Funder Focus: Anne Swarbrick and the Toronto Community Foundation
April 4, 2005
By Nicole Zummach
This month in our Funder Focus we feature the Toronto Community
Foundation, which was established in 1981 to help philanthropic
citizens establish endowment funds and to ensure that grants have the
greatest impact on Toronto's most pressing issues. CharityVillage spoke
with president and CEO Anne Swarbrick about how the foundation
identifies and addresses the needs of Canada's largest city, its role
as a convener and a catalyst, and its synergistic approach to grantmaking.
CharityVillage: What specific challenges do you face as the community foundation for Canada's largest city?
Anne Swarbrick: One of the challenges, of course, is increasing
awareness, because Toronto is a very busy media hub in terms of trying
to get any media coverage. Also, it's such a major financial centre
that there are many firms to reach out to and raise awareness among
professional advisors about the services that a community foundation
can offer to high net-worth philanthropic citizens.
CV: Each year you publish a Vital Signs report, an annual check-up of the city of Toronto. What did you find in your 2004 report?
AS: There are ten different issue areas that we deal with, everything
from the gap between rich and poor, to housing, to arts and recreation,
to the environment, to belonging and leadership. Some of the key learnings
included showing some of the growing disparity in the community. There
is growing wealth, growing economic indicators in the Toronto region,
and on the other hand, many people are very much at a disadvantage compared
to others in areas such as affordable housing, for example. There are
almost 70,000 people waiting for affordable housing in our city, yet
there are more than 10,000 vacant rental units that exist. That told
us that there was a real opportunity that a community foundation should
grab hold of to see if we could build a bridge between some of those
people on the waiting list and some of those vacant units. So we brought
together landlords, the affordable housing sector, and two levels of
government - municipal and provincial, which resulted in our developing
a new model for shelter allowances. We expect that this is just the
beginning, and hopefully it will be replicated to create access for
many more people in need of affordable housing.
CV: Toronto is a large and very diverse city. Aside from housing, what are some of the other pressing issues the city is struggling with, and how are you working to address these issues?
AS: As we approach how we can build the quality of living in
the city, we are trying to get people to stop thinking in terms of silos.
For example, encouraging people to see the connection between the traffic
problem in our city, the air pollution that it causes, and the health
problems that result from this, such as the number of cases of asthma
and deaths attributed to air pollution. In other words, it helps us
as a community foundation to look at the importance of identifying programs
and initiatives that can help reduce gridlock in the city because this
would result in cleaner air, more healthy people, lower health care
costs, and more attractiveness economically since companies would be
happier with productivity if employees didn't have to spend so much
time in transit to work.
CV: A spin off of the Vital Signs report is your Vital Ideas Grants
program. What initiatives is it supporting right now?
AS: Part of our trying to be very synergistic in the approach
we take in the community is that we are looking at Vital Signs as more
than just an annual report card, and more than just a project in itself.
Instead, we've made it the lynchpin of our strategic framework, around
which we are developing our various other activities. So in terms of
our discretionary grant streams, we've developed Vital Ideas, which
offers grants of up to $30,000 for some of the most innovative, high-impact
community initiatives that are helping to make a difference in the city's
Vital Signs. The grants also help support those initiatives in building
their financial sustainability by developing their communications and
marketing outreach. Right now, we have lots of great ideas out there
that people don't know about. If people knew about them, they wouldn't
be looking to reinvent the wheel, but to learn from these initiatives
and replicate them, as appropriate.
Pathways to Education is one of the terrific initiatives in our city
that is very deserving of being replicated, and of being increasingly
supported - both by government and the private sector. It provides educational
support to youth who live in Regent Park, which is one of the poorer
areas of our city. This support includes tutoring twice a week, as well
as being linked with a mentor. Plus, each year that a student participates
in the program and meets the basic criteria, a thousand dollars is put
into a savings account toward the cost of post-secondary education.
So by the time they graduate, there should be $4,000 waiting in an account
to help get them off to a good start in their post-secondary education.
Right now, 97% of the eligible youth in Regent Park are participating
in the program, and as a consequence, school absenteeism has dropped
by 50% over three years.
BikeShare is another example of a wonderfully innovative idea. It's
designed to help people traveling around the city, as a complement to
the public transit system. It especially benefits people who either
can't afford an automobile, or who choose not to use automobiles to
get around because they know how it causes deterioration of the environment
and health, etc. Something as simple as bike share arrangements just
adds to that flexibility of people's access to local communities.
Aside from the Vital Ideas grant stream, we also have the Vital People
grant stream. These are grants of up to $5,000 to provide professional
development support to emerging community leaders who need that professional
development to help them move to the next level of leadership in the
community. So, everything is geared to help build that critical mass
to contribute as much as we can to help improve the city's Vital Signs.
We hope, also, that other organizations will consider the data in Vital
Signs when conducting their own environmental scanning and building
their own operational and strategic planning.
CV: Aside from your donor-advised funds and other endowments, you also operate the discretionary Toronto Fund. Tell me why this fund is important to the foundation.
AS: The Toronto Fund is the community-building fund that supports
our discretionary grant streams, such as Vital Ideas, Vital People,
and our ongoing Vital Signs report card. For us to develop those high-impact
ways to leverage maximum community building, we need to have the resources
to support those discretionary initiatives. We were delighted recently
when one of our donors chose to put $285,000 into the Toronto Fund.
This is wonderful because we need to build it as a very strong endowment
that will be that gift that keeps on giving to support those kinds of
initiatives on an ongoing basis.
CV: You strive to be a convener and a catalyst. What does
this mean for the foundation and how are you working to achieve this?
AS: A community foundation has the opportunity to be seen as
neutral and unthreatening to all sectors of the community. Therefore,
where there are particular challenges, like the affordable housing shortage
in our city, we are the kind of organizations that can bring together
private landlords, the affordable housing community, and the different
levels of government. By being able to build the trust of those various
players, we can help to forge a new model, like the Strong Communities
Housing Allowance Program that I mentioned earlier.
We're also currently involved in bringing together 30 different people, from philanthropists to nonprofit community leaders, to City of Toronto employees, to architects and designers, around Toronto's need to improve its outdoor public spaces. So, we engaged in a dialogue process with those 30 diverse representatives that resulted in some wonderful ideas about the kind of criteria that should be applied for us to create some demonstration projects that will help to further beautify our city.
CV: New community foundations are springing up across Canada
and around the world. What do you think are some of the challenges associated
with this rapid growth?
AS: It's always a challenge when any organization or sector is
going through aggressive growth. It's challenging in terms of resources
and creativity, and how you can support that growth. Obviously, in the
case of Canada, we are very blessed to have a good, strong Community
Foundations of Canada (CFC) as a national association to help provide
support and sharing of intellectual capital and other resources. A challenge,
of course, can include 'Can we provide enough resources to CFC to be
able to support every community across the country? Or, do we need to
be looking at whether there is some better coordination within regional
approaches to community foundation development?'
CV: Your asset base recently surpassed the $120 million mark
and continues to grow. Where would you like to see the foundation ten
years from now?
AS: We have a strategic plan that calls for us, in another four
years, to be over $200 million. It's a lot of growth and we are bent
and determined to exceed it. Our return on investment of the assets
that we manage has been consistently top quartile and near top quartile.
For instance, at the eleventh month point of this fiscal year, our return
on investment was 11.85%. Last year, our return on investment was 22.9%.
So we demonstrate a high level of competence in managing investments
for philanthropic individuals and charitable agencies.
There is a common thread in everything we are doing right now. So, we
will likely grow other 'field of interest' funds that correspond to
the issue areas of Toronto's Vital Signs. That way, donors will be able
to put money into those particular fields of interest within our Toronto
Fund, knowing that they can trust our judgment to figure out which are
the highest impact initiatives to put grant money to work in.
We are always looking at what Vital Signs helps to tell us in terms
of some of the community's challenges and where we are uniquely placed
to be able to bring together people from diverse sectors, and diverse
kinds of resources, to support some of the most strategic ideas that
can be catalyzed to make a difference. We are also taking our convening
role to another level by initiating Vital Conversations dialogues. I
want to emphasize how community foundations like ours can help to leverage
high impact in the community through the knowledge that they offer to
philanthropic citizens. We can be at the cutting edge of learning about those ideas that some of our community organizations are discovering, creating, developing plans for. They need the leap of faith and vision that a community foundation is willing to offer.
Anne Swarbrick has been president and CEO of the Toronto Community
Foundation since 2003. Prior to that, she served four years as executive
director of the Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange (CATIE).
For more information about the Toronto Community Foundation, visit www.tcf.ca, or to download their most recent Vital Impact
report click
here.
