This summer, I sat down with staff and board members from five other community foundations across the Thompson Okanagan region: Shuswap, Central Okanagan, South Okanagan Similkameen, BC Interior, and North Thompson. We spent a full day comparing notes: what each of us does well, where we need help, and what we could accomplish together that none of us could pull off alone.
By the end of the day, every foundation in the room had committed to the same thing: working together on impact investing. If that term is new to you, you’re in good company. Most people think of community foundations purely as grant makers, collecting donations and giving money away. That’s true, but it’s only half the story. Community Foundations also hold endowments, money invested for the long term so it can keep giving for generations. Traditionally, that money sits in conventional stocks and bonds. Impact investing asks a different question: what if the money itself, not just the grants it eventually produces, could also do good in our community, while still earning a solid financial return? In practice, that can look like an impact fund, a mortgage, a real estate project, or a community bond, structures that let local dollars solve local problems and still turn a profit.
CFNO isn’t new to this. We were the first community foundation to invest in the Thrive Impact Fund, joining in September 2022 and providing flexible capital to local impact driven enterprises. We put in $40,000, and it has paid us a steady 3.5% return every quarter since. We have no plans to pull out. If anything, I’d like to see us invest more. We also joined four fellow Thompson Okanagan foundations in a $100,000 community bond investment, $20,000 of it ours, to help fund Propolis Cooperative Housing Society’s 53-unit net-zero housing project in Kamloops. That bond has now been repaid in full, plus interest, and the money is sitting ready to be redeployed into the next opportunity.
That’s really what the gathering was about. Impact investing works best when foundations pool resources and share risk, and that only happens if we trust each other enough to collaborate beyond our own backyards. Six foundations committing to this together is bigger than any one of us. It’s bigger than foundations, too. Propolis’s bond campaign raised money from more than 100 everyday residents, not just institutions. The more our community understands and gets behind this kind of investing, the more good it can do here at home.
If you’d like your giving to do double duty, earning a return while building something our region needs, I’d love to talk.
Learn more at cfno.org/investing
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