Leveraging our assets and knowledge for a bigger impact 

As a community foundation we know full well the potential of pooling assets to deliver a more powerful impact. This year we reaffirmed that philosophy as preferred practice of collaborating with other investors – notably other foundations – on larger, and sometimes ground-breaking initiatives so that we can share the due diligence, best practices and risk. But it was also a year of firsts.

This year has marked a turning point in Toronto Foundation’s ability to put more of our assets to use for good. With the onboarding of RockCreek as our new Outsourced Chief Investment Officer, we’re on track to significantly increase the percentage of socially responsible investments in our main investment pool. Already this year money has been re-allocated to such investments and we expect that our board of directors will formally approve the foundation’s direction in socially responsible investing before the end of 2021.

Building on our COVID-recovery and equity lenses, we now also evaluate our social impact investments on whether and how those initiatives are led by and serve Black and Indigenous communities, as well as people of colour.

Finally, we expanded beyond traditional debt and limited partnerships with the approval of our first social impact bond, which closed in September 2021. Social impact bonds have returns that are tied to the measurable outcomes achieved. We see a promising future for social impact bonds.