Two years ago, TD announced a global commitment to spending $1 billion by 2030 on four interconnected agendas: connected communities, better health, a vibrant planet, and financial security. 

That was before the world was fundamentally changed by COVID-19. In response to the pandemic, TD has allocated $25 million of its initial $1 billion commitment to social impact organizations supporting those most impacted, through a Community Resilience Initiative. The company started by granting $1 million to community health centres across the country, including the Alex Community Health Centre in Calgary, which used funding to create a dispatch centre to provide information and updates about the coronavirus and social services to isolated community members. The initiative also includes flexible funding for existing grantees “to fund immediate, short-term needs and help save not-for-profit jobs at risk due to funding shortfalls.” 

But these are just initial responses, TD’s global head of corporate citizenship, Andrea Barrack says — the pandemic has changed the way she and her team think about the Ready Commitment’s four priority areas for good. We sat down virtually with Barrack to learn more about what community wellbeing means to her now, and what others working in corporate citizenship can learn from her insights. 

What have been some of the biggest challenges and considerations you and your team have been working through since the pandemic began?

We were having one set of conversations about how we were helping with the acute and emerging needs, whether they were about job loss and economic needs, food insecurity needs, the health needs that we saw rapidly rising. On the other side, we had conversations with many of our existing community partners who were, quite frankly, freaked out, and asking, Are you going to pull our funding? Can we still apply for funding, even though we don’t think we’re going to be able to do what we would normally do? 

I think as a team and as an organization, all of a sudden we realized that — we’re the sustainability and corporate citizenship team at the bank, and sustainability by definition is trying to meet the needs of today without sacrificing your ability to meet them tomorrow. And that was the conundrum that we were in. We did want to engage in a dedicated effort to meet the acute needs of right now, but we also had an obligation and a responsibility to stand by our community partners, who we rely on to help execute the TD Ready Commitment in the long term — which is about dealing with the interplay between health, social, economic and environmental issues. Their needs were going to be different. Sometimes their needs were going to be about, How do I pivot my program so it can happen digitally? Other times, the needs are going to be, I need to pay the hydro bill, or, I stopped payroll. Now was the time to recognize that it’s not going to be a programmatic approach. It’s really going to be a stabilization approach.

A big part of the Community Resilience Initiative is that stabilization you’re talking about — and support for capacity-maintenance. Why was this important to you?

We are really fortunate to have deep relationships with partners that we’ve had over the years, and I think there’s mutual trust. It’s clear we can have real conversations about what’s going on with them, and if we don’t help them to keep the lights on right now, that they won’t be there for us next year. There are needs that are acute right now, but we also are going to need a strong not-for-profit sector to support our recovery and to help us, individually and collectively, deal with whatever the new normal looks like. 

I hope that there are strong arts and culture organizations that can bring joy and light into our lives when this is over. We need strong environmental organizations to be able to deliver on some of the commitments that the bank has made, in terms of urban green space and accelerating a transition to a low carbon economy. We really, really need to find ways to have sectors that help the most vulnerable and to be there when this emerging, urgent situation hopefully dissipates and gets back to normal.

As the federal government is looking at, how do we make sure that small businesses don’t fail and that the basic structure of our economy doesn’t fail, the not-for-profit sector is 8.5 percent of GDP in Canada. We can’t afford for that sector not to be there. We just can’t start over again when this is over.

The TD Ready Commitment has four priority areas — connected communities, vibrant planet, financial security and better health. What has the crisis illuminated for you about each of these priority areas? Has it changed how you think about any of them?

[On the environmental sustainability front,] what’s been interesting is that climate change and biodiversity degradation has clearly caused a set of circumstances that can allow viruses to flourish in ways that they haven’t been able to before. The greenhouse gas emissions piece, too, is interesting because they haven’t reduced as substantially as I would’ve thought. I think what that shows is that while individual personal decisions absolutely can make a difference, [we need corporate action, too].

We’ve also been very committed to this transition to a more green economy, but at the same time recognizing that in Canada, the energy sectors are a huge part of our economy and you can’t turn that off overnight without having disastrous impacts on real people. So for us, the learning has been that we do really need to stay on this path around transition, and how we can transition jobs and the economy to that so that people do not suffer.

That intersects with the financial security focus, too. What has the pandemic illuminated for you around that piece?

That’s probably been the most obvious. One of the things that we’ve been really concerned with is that the folks considered essential workers are predominantly women and they’re predominantly from racialized communities. They often are gig employees, they’re contract employees, they don’t have benefits, they’re the folks who we are so grateful to for delivering our groceries. I’m really rethinking what decent work looks like, why it’s important, why it’s in all of our interest to make sure that we have an economy that works for everyone. I think this has been one of the benefits of this crisis. 

On the health front, too, the racialization of the virus has been really devastating in many of the American communities that we’re in, and we actually suspect that the same is true in Canada, although we don’t collect statistics right now in the same way, so it’s a bit more difficult to see. But folks who already have preexisting conditions or other determinants of [poor] health are more at risk, not only of contracting the virus, but higher mortality rates as well. And so we need to really consider, when we talk about better health, that we want to see equitable health outcomes, and we’re absolutely not seeing those equitable health outcomes with COVID. We need to really take a look at why that is, and how we can even the playing field. Look at who are the communities most susceptible to diabetes or COPD or all of the other things that are now risk factors. They tend to be Black or Brown communities. They tend to be communities that are low income. 

How can people doing corporate citizenship and corporate social responsibility work start to address these kinds of big, looming challenges?

Corporate citizenship, on its most broad definition, is not just about philanthropy. It’s also about how you conduct your business. We’ve certainly been concerned about our employees. Our CEO went out early to say no employee will lose their job in 2020 as a result of the COVID, which really just took the fear away. 

There are ways that we can use our business to support the world that we want to be in. Part of the TD Community Resilience Initiative is trying to bring our human capital, business, and philanthropy all together in a way so that the sum is greater than its parts. Corporate citizenship is about being a citizen of the communities you’re in, [and that means] really seeking out organizations that are perhaps not all over the news and everyone else is jumping on the bandwagon for them. Our early grants to community health centres are an example. They don’t do fundraising. They don’t have corporate partnerships. They are just working quietly, doing great work in communities. There are many folks in the sector who need us right now, but don’t know how to access us. We’ve been trying to be thoughtful about making sure we’re reaching out to those folks as well, because they do great work.

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