The Catalyst Community Finance project is a multi-year initiative to develop enhanced ecosystem and policy infrastructure to support the start-up and scale up place-based community capital organizations in urban, rural and Northern communities in Ontario and across the country.

Partners

A core collaborative including Pillar Nonprofit Network, SVX, Scaling Impact, Ontario Trillium Foundation, DUCA, United Church of Canada, and Vancity Community Investment Bank are supporting the Catalyst Community Capital Initiative. A wide range of networks, intermediaries and funders are also supporting this initiative.

Goals

• Collectively design relevant ecosystem and provincial public policy infrastructure to ensure that community capital institutions can successfully and sustainably start-up and scale their impact
• Facilitate knowledge sharing amongst place-based capital and capacity organizations
• Engage existing and new community capital organizations that can serve organizations, projects, and enterprises in selected urban, rural and Northern communities, alongside mainstream leaders in philanthropy, public policy, and financial institutions

Process

This project will engage in a community development process including:

• Discovery: Building understanding of market conditions, trends, barriers, and opportunities and directly engage stakeholders in community capital;
• Design: Design, test and refine actions for ecosystem development through a Learning Community and an Action Plan for the ecosystem, government, investors, and intermediaries;
• Deployment: Advance and implement solutions and actions for ecosystem to take next step in its evolution.

Outputs and Outcomes

• Learning Community of current and interested place-based community capital stakeholders;
• Community Capital Research Report including case studies, map, data, and comparative analysis of Canadian (federal and provincial), US and UK policies that support community capital institutions
• Action Plan including potential policy interventions to scale up community capital institutions in Ontario as well as potential ecosystem infrastructure interventions with an appropriately phased plan to scale up community capital institutions in Ontario and across Canada
• Tools and templates for community capital leaders.