Building The Infrastructure Needed To Align Capital Around Outcomes No Single Organization Can Achieve Alone
Canada‘s most pressing challenges —poverty, workforce transitions, racism, democracy, and community resilience— are increasingly complex and interconnected. Yet much of our funding landscape remains structured around individual grants to individual organizations.
As a result, organizations closest to these challenges are competing for limited resources, while funders face growing demand and increasing pressure to demonstrate impact. Current approaches limit impact, scalability, and how far scarce dollars can go.
Large-scale community and economic resilience will not be achieved through isolated funding, programs, or initiatives. It requires funders, charities, non-profits, and communities to align capital, share responsibility, and invest in outcomes that no single actor can achieve alone.
CCFI brings together funders, intermediaries, and charitable sector organizations to:
The Canadian Collaborative Funding Initiative (CCFI) is building the conditions for more coordinated investment and action by:
Enabling aligned, multi-funder investment strategies
Supporting community-led, multi-organization solutions
Developing shared standards, frameworks, and commitments
Building the infrastructure needed for sustained collaboration
Map and strengthen collaborative funding models across Canada
Establish shared practices that reduce friction and increase scale
Launch new funder collaboratives and coordinated strategies
Support the shift from isolated efforts to system-level outcomes
If you are a community or sector leader, this is a pathway to move from individual proposals to coordinated strategies that match the scale of the challenges you are working to solve.
If you are a funder, this is a pathway to invest alongside others with greater clarity, confidence, and impact.
CCFI is designed to make collaboration our norm.
Why Now
Canada’s most pressing challenges - poverty, workforce transitions, racism, democracy, and community resilience - are increasingly complex and interconnected. And yet much of Canada’s philanthropic landscape is still structured around individual grants to individual organizations. These approaches limit impact, scalability, and how far scarce dollars can go.
Coast to coast to coast, many funders and organizations are already working to meet this reality - collaborating across sectors, building multi-partner strategies, and focusing on systems change. What’s missing is the infrastructure to learn from these efforts.
Also coast to coast to coast are dozens and dozens of funders not yet engaged in collaborative funding models but keen to. What’s missing is the infrastructure to surface where there are common interests and to turn those interests into new pooled funds.
Over the past year, through national conversations, convenings, and engagement across philanthropy and the charitable sector, a shared question emerged: How can capital in Canada be better aligned and deployed to achieve more the type of impact that no one organization can achieve on its own?
The Canadian Collaborative Funders Initiative (CCFI) is a direct response to that question.
This is not about more dialogue. It’s about bringing together people who want to align capital toward shared and transformational outcomes and building the structures, standards, and partnerships that will enable it.
The first stage of CCFI is being stewarded by three organizations working at the intersection of philanthropy, community leadership, and systems change: SETSI, Tamarack Institute, and Philanthropic Foundations Canada (PFC). This collaboration is grounded in a history of work together alongside others across the philanthropic and social impact sectors— and a commitment to listening, sense making and acting on what we hear.
Why Us
SETSI advances new models for an inclusive, resilient social economy – engaging and providing meaningful opportunities to the historically under-represented communities in the social economy, social finance, impact investing and cooperative ecosystems.
Tamarack Institute catalyzes collective action, supporting communities to move from connection to coordinated strategies that address complex challenges. For 25 years, we have been developing and deploying models that have contributed to hundreds of municipal, regional, provincial and territorial and national partnerships across nonprofits, funders, and other sectors.
Philanthropic Foundations Canada strengthens and connects the philanthropic sector nationally, enabling alignment across diverse funders.
This is about collaborative action. We are inviting funders and organizations into a process to create the connections, trust and ultimately agreements that will move capital more effectively toward systemic change.
CCFI will add to existing efforts by:
Surfacing and making visible existing examples of collaborative funding models – what they are and how they came to be
Convening funders to learn from each other about the approaches that are enabling collaborative funding models – and then to cohere those approaches into shared standards and commitments (and then into new collaborative funding models)
Convening nonprofits, charities, and other groups that are closest to the challenges to learn from each other about the approaches that enable cross-sector strategies for systemic change – and then to cohere these approaches into shared standards and commitments (and then proactive, irresistible change strategies that can be brought to funders)
Our intent as we continue this work will be to recognize the contributions of everyone who participates. While we are not yet in a position to compensate our nonprofit, charitable, and grassroots partners, we will list all partners on this website and in other key communications, and ask throughout our work together what other forms reciprocity could take.
Collaboration, mutual support, and shared stewardship are not innovations of this initiative. They have been practiced since time immemorial by Indigenous, African, and other cultural communities. This work is about returning to, learning from, and resourcing these ways of working.
We are also building on, and learning from, a growing set of aligned efforts across Canada and beyond:
In late 2025 and early 2026, Gore Mutual Insurance convened conversations with 32 funders focused on strengthening collaboration across Canada’s funding landscape. CCFI is, in part, a continuation of this work, and the insights from these convenience shaped its design.
In late 2025, Ontario Nonprofit Network, Vantage Point, and nine other organizations joined Tamarack and SETSI as original signatories to an open letter from nonprofits and charities to corporate and philanthropic funders. Today, this coalition includes more than 120 organizations. Supportive responses from all four of Canada’s philanthropic networks – Community Foundations of Canada, Philanthropic Foundations of Canada, The Circle, and Environment Funders Canada – helped establish a shared foundation for the commitments we will advance through CCFI.
Fair Funding for Nonprofits, led by Imagine Canada, and La communautaire à boutte campaign in Quebec are advancing more equitable, flexible, and community-responsive public funding systems.
Across Canada, collaborative funding initiatives are demonstrating new approaches to shared investment and systems change. Examples include GeShiDo Foundation’s “big bet” philanthropy model, The Lawson Foundation’s Charitable and Nonprofit Sector Infrastructure Collaborative Fund, Inspirit Foundation’s Journalism Futures Fund, the Indigenous People’s Resilience Fund’s Indigenous-led model of resource redistribution, and the Workforce Funders Collaborative’s coordinated workforce development efforts.
Gratitude
Chantelle Moore, Manager, Social Impact, Gore Mutual Insurance Company
“Canada’s biggest challenges don’t fit neatly within organizational boundaries. CCFI is redefining how funders approach complex social challenges in Canada, focused on bolstering the Canadian charitable sector through coordinated responses that meet the growing needs and complexities across our communities. Together we are shaping a new era of philanthropy through bold leadership that understands what this moment calls for.”
Zahra Esmail, CEO, Vantage Point
“I see so much potential for funders and non-profits to work more effectively together, in a way that is rooted in partnership, reciprocity, and community care. This may require a gentle resetting of power dynamics and more collaboration between non-profits themselves, and from funder-to-funder. With intentional steps, we can build a brighter and more sustainable future to benefit communities all across Canada.”
Opportunities for funders:
We are currently inviting corporate and philanthropic foundations and other funders to contribute to this work in various ways based on capacity and point of interest.
Stay Informed: Receive updates and findings. Help us make the case for collaboration in service of equitable and transformational results!
Contribute Insights: Participate in interviews, take our short survey, and attend learning sessions to inform the inventory of where collaboration is already strong, the standards for how to collaborate well and “how to” tools we’ll create.
Join a Collaborative Table: Participate in funder or community conversations focus on collaborative funding, shared outcomes, and ecosystem challenges.
Host a Conversation: We are looking to convene conversations, test and validate our findings at the places where philanthropy and social impact organizations will be this fall and winter. If you’re hosting an event, we’d love to talk.
Support Research and Mapping:
We’re looking for partners with the research and mapping capacity to discover existing collaborative models, analyze the information that participants offer and document the journey of this work.
Support Future Experiments: Help identify, design, or participate in collaborative funding pilots beginning in 2027.
Provide Financial Support: Our aim is to raise the funds to support two years of design, convening and facilitation — and, critically, to provide compensation for charitable sector partners who are contributing to the work. We’re seeking partners at multiple levels.
If you are interested in any of these ways to engage with CCFI’s work and or would like to discuss this further, please contact Laura Schnurr at laura@tamarackcommunity.ca
Opportunities for charities and nonprofits:
We are currently inviting charitable sector organizations to contribute to this work in various ways based on capacity and points of interest. We'd love for you to:
Stay Informed: Receive updates and findings. Help us make the case for collaboration in service of equitable and transformational results!
Contribute Insights: Participate in interviews, take our short survey, and attend learning sessions to inform the inventory of where collaboration is already strong, the standards for how to collaborate well, and the "how to" tools we'll create.
Join a Collaborative Table: Participate in community conversations focused on collaborative funding, shared outcomes, and ecosystem challenges.
Host a Conversation: We're looking to convene conversations and test and validate our findings at the places where philanthropy and social impact organizations will be this fall and winter. If you're hosting an event, we'd love to talk.
Support Research and Mapping: We're looking for partners with the research and mapping capacity to discover existing collaborative models, analyze the information that participants offer, and document the journey of this work.
Support Future Experiments: Help identify, design, or participate in joint ecosystem proposal pilots beginning in 2027.
If you are interested in any of these ways to engage with CCFI’s work and or would like to discuss this further, please contact Laura Schnurr at laura@tamarackcommunity.ca