Ontario Trillium Foundation launches $80 million non-profit recovery fund
Why It Matters
Canadian charities have lost a third of their revenues so far this year. Meanwhile, more than half say they’re spending the same amount of money — and 15 percent are spending more to either adapt to the pandemic or respond to rising demand for services. This new fund from one of Canada’s largest grantmakers will help Ontario organizations pivot and adapt.
As the COVID-19 pandemic devastates the non-profit sector, one of Canada’s largest grantmaking organizations is launching a fund to help Ontario’s non-profits adapt and make a full recovery.
The Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF) is repurposing $80 million from its Growth and Capital grants to create the Resilient Communities Fund, a pool of money to help organizations retrain staff, reimagine fundraising strategies, and purchase personal protective equipment – better equipping them to handle programs in the post-pandemic world. Successful applicants will receive anywhere from $5,000 to $150,000 to shore up these costs.
“We knew that these were really challenging times and that we couldn’t just proceed with our regular granting programs,” says Sonia Dayal, community investments director at the OTF. “We really wanted to come up with something to help the not-for-profit sector respond to COVID.”
While food banks, mental health services, and other non-profits are seeing demand for their services soar during the pandemic’s hardships, they are also facing PPE- and COVID-related expenses – along with severe financial threats. According to an Imagine Canada survey, revenues at Canadian charities are down by almost one-third over the course of 2020. Meanwhile, just over half of Canadian charities are spending about the same amount of money as they did before, and another 15 per cent are spending more than they used to.
“We knew that these were really challenging times and that we couldn’t just proceed with our regular granting programs.”
Dayal says plenty of funds have been established to help communities with immediate needs – like providing food to the hungry. Not much was available for non-profit organizations themselves to build back their own operating capacity, especially with all of the COVID-19 related expenses required of them. “It’s a very unique opportunity,” she says.
The fund is open to any non-profit whose work primarily helps Ontario residents and currently struggles to run their programs because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It can be used to retrain board members or employees, renovate buildings to meet public health protocols, buy PPE, develop new ways to raise money, and adapt programs to meet new public health requirements. Organizations can also use grants to create new ways of working together – whether that’s through peer learning, data sharing, or networking.
The OTF has paused their Capital and Growth grants for the year, and used them to start the new fund. While these pools of money help non-profits renovate and expand existing programming, Dayal says neither helps rebuild and transition organizational capacity. Very few funds do – one notable exception is the recently launched CanadaHelps Charities Adaptation and Innovation Fund, which allows Canadians to donate to a group of 400 charities who need help supporting their operations during the pandemic.
There are a couple of catches. Any organization applying for the OTF fund needs to have at least a year of financial statements. It’ll also need to fit into one of the OTF’s six action areas, which includes supporting children and youth, improving economic well-being, supporting the arts, or promoting healthy and sustainable living.
Grants will last up to one year — the OTF doesn’t plan on keeping the fund open beyond that point. The fund has two separate deadlines for organizations: Sept. 2 and Dec. 2. According to the OTF, these deadlines are to “address the diverse needs of organizations and to support them where they are in their recovery and rebuilding.” (Organizations can only apply for the fund to support COVID-19 related operational capacity specifically, and not all of them will necessarily be ready to do so by September.) However, organizations will only be allowed to receive one grant each.
The OTF is one of the largest grantmakers in Canada. Last year, it awarded $108 million to 629 projects across the province, according to its website, and has continued to issue grants over the course of the pandemic.
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