Today in the Canadian philanthropic funding landscape, capital is frequently deployed through isolated grants and organizational silos, limiting the collective scale required to address rising demands and pressing interconnected societal challenges.
Our Mission
To create a collaborative funding ecosystem that empowers organizations, funders, and communities to work together toward long-term systemic transformation.
Our Vision
A more resilient, equitable, and responsive Canada where collaborative action and aligned funding create measurable social impact at scale.
Canada’s Collaborative Funding Initiative (CCFI)
To address this structural gap, with founding support from Gore Mutual Insurance, partners including Tamarack, SETSI & Philanthropic Foundations of Canada, are exploring a new collaborative funding infrastructure designed to align capital, strategy and operational leadership. This effort is grounded in a growing recognition that meaningful systems change cannot be achieved by individual organizations acting alone. Instead, it requires coordinated action across institutions, aligned capital deployment, and investment both in emerging leaders and shared goals.
Our work is structured to build a comprehensive, action-oriented blueprint for collaboration. We are establishing four interconnected tables, each focused on a critical piece of the puzzle:
Mapping and Scaling What Works
We are moving beyond theory to inventory and analysis of existing collaborative funding models across Canada. By identifying the principles and practices that are already delivering results, we can accelerate the replication and growth of successful approaches.
Deliverable: A practical playbook and roadmap for shifting from isolated grants to pooled and coordinated funding, enabling funders to achieve the financial scale necessary for transformative impact.
Table 1
Table 2
Forging Shared Commitments Among Funders
To unlock the full potential of collaboration, we must create greater alignment with funders. This table will develop shared protocols to reduce administrative burden, increase transparency, and synchronize strategic planning and funding cycles.
Deliverable: A set of shared standards, best practices, and a formal agreement among participating funders, creating a more efficient and effective ecosystem for both grantmakers and grantees.
Table 3
Empowering Community-Led Ecosystem Proposals
This table focuses on strengthening the capacity of community organizations to move beyond isolated requests and present coordinated, ecosystem-level proposals. This empowers communities to become architects of their own solutions, with aligned funding following their lead.
Deliverable: A framework for strategic partnerships that enables communities to present ambitious, cross-sector proposals for systemic transformation, backed by a funder coalition ready to respond.
Table 4
Accelerating Through Collective Learning
We will not reinvent the wheel. This table is dedicated to rigorously learning from past collaborative experiments, both successes and failures in Canada and internationally. This ensures our work is informed by evidence and avoids repeating costly mistakes.
Deliverable: A synthesized understanding of the full spectrum of collaborative funding approaches and the patterns that lead to success, providing a critical knowledge base to guide our collective action.
Toward a More Resilient and Responsive Sector
The Canadian Collaborative Funding Initiative is more than a series of meetings; it is a deliberate move to advance the relationship between funding and action. By aligning capital, strategy, and operational leadership, we are building an infrastructure that can match the scale and complexity of the challenges we face. This is an invitation to funders and community leaders alike to step out of organizational silos and into a shared space of possibility where collective ambition meets coordinated resources to create a more just, resilient, and prosperous Canada for all.
