to living a good life and ensuring that others do, as well.
With the Gates-Buffett “billionaire challenge,” the world’s wealthiest people are moving philanthropy directly from the boardroom to the barrios, doing what governments used to do, or never could do, stretching what it means to be a large corporation, a senior executive, a foundation, and a philanthropist.
But this transformation is not just limited to billionaires: we see it in Toronto, for instance, with families who give as little as $25,000 to set up a family foundation within the Toronto Community Foundation. Every member of that family is involved in determining where their philanthropy should go.
That bottom line is morphing and merging, so more non-profits are run more like businesses than ever before.
But they shouldn’t be run as businesses. What’s more, the overlapping shouldn’t be a one-way trip. If you feel charities should run more like businesses, then surely businesses can work better if they’re run in some ways like charities.
To those people who say the business approach is the only way to run government or philanthropy, let me say, no, business can help explain and inform government and the social sector, but not replace them. When business tries to turn society into a business, things get out of whack. Or put more elegantly, these three sectors become misaligned.
We see the cost of this misalignment particularly in the United States, where the political gridlock has an iron grip on any progress the country hopes to make, especially economically. The reason is that the competitive urge – the basis of much of business – can at times completely overwhelm the co-operative impulse. The result is that healthy debate about the future of cities, for example, is replaced by clenched fists instead of outstretched hands.
The situation is not as dire in Canada or Brazil.
Competition – the ability to compete and win – has built much of Toronto and Sao Paulo. But the way forward is not through competition. Or at least not just competition. It’s through collaboration. Lots of people know how to “do competition.” But knowing how to do “co-operation” is much harder because it’s new and we don’t have the tools and skills to do it well. This just means we need to find a way to reward co-operation.
We need to stop thinking of our sectors as walls, but rather as bridges. If we can find ways to align our interests, to start by finding what we share rather than what we don’t, business will prosper all the more, the social sector will better serve more people, and government will improve the lives of its citizens.
When people give money to charity and use the financial bottom line as their sole determinant of who gets that money, that’s doing good for personal sake. Or for corporate sake. Or even for political sake. But it’s not for goodness’ sake.
We can only do that when we join with others in the journey, and only when knowledge is added to philanthropy to improve society.
Rahul K. Bhardwaj is President and CEO of Toronto Community Foundation. He gave this address during the recent Sao Paulo Foundations’ Association 5th annual conference. This commentary also appeared in the Globe and Mail.
TORONTO, June 22, 2009 – Today, along with Mayor David Miller, the Toronto Community Foundation celebrated 26 high-impact community organizations and leaders at its annual Vital Toronto event. The event was hosted by Matt Galloway of CBC’s Metro Morning. Mayor Miller also discussed the scholarship fund in memory of his mother at the Community Foundation.
Three grant programs are fueled by the organization’s Vital Toronto Fund – a community endowment used to contribute to and partner on targeted strategies tackling quality of life issues identified in the Community Foundations’ annual Toronto’s Vitals Signs® Report.
1. Vital Ideas invests in Toronto’s most high-impact organizations by providing capacity building grants to further expand or replicate programs with successful track records in other areas of Toronto.
2. Vital People is a leadership grant that assists Toronto’s exceptional community leaders in the not-for-profit sector to grow through professional development and further magnify their impact.
3. Vital Youth supports free high-quality sports and recreation programs to help develop the leadership skills of youth from Toronto’s more vulnerable neighbourhoods.
“We use our Vital Signs Report as a blueprint for investment to transform lives, communities and our city,” said Rahul K. Bhardwaj, President & CEO, Toronto Community Foundation.
“Our solution-focused strategy relies on partnerships with community organizations and individuals such as those recognized today. They are working on innovative and creative solutions and represent the steps towards a more vital Toronto that we should be proud of.”
A complete list of the recipients is available at www.tcf.ca.
Toronto Community Foundation
Community vitality has been our purpose, promise, and passion since 1981, when we started connecting donors to community needs and opportunities. Home to over 300 funds, we help people invest in Toronto, making it the best place to live, work, learn and grow.
We monitor the quality of life in our city, identifying its strengths and weaknesses through our Toronto’s Vital Signs® report. We provide the leadership and guidance to bring people together from all parts of our community. We exist for Toronto – for now and for always.
Since 1981, the Community Foundation has granted in excess of $70 million to hundreds of charitable organizations. In 2009 alone, it brought together and leveraged the resources of the more than 300 funds under our helm to invest $8.2 million in more than 450 community organizations working on innovative solutions to city challenges.
Posted in Toronto
Betsy Martin, Senior Advisor to Community Foundations of Canada and head of its Responsible Investment Pilot Project, listened in on Janice Stein’s interview (video) of Jed Emerson, the pioneer of blended value, at MaRS Discovery District in Toronto last night.
Some initial take-aways from what was a rich interview followed by lots of good discussion with a large crowd at MaRS.
Jed has been a proponent of what he calls blended value for years. It is looking at the return on investments as a blend of financial returns and social and/or environmental impact. It’s not having three bottom lines. And it’s less like a soup and more like a salad in which you can still taste the individual ingredients.
Jed’s personal story is really interesting. He started out as a social worker and now works for a hedge fund in NY. After years as a social worker and running non-profits, he ended up burnt out and cynical about the non-profit world and the fact that how most non-profit organizations get funded has nothing to do what they really accomplish. He now works to make the case to direct capital to companies and organizations that deliver the best blended value.
Jed has a real challenge to the traditional approach to philanthropy.
After he left his last non-profit organization, he started to work with a philantropist who, like Jed, was really bothered by the fact that there is no logic to the capital structure in the non-profit sector. As a friend of his described it, the philanthropy funding model is to “let a thousand flowers wither” because we have no model for growing the funding for ideas and organizations that are making a difference. Good ideas may get initial funding, but there is no structure like there is in business financing to move up the investment ladder to be able to attract greater investment as you prove that you have a successful model.
So they started to apply an impact investment model to working on homelessness and they came up with a couple of sets of indices to track whether or not they were making a difference. One set was on the business performance and one set was on the social outcomes over time of the homeless organizations they worked with. And they also gathered stories about the people the organizations helped find the way out of homelessness. All of that was the blended value of the foundation’s investment in homelessness and they could tell which organizations they were funding had the greatest impact and direct further investments accordingly. And those investments were not just grants – they included loans, mortgages and other investments that allowed successful organizations to grow, plan for the future and diversify their own funding.
As the whole area of impact investing has grown in recent years, there are more and more metrics becoming available to track environmental and social impacts to help foundations and others figure out where their investments can make the most difference.
Which brings me to his other message to foundations: that the grants made by foundations are just one relatively small tool in the toolbox. As Jed described it - If you were trying to get me to invest in your company and said that you’d use 5 cents of every dollar I invest for your business and put 95 cents in the bank, I’d think you were crazy. But that’s been the standard foundation model. It’s changing and it’s fascinating to see how foundations are rethinking this model and how to use more of their assets to invest in making real impact on our social and environmental challenges.
More on how that’s changing later…
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