McConnell commits $30M in capital transfer to Indigenous-led foundations. What's a capital transfer? And will others follow?

“They're leading the way. Like a pebble in a pond, it will have a ripple effect and that’s what we need,” said Bruce W.J. Miller of the Indigenous Peoples Resilience Fund.

Why It Matters

Black and Indigenous-led foundations have called on private foundations to transfer assets to them — to put them in charge of distributing resources to their own communities. But have funders been heeding these calls?

Early in the morning, one day in mid June, Bruce W.J. Miller took a video call from his home in Winnipeg, on Treaty 1 territory, that he could have scarcely imagined two decades prior. 

From the Northwest Territories, two leaders of the McConnell Foundation, one of Canada’s oldest and largest private foundations, told Miller that their board, at a recent meeting, had committed to a “capital transfer” of $30 million to Indigenous-led foundations — and that his organization, the Indigenous Peoples Resilience Fund would receive a third of that sum.

“When I started in this sector…it was just such a hard, uphill battle,” says Miller, partnerships lead with IPRF. “And [now] to be in a position of opportunity to see this come to fruition — it’s really a monumental moment in philanthropic history.” 

In Canada, multi-million dollar gifts are

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