Funder Focus: Tim Draimin and the Tides Canada Foundation
November 1, 2004
By Nicole Zummach
This month in our Funder Focus we feature the Tides Canada Foundation,
a national public foundation that was established in 2000 to support
innovative programs that actively address the root causes of social
and environmental imbalance. CharityVillage spoke with executive director
Tim Draimin about the foundation's efforts to encourage philanthropy
in Canada and raise awareness about the importance of core funding,
as well as its work in the areas of environment and social justice.
CharityVillage: Tides Canada was established in 2000 as a
sister organization to the US-based Tides Foundation, which has been
around since 1976. Why do you think it took so long to bring the Tides
concept to Canada?
Tim Draimin: Generally speaking, Canada has a much more underdeveloped
philanthropic infrastructure than the States. The United States boasts
all kinds of institutions that specialize in different areas of philanthropic
giving, support for donors, or different types of donor services. The
Canadian philanthropic market is smaller because we have a smaller economy
and a smaller population, but we also have a shorter history of the
development of philanthropic institutions.
I think that the United States has been able to support so many innovations
and so many different experiments in philanthropic institution building
partially because of the early emergence of foundations a century ago
in that country. That helped to create a really supportive philanthropic
enabling environment. In Canada, the dedication of philanthropic dollars
to programs that build up philanthropic infrastructure and support the
growth of philanthropy, as opposed to fundraising per se, really only
got going in a significant way in the 1990s.
CV: Your web site refers to an underdeveloped donor base for social
justice and environmental charities in Canada. Why do you think this
is, considering that most people seem to really value social justice
and the well-being of the environment? What is the disconnect between
caring about these causes and giving to them?
TD: I totally agree with you that there is a fair amount of interest
on the part of the public in both social justice and environmental values.
However, I think that it has been a challenge for the organizations
that are dedicated to those cause areas to significantly grow the pool
of donor support as quickly as they would like. One of the reasons,
I think, is that the social justice and environmental charities probably
find themselves most often situated among the small to mid-sized organizations.
Over the last decade, the larger organizations have been able to manage
the turbulence in the charity world fairly well. As we can see from
the Statistics Canada
research that was released in September, it's the medium and smaller-sized
organizations that most often indicate that they are finding it challenging
to do the revenue generation and other areas of their organizational
development. So we simply don't have large-scale organizations that
are able to build up visibility of the issues as much as we might like
to see it happen. I think that's in the process of changing, though.
CV: When the foundation was first launched, you spoke about
the importance of core funding to enable organizations to do their work.
That really goes hand in hand with what you are saying now about building
up these smaller organizations.
TD: Exactly. As we know, one of the things that has generally
happened is that in the social justice area, especially among social
service agencies, the funding model has shifted quite a bit - from core
funding from governments to contracts for specific projects, and even
to the emergence of RFPs and things like that.
There was a recent study done in Toronto of a number of different social
service agencies. One of the things they discovered was that in many
cases organizations that were taking government contracts were actually
spending more on implementing the contract than they received from government.
Government has basically shortchanged the institutions on sufficient
resources to actually do the job. That means that they are eating into
their core resources.
Similarly, we know that core donations become the working capital of
an organization. It provides them with the resources to be able to do
the kind of strategic planning they should be doing. It provides them
with the money that permits them to undertake a new endeavour or respond
to a new issue or need that's not determined just by the whims of donors.
Core funding is basically the most important form of contribution you
can give to an organization. That's what I felt then, and I still feel
that way today.
CV: What types of initiatives and projects are you supporting right
now?
TD: One of the areas we've been very active in is supporting
a range of organizations that are looking at issues related to aquaculture,
from scientific research related to what's happening with fishery stocks
and the impacts of certain types of activity on the fishery, through
to the development of educational initiatives with regard to consumer
practices and long-term stewardship of our marine, aquaculture, and
fish stocks.
We have a small initiative in Vancouver supporting some of the organizations
working on the four pillars approach to dealing with drug and substance
abuse issues on the Downtown Eastside. It's been really interesting,
especially in the context of the interest of local government to support
a harm reduction policy with regard to these issues.
We've also been historically involved in supporting innovative activities
by emerging social entrepreneurs in Canada, in the social justice and
environmental fields. And we try to be supportive of organizations that
are interested in employing some new revenue generation strategies,
such as social enterprise, where the organization explores how to use
the market to diversify their income.
Last month, we held a roundtable involving people from First Nations,
financial institutions, charities, conservation organizations, and others.
They talked about how to accelerate the growth of capital markets that
would be accessible to nonprofit organizations trying to employ a large
number of dollars in meeting their mission beyond just the charitable
dollars that they have. In other words, how can you use charitable dollars
to leverage additional dollars to be able to invest in the activities
that expand the impact of your organization?
CV: From that roundtable came a summary, entitled Over
the Horizon: The Future of Canada's Capital Market for Social and Environmental
Innovation, which is available on your web site. Perhaps you could
expand a bit on this idea of social capital markets.
TD: Well, first of all, we know that there is a relatively small
pool of charitable dollars out there - about $5.7 billion a year. But
charities are active in a huge number of things, and actually the cash
flow of charities, according to Stats Can, is about $115 billion a year.
So, obviously charitable dollars are just one small portion of what
charities are employing to be able to meet their mission. A lot of charities,
especially the bigger ones in the health and education fields, have
certain kinds of income from fees and other things associated with what
they do. But increasingly, people are looking at innovative ideas to
link to new forms of social enterprise that could be beneficial to their
organization. For example, some organizations are now creating social
enterprises that might happen in house if they are closely related to
mission, or might be outside of their organization in a separately incorporated
entity. These initiatives will often need some capital to get started,
and where is the capital available to do those things?
We looked at this from the point of view not just of charities, but
also of people involved in the community economic development field,
as well as the social enterprise field, and the First Nations economic
development field. It's clear that there aren't very many mechanisms,
and there are very few institutions that are making available financing
programs for initiatives in those areas. What we wanted to do with the
roundtable was to make sure that we understood the dynamics that were
at play in terms of the current status of social capital markets. What
were some of the obstacles, and what were some of the opportunities
to grow capital markets that would be available for social and environmental
innovation.
CV: Since your funding is donor-advised, does that mean you
don't accept applications?
TD: We are glad to accept a one-page description of an organization
or its programs, which we keep on file. There are 80,000 charities so
when we do research on behalf of a donor we want to make sure that organizations
can take an initiative and share with us the information that they have.
But we only need a page.
CV: What kinds of giving options do you offer donors?
TD: First of all, they can do a donor-advised fund where they
are making recommendations to us of where they would like their grants
to go. We also make available to donors the ability to participate in
some of the thematic funds that we have set up. For example, we have
a marine fund, we have the drug policy reform fund that I mentioned,
we also have a generic social justice fund and a generic environment
fund that they can get involved with.
In addition to that, we are interested in making available different
kinds of donor learning opportunities. Last year, for example, we organized
a site visit to some of the fish farms on the Broughton Inlet in British
Columbia. We've also organized visits to northern British Columbia to
look at issues related to conservation and First Nations. In addition,
we've organized a seminar for woman - in partnership with the Canadian
Women's Foundation - covering some of the basic elements of philanthropic
giving and providing an opportunity for people to get together with
their peers to discuss some of the issues and challenges that they felt
they had in terms of philanthropic gifting.
We're currently doing some research about effective ways to develop
collaborative giving, either by individuals or institutions. We find
that one of the things that donors are really interested in is trying
to develop a community of peers to be able to discuss and learn about
issues related to philanthropic giving. A number of people have made
the observation that people do so many things together with others,
such as cultural activities or participating in their faith communities,
but giving seems to be such an isolated activity. I think people are
realizing that there is a lot to be learned by joining together with
others as they think about or implement their giving strategy. So we
are trying to create an environment where we are able to provide donors
with ongoing access to information, people, and experiences that enrich
their thinking about philanthropic giving.
CV: What is coming up for the foundation in 2005 and beyond?
TD: In the coming year, we hope to be doing some more work around
social capital markets, as I mentioned earlier. We are very interested
in being a catalyst in helping to grow social capital markets. We've
always been very supportive in the foundation world of mission-based
investing, so that people can leverage change through their investments
as well as through their grantmaking. Within that, we are going to be
interested in helping to promote the idea of program-related investments.
This is where foundations would, with a certain portion of their assets,
try to use those assets to make investments in organizations that reflect
the mission or objectives of the foundation or the donor partner.
We continue to be really interested in initiatives that strengthen philanthropic
values among Canadians. We're considering being involved in promoting
some accessible educational material with regard to philanthropy, which
might be made available for free as a downloadable resource. We're also
interested in helping to provide support to charities to ensure that
they take advantage of the opportunities associated with the intergenerational
transfer of wealth. That is probably one of the single most important
opportunities for the charitable world in the coming decade.
Tim Draimin has more than 25 years experience in the charitable and
nonprofit sector in Canada and abroad. He was most recently Senior Policy
Advisor with the Canadian Council for International Co-operation and
also worked with CUSO and the Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice.
For more information about the Tides Canada Foundation, visit www.tidescanada.org. The next edition of
the foundation's e-newsletter
will be available in mid-November.
