Fostering Global Giving: How Canadian Philanthropy Can Meet the Moment

Speakers

Joanne Kviring, CEO of CAF Canada
Michelle LeDonne, Executive Director of Pathy Family Foundation
Aled Hollingworth, Senior Vice President of Development of buildON
Chrisoula Mirkopoulos, Co-Founder of Ancestors of Tomorrow
Mark Brender, National Director of Partners in Health Canada

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Joanne Kviring
Hello and welcome everyone to this webinar, Fostering Global Giving, How Canadian Philanthropy Can Meet the Moment. I’m Joanne Kerving and on behalf of CAF Canada, I’m pleased to be co-hosting today with Michelle LeDonne of the Pathy Family Foundation. Over to Michelle.

Michelle LeDonne
Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We’re really excited that Joanne’s created this space. We look forward to learning and sharing today. As we get started, we just want to take a moment to acknowledge the land we are on today. I know folks are calling in from across North America, Turtle Island, and also around the world.

We know that our land is the traditional home of the First Nation, Metis and Inuit people here in Canada. I am sitting on the unceded land of the people in Montreal. And as we go through the discussion today, I think we can all keep this commitment to reconciliation and decolonial practices front of mind. And we encourage you to acknowledge the land you are sitting on today. Back to you, Joanne.

Joanne Kviring
Thank you, Michelle. Our agenda today is to have an opportunity to share and learn about global giving from Canada. We are pleased to be joined in this discussion. Who will be joining shortly? Aled Hollingworth of Build On, Chrisoula Mirkopoulos of Ancestors of Tomorrow Fund, Mark Brender of Partners in Health Canada.

There will be time for questions. Please use the Q&A chat function that should be on the top of your team’s window. You will see the webinars being recorded as we will be sharing it out publicly. In our limited time today, we hope to touch on the following across the panel discussion and your questions. Understanding of the Canadian regulatory landscape for international philanthropy, including how to support charitable activities outside Canada and how to manage risks when doing so. Learn about the range of models and approaches to advancing locally led change and how funders can support effective partnerships that respect community priorities and deepen long-term impact. And connect the dots between philanthropic ambition and practical pathways for collaboration around an international funding strategy.

We’ll bring in our panelists now. And thank you again for joining us. To start us off, Michelle, I’ll ask you to go first with these questions. What does meeting the moment mean for Pathy Family Foundation and what are the challenges and opportunities
your organization is meeting.

Michelle LeDonne
Thank you, Joanne. So for context, the Pathy Family Foundation is a private family foundation based in Montreal, but active in our grant making across Canada and currently in 18 different countries around the world. This has been a longstanding commitment of the family and the foundation.
to be really active in the international development and human rights space. And this commitment really, in terms of meeting the moment, really became an urgent crisis last year when USAID funding left the scene overnight, and we found ourselves in a kind of unexpected leadership position in the Canadian sector. There’s not a lot of major philanthropic entities who have long-standing strategic grant-making portfolios.

And our partners, our peers were looking at us for what do we do in this moment? How do we respond? And I think what I would say towards meeting the moment that also speaks to the challenges and opportunities, we found that the best thing we could do was to be really clear about our size, our scale, what we can and can’t do in this moment. And be as communicative and responsive as possible to our partners. We were upfront about the fact that we can’t fill this gap, but what we can do is be as adaptive and communicative and therefore you as the situation evolves.

And we hope that that was felt by our partners. We have one of our longstanding amazing partners on the call today with Mark. And this moment of crisis has really led to, I think, renewed focus at the foundation, stronger relationships with our current partners and also a chance to reflect on our approach as we bring new partners on in this changed ecosystem. We’re doing so with a lot more intentionality, a lot more consciousness of what our support means, the expectations it creates. And we’re doing that, I think, in the most relational way that we ever have. So that’s what I would say for that. And I think I’m passing it over to Chrisoula to answer the same for Ancestors of Tomorrow.

Chrisoula Mirkopoulos
Thank you, Michelle. Hello, everybody. My name is Chrisoula. I’m here with representing Ancestors of Tomorrow. For us, when we think about meeting the moment, it really revolves around 4 aspects, I think. Awareness, agility, purpose, and the biggest of all, courage.

Courage to proactively engage rather than being passive, courage to recognize the significance of a situation and taking appropriate action to address it. For us, we recognize the growing need for regenerative solutions, given the growing disparities in our underserved community. And we made it our mission to address those social inequalities, along with the environmental deteriorations that sometimes we see go alongside that.

I would say one of our biggest challenges, particularly when we’re talking about a global place where we want to be directing funds, is knowing if something is real without being able to see it, to feel it. How do you in this ever-changing world and ever-changing AI world really know what is a real thing and what is just made-up. So we’ve worked really hard over the last couple of years to develop a methodology, which we’ll maybe get into a little bit later, to kind of decipher who is aligned with our mission and our vision and who is perhaps just out there trolling, if you will.

On the flip side of that, the biggest opportunity is the potential to create these virtuous cycles of philanthropic capital, addressing illequality and scale a positive change. We feel that by integrating these systems of giving, we can really begin to heal and create social well-being for everybody.
And now I will pass it on to, I believe it’s Aled.

Aled Hollingworth
Thank you, Chrisoula. I’m Aled Hollingworth, representing Build On, and extremely excited to be here with everybody today. For folks that don’t know us, Build On is an organization based here in the United States, but we construct and work to build schools and establish schools in eight countries globally. And we’ve been doing this for 35 years.

As an organization, we now have over close to 3,300 schools globally that educate over 423,000 children, parents, and grandparents in these communities that we partner with. One of the things that we are so excited about with our work is that 50% of the participants in our schools are female. And that is extremely important when we look at meeting the moment globally, is that we really want to ensure that communities are at the center of change in their own communities. We realize that with global philanthropy changing, with what’s happened around the world in many of our communities, we really feel that our opportunity to meet the moment right now is working directly with the communities themselves.

While we were not impacted, and Michelle, you spoken to the USAID challenges, we luckily were not impacted last year by those changes, but many of the communities that we work in were. And so we found that an opportunity for us was to really dig in and work more closely with the communities to keep our commitments that we had to ensure that we’re there and can support them not only in establishing schools and educating children and adults, but also making sure that we’re working with them to create future income for their households and their communities as well.

A phrase we have here at Build On is we never give up. And I think that that’s an important thing when we look at the challenges that we’re all experiencing globally at the moment, too. We are working currently in Haiti, in Mali, in Burkina Faso, which there’s political unrest in all of those countries, as well as in Nicaragua and many other countries globally. And that’s probably one of our largest challenges is the political landscape in many of the countries that we work in.

The opportunity is that communities are ready to partner and to work closely with us and to really dig in to make sure that they’re helping be a part of the solution in their countries as well. And so that’s where we are, you know, we really view the challenges as an opportunity to, and excited to join this conversation today.

And I think, Mark, I’m passing it on to you.

Mark Brender
Thanks, Aled. I think I have an opportunity to get better internet at the office is what is the first opportunity. So apologies for that. But yeah, I just want to echo my thanks to Joanne and Michelle for arranging this and Aled and Chrisoula for joining.

So I think super quick on Partners in Health, so we’re a global health and social justice organization that has been working for about 40 years to really provide high quality health care in some of the most impoverished and resource poor settings around the world. So we work in 10 or 11 countries, really based on long term health system strengthening and really using local expertise of the people that we call our bosses, which are our patients.

And so if our patients are our bosses, because they’re the ones that know the social environment, the conditions in which they live, they’re the ones that understand the historical forces that have caused impoverishment of the kinds of places where they live and such that what needs to be done to kind of both rectify injustice, but also to address a whole range of factors about what it means to build systems that can deliver high quality care. And as we do that, we also work with and through the public sector.

So if we think that Health is a human right. The people who are responsible for delivering on that right are not NGOs. It’s governments. It is their obligation, just as we expect our governments hopefully to provide human, the essentials for human rights, governments in the places where we work. It’s their obligation as well.

And so our job is to accompany those governments to increase capacity and support so that over time they can take this work on themselves. I think as far as meeting the moment, what, you know, Michelle alluded to in terms of what has happened to the crisis in global health in many ways that has really drained billions of dollars and caused a cascade effect. It’s not just the US that has kind of retreated. We know that Canada has decreased our funding to grow towards global health.

So kind of in a countryside, it really is making a lot of impossible choices that have to be done about the needs are much, much greater than the resources. The needs are coming from patients as well as from governments that we are being asked to do more and more to support the public sector that is also faced with a loss in revenue. And so how to navigate that tension is something that is really, really important as an organization, how we’re thinking about doing that.

I don’t like talking about opportunity through this crisis because none of our patients would say this is an opportunity, right? This is a crisis for them. I do think the opportunity in the sense that there is more attention focused on how can we do responsible development. In our case, responsible global health, what does responsible philanthropy look like? And effective philanthropy? These are conversations that are incredibly important right now. So we really look forward to diving in and having a chance to talk more about that.

Joanne Kviring
Thank you, Mark. I’ll wrap this section up with introducing a bit of what CAF is. CAF is a group of charitable organizations in the UK and North America operating globally. The Charities Aid Foundation in the UK, Charities Aid Foundation America, and Charities Aid Foundation Canada, CAF Canada. Each of us work with donors to ensure their giving is impactful and provide strategic support to help charities.

In Canada, CAF works across cause areas, including education, health, the arts, and the environment, by connecting Canadian donors with charities around the globe. As part of our broader mission each year, CAF Group’s World Giving Report gathers insights from more than 50,000 people around the world to explore what drives giving at a global level and across more than 100 countries.

And as I was thinking about this conversation and what it means to meet the moment, recognizing so many of the different challenges, it was interesting to me in this year’s report, we continue to see Canadians reasons for giving are shifting. Among those who donate to charity, fewer, not all, but fewer are saying they give primarily because of emotional connection to a cause or personal impact. What we’re seeing here is this emphasizes the importance of transparency, clarity, and strong communication around results that inspire Canadians to give.

CAF Canada works with our donors to make strategic and focused philanthropic decisions throughout the world. We navigate the intricacies of global giving, which we’ll get more into in this conversation, fully complying with all CRA regulations so that Canadian funders are able to maximize the positive impact for the communities they support, whether they are individual donors seeking tax effective giving solutions or philanthropic foundations working with charitable assets. CAF Canada’s due diligence process and management of charitable projects, international charitable projects, meet the need for balancing the risks of global giving and identifying who to partner with and how to make a positive difference in this space right now. Our charitable partners are thoroughly vetted for compliance with CRA standards for charities and effective management of nonprofit organizations, as we recognize this can be one of the challenges. As projects are implemented, we monitor for the use of funds and the impact of the activities, meeting the regulatory requirements, but as well as the expectations of funders around transparency and clarity of impact and results.

To get more into that, I’ll turn back to Michelle now to talk more about how Pathy Family Foundation approaches its role as a Canadian foundation supporting work outside Canada. Over to you, Michelle.

Michelle LeDonne
Thanks, Joanne. So as I mentioned briefly in the introduction, we are a private family foundation in Montreal, been around for just about 20 years, who keeps a very, very low profile and has a very diverse group of grantees in the sense that what’s really the through line of our work is how we work in partnership rather than a commitment to supporting health or education specifically. The portfolio touches on a wide variety of issues and community needs that are identified by the community or the partner themselves.

So we really honed in on what the sector buzzword would call a trust-based philanthropic approach with our Canadian-based partners specifically. It’s very light touch grant making in terms of reporting. It’s very relational. It’s very long term. It’s very adaptive to the partner’s needs. And after many, many years of also working internationally, we started to really question ourselves. How can we bring this more trust-based relational approach? How can we transpose that into our international partnerships when we don’t have the physical proximity to just drop by for a visit, have a coffee, get to know them. And when there is the additional regulatory barriers from CRA and others, when you’re granting to non-qualified donees outside of Canada, how can we bridge those things?

And this led us to do a fair bit of research and consultation with our partners, whom we consider to be the experts in this work, but also with other peers in the sectors, with charity lawyers. We’ve gone through two CRA audit cycles of our international work. So we have those very detailed feedback letters from the CRA themselves. And we’re also very fortunate that at the creation of the foundation, our charitable purposes were written in such a way that we do have the mechanism internally to grant directly from our sister entity rather than having to use a pass through peer like CAF or Myriad or we, I should have mentioned that at the top, we have the in-house capacity to do that because of our charitable purposes.

So how did we go about this and where are we at now, we did this in-depth consultation and study on international grantmaking trends and gaps and really what Canadian philanthropy could do given its size. I think keeping scale in mind is really important. We’re not
GAC. We’re not USAID. We’re not American philanthropy. It’s a small scale, but within that small scale, what’s really our most impactful niche? And what came out of this study was that far and away, how you fund is more important than what you’re funding. So this idea
our sense of being there over the long term, being as relational as possible, letting the grantee themselves define what success looks like, and then putting in place the mechanisms to help them achieve that. That really came out loud and clear across the study.

Also the attention towards more localized giving, which brings up the regulatory questions of, okay, if you’re not using a Canadian organization that then re-grants, if you’re not going through a 501c3 to re-grant internationally, how are you putting in place those structures?
and regulatory mechanisms to keep the CRA happy. And we’ve done a lot of work very recently with an excellent charity lawyer here in Montreal. I encourage everyone who’s on this journey to make sure you’re taking advantage of the regulatory changes that came about in 2022, how you can make qualified donations. You have a lot more flexibility than even we realized and we’re in this day-to-day. So really take this moment to like make sure you’re up to date because you might have more power than you realize.

And the third thing that came out, and I’ll wrap up with this, is the importance of collaboration and building, I think because of our small scale, building, as Mark explained so beautifully, the importance of coalitions around the kind of change you want to see, whether that’s pooled funds, donor-led funds, public-private partnerships. I think the door, when we think about opportunities, the door is more open for that than it ever has been before due to necessity. And so thinking about what role you can play, how you can best do that, and then how that can contribute to collaboration. What’s our niche? How do we do it in the most intentional, least harmful way? And how can we fit into a bigger puzzle? I think is really at the core of of what we’re doing internationally.

I’ll leave it there. I think I am now asking Chrisoula, from your perspective, as an international funder, what helps to ensure that Ancestors of Tomorrow shows up as respectful and effective partners in supporting resilient communities and ecosystems.

Chrisoula Mirkopoulos
Well, I think part of the answer is definitely in the question, community, the idea of community, you know. I think a big part of our methodology is when we find a partner that we feel we can work with is how will they engage their community in the planning, in the execution, even in the evaluation of the project that we’re funding because it can’t just operate on its own in a bubble.

We really feel strongly that the community of wherever these projects are taking place have to be a part of the project, have to buy in in order to ensure its success and ensure the ripples. So we have developed a three-phase kind of vetting process to get us to the finish line. The first is just gathering, you know, general information and finding out why an organization would want to work with us. Is there an alignment there?

Then should they pass that round, we go into more of an in-depth evaluation where we look for more business information, where are they registered, if they’re a registered charity, if not, are they an NGR, are they an artist? Where do they fit? What are the funding needs and the uses going to be? Is this also a longer term or short term project as we fund both depending on the circumstance? And importantly, what is the impact and alignment and how is that impact going to be measured? How is the community going to be brought in to evaluate the success of the project?

Our final step, if all of those check greens for go, is to do an interview with them. Like you said, it’s not really always easy to go out and meet somebody and shake the hand and look them face to face in the eye to let your gut really tell you you have a lot more homework to do these days. So doing an in-person virtual interview often is the way to go to really get more in-depth and develop the relationship with that person or the organization, I should say.

Then we also have a framework we rely on, we call it the return on regeneration framework that we use to kind of evaluate the potential of a project. So we look at it as a seed growth and ripple methodology. We track how each initiative plants a seed, how it grows, how it could ripple outward, measuring not just what was funded, but what would flourish and ultimately what becomes truly regenerative about the project. So, so far that has served us well and is a little bit different than what a lot of other funders out there might be using.

So we’ve been told by the partners we’ve worked with so far and we feel that by really… getting all the information and not being shy, have the courage to ask for the information and ask the challenging questions because sometimes people get uncomfortable and uncomfortable is okay. It means you’re both headed in the right direction, I think, that if you can collaborate in that sense that it just, it only leads to better success, better outcome. But the community is where it starts and ends in our minds.

Pass it back to Joanne, I think.

Michelle LeDonne
I think it’s me again. Thank you, Chrisoula. That was that was beautiful and I think really, really important to bring it back to community defined needs and community evaluation. Joanne, on a slightly different but related subject,

Chrisoula Mirkopoulos
Oh, Michelle.

Joanne Kviring
Yes.

Michelle LeDonne
What do you think Canadian donors should understand first when thinking about supporting organizations outside of Canada?

Joanne Kviring
Yeah, thank you, Michelle. And it’s tough to follow Chrisoula on that because I am going to bring up, you know, the CRA regulations. And, you know, first and foremost, I think something that has to be understood is, and I think many people do, is that Canadian regulations, charity regulations are different and maybe even dare I say uniquely Canadian and in some ways much more stringent as compared to other countries in terms of how philanthropic dollars, you know, money that is considered charitable assets can be deployed to support activities delivered by organizations that are not registered charities with CRA. It’s difficult.

And I think, Michelle, you raise a good point that there have been recent changes in 2022 and knowledge. I think that, you know, to your point, there are opportunities for people to do more than maybe what they realize, but there are very strict parameters for how they can go about doing that. For CAF Canada, when we receive recommendations from our donors, you know, because they haven’t been able to fund something themselves, whether as an individual donor or philanthropic foundation, to support the work of an international charity, we work within the CO policy of a Canadian charity using an intermediary to carry out its own activities.

So this is different than the qualifying disbursements or the grants to non-qualified donees. This policy’s framework means that in practice, CAF Canada contracts the international charity to carry out a project. This project is a focused set of activities with a defined line item budget and specific start and end dates as prescribed by CRA. As each of you know on this panel, I think, and many of those attending this, this is a framework that requires that Canadian charity has direction and control and overseeing the project implementation by the intermediary. While it certainly has its challenges, CRA’s policy of direction and control, it does provide a framework for how risk is managed and social impact can be maximized, given the oversight for ensuring charitable resources are used for public benefit.

And within direction and control, we are still able to, and I think we should, similar, you know, on Crisella, you know, the point that you’ve talked about really creating a partnership. And in direction and control, it’s still important to recognize and value the local knowledge, the expertise, the community reach of the international charity. And this is a really important aspect of how CAF Canada supports donors in their global giving strategies.

As we carry out the due diligence required and make sure that we have direction and control, we work with the international charity to develop a project that leverages their local expertise, and we look at how that organization is responding to the need they’re addressing and how they work with the community as well as how they track their own impact.

So we eventually do get into the same space as Ancestors of Tomorrow and Pathy Family Foundation, but we might get to it in a different way. I’m really pleased though today that one of Canada’s partners is on the panel, Build On, and for exactly this reason, and Alanna led asking you to talk more about how Build On works with local communities to shape the planning, implementation, and measures of success in advancing access to education. So over to you.

Aled Hollingworth
Joanne, thank you. And it’s again an honor to be here and to be a partner of CAF Canada. I will say exactly what you just highlighted for us as an organization on the other side of it, where our expertise is really on the ground working in with communities. It is nice to have a partner that understands the regulatory side of things and can support and we can have that partnership conversation back and forth. It goes a long way because it allows us to really focus on the area that we do best and you guys to focus on the area that you know best as well. So absolutely agree on that. That collaboration, I think, is a common theme that’s coming up today.

Yeah, and for us, I think, you know, one of the biggest things that when we’re working with communities and them identifying the challenges and needs and opportunities that really are within the community. A couple of things that really stand out for me in this is 1, in all of our partner countries, we have staff, local staff on the ground that work in those countries all the time. They’re from the countries, many of them, you know, born and raised in communities similar to the ones that we’re working in today. So there’s a ton of local context and knowledge that comes in.
It is not, you know, us arriving in a country and working there for a period of time and then leaving. We really have boots on the ground constantly there.

As a part of that, the way that we identify and work to identify communities that are in need of schools, in need of adult literacy programs, that are in need of re-enrolling children, that are out of school. We have a rigorous process that our staff goes and implements in these communities. But it also, we work in partnership with the local governments. Mark mentioned it earlier, when we build systems, we don’t want it to be a system that they rely on us to continue to come and provide the educational resources. At the end of the day, the government of that country is responsible for educating their children. And that’s what we want to make sure happens.

And so when we are able to establish the schools, we’re able to provide the adult literacy programs to sensitize the communities. We are also working with the local governments to help us identify communities in need that we’re then able to go and say, does it meet the requirements of what we think actually their school needs to be established here? And then is the community ready to take on their part of the ownership to ensure that they want the school and that they’re willing to commit? And that process is that the community is responsible for some of the resources that go into the actual process of establishing the school.

The second piece of it is that they volunteer. So we create leadership committees of six men and six women that are the ones that really mobilize the rest of their community, men and women, to come out and be a part of that school establishing the process of getting that school up and running. Once the school is then complete, they’re the community members that are out there working with their peers and their neighbors ultimately to ensure that they’re sending their boys and girls to school in equal numbers. And so through this, as I shared earlier, you know, over 3,500 schools globally and hundreds of thousands of people attending these schools, it really is at the end of the day, the communities take ownership from the very beginning.

And then we see that because of that, we just had an independent study done in Senegal. We’ve seen that student or female enrollment in our schools increased by 47% because the communities are taking ownership for that process. Then, you know, as I said earlier, we’re in a process of, I should say, sorry, the increase of 47% was of completing primary school, not enrollment. So completing primary school is 47% more for girls.
We then run income generating activities through our adult literacy programs. And as a result of that, we saw a 54% increase in monthly household income. Again, community members helped to establish the school. They were the adults that stepped up as leaders. They’re now the ones that say, hey, I want to go back to school or I want to go to school to learn. and be a part of this income generating activity that we then work with them and they’re excited about that and their household income increases dramatically.

And so we’re really excited that overall this process, when you work with the communities, you identify the community that really needs this school and is excited about it, that’s willing to put their time and energy into it. They also donate the land that the school is ultimately established on so that they’re the ones that have really like, hate to use the term skin in the game, but they’re really, really involved in the process from the very beginning. And then they’re the ones that ensure their children are going there, that they as adults are enrolling, and that the school is then continued to be run as a school and not falling into some other capacity of, you know, storing livestock or whatever.

One of the things that’s amazing about these is that we have also seen these schools kind of become the center of like a community hub for other things that may happen in the community, right? They then may go on and advocate for additional classrooms or may go on and advocate for a health clinic to be put in the community, or they may want running water. So those are things that they may go on and do. We’ve also seen the schools serve as shelters. Mark and, you know, Bildon and Partners in Health both work in Haiti, very, very prone to earthquakes. And we’ve seen our schools act as shelters and emergency response medical clinics in that setting. So it turns into something else in that period of time and then is able to continue as a school beyond that as well.

So really it comes down to having boots on the ground, making sure that the staff are working with the communities, ensuring that the covenant is signed with the community, which is that agreement that we have with them which is very similar to the work that we have to do with CAF Canada. And then ensuring that the community is really at the center of everything that we do.

One thing I didn’t share earlier, Joanne, that I should highlight in terms of the challenges as well, is we did actually earlier this year lose funding for 100 of our schools globally, which means 100 communities that now are not going to be in that same place of the 400 schools that we were going to construct earlier this year. I’m sharing this only because there is also this, when we’re talking about the global need, you know, every organization is impacted in a different capacity. And we all plan for what the future looks like. And we all have, you know, benchmarks and goals and objectives that we may have on the year. And whenever we receive this information, it’s always a challenge.

And so, Michelle, it’s a, you know, I want to reiterate what you said in kind of your opening remarks as well as how when folks can really identify a strong partner and then think about what multi-year giving looks like, that’s been a big shift of ours as well this year from the non-profit or charitable side is really how do we confirm much longer term commitments. And this one was, there was other, unfortunately, geopolitical challenges that were happening that limited that from being able to happen. I mean, we’ll miss on timing for that one.

But the great thing is, is that when folks are able to think about identifying the right partners and committing longer term, it holds us both accountable. And ultimately, the communities are the ones that benefit from that as well. So yeah, I don’t know if I answered everything at Joanne, but please, if there’s more, I’m happy to share more.

Michelle LeDonne
That was amazing, Aled. Thank you. So fascinating and so impressive, the scope and the impacts you’re seeing. And I think that was a perfect segue over to Mark, who we really want to hear from about exactly that. Like what difference it makes when the commitment is there over the long term? What does that facilitate? What’s that that donor relationship like? And also, Mark, with your longstanding experience working with funders, how do you think about this idea of risk? How would you respond to that question when the needs are so great and they’re not going away, they’re not short term necessarily?

So how do you think about those questions?

Mark Brender
Yeah, it’s such a timely and fascinating conversation. I was thinking of a couple of things. One, you know, we were all talking about relational, you know, the work should be relational. It should be about… You know, it’s hard enough. People should enjoy it, right, in terms of doing what we’re doing. We often talk about one of the co-founders of Partners in Health is a guy named Paul Farmer who passed away a few years ago, but he had a phrase about what it means to be engaged in this work, and he called it doing hard things with friends.

You know, and that applies both to staff, certainly, but in some ways in his context, there was a very, very big tent in terms of the kinds of people initially around Partners in Health that came. It was, you know, people from all walks of life to really join a movement that really started in Haiti but that Paul and others created. And that notion of we’re going to be able to do hard things together because we’re friends, right? Because we’re invested in each other, we’re invested in the work.

It applies to PH staff worldwide. So we have about 17,000 staff 99% of whom are often from, similar to all that, oven from countries where they work. They’re Malawians working in Malawi, Haitians working in Haiti. We have Haitians working in every country almost where we work because they developed the model. Our executive director in Liberia is Haitian, our chief medical officer. also happen to be living in Liberia is Haitian, because they are the ones, they are the experts.

And I think that ties in a little bit to this notion of risk. Another thing that Paul often said is that within the sector, we often, and this is notwithstanding the risks of compliance and CRA that, you know, everybody here knows about that are very, very, very, they’re structural, they’re important, they’re things we have to deal with in order to get the work done in a proper way that is safe for everybody.

But as a collective, we often have risk inverted, right? We think about when we talk about risk, we think of risk to ourselves. We think of risk to people with resources in terms of a project not going well, our money not being spent effectively, risk of compliance factors, when the reality is the risk that there’s a much, much greater likelihood of death when people don’t have access to health care. And so the people that bear the huge element of risk in the work that we are all doing. If kids don’t, if a girl isn’t able to go to school and has to go start work when she’s six years old, the life outcomes and expectancy, not just for her, but future family are dramatically plunged. And so how do we keep the focus on that’s where the risk lies? And then how does that determine the structure of how we go about doing the work?

I think one of the ways is, you know, that as Aislinn knows, Krystal knows, everybody knows that there are, there is such expertise everywhere in the world. And there are people, activists and practitioners, and whether it’s health or education or environment, there are experts who know stuff inside out, who are starved of resources, and they are the leaders. And really the biggest job of philanthropy is how do we find them, right? How do we go about finding the people already embedded in long-term systems in countries and find the people that we need to support?

I think one of the things that’s in common is, you know, this, when we talk about a long-term approach, we often hold different standards for the kind of places where all of us live and the kind of places where the work happens. And that, you know, we talk about sustainability at times and what does that word mean? And often we use it as a way to say what is sustainable for people who have resources to ensure that we’re not on the hook for long term, right? When in fact, we don’t apply those same standards in Canada.

So I’m in Toronto, Princess Margaret Hospital, SickKids Hospital, University of Toronto. They do very large fundraising campaigns year after year after year. And people don’t dispute that that’s an effective way because there are needs, there are legitimate needs. And the government, we are appealing for the government to do more and more. And yet often when we go to the most the poorest places in the world, the most impoverished, those are the places where we say, you need to stand on your own 2 feet, and that’s the objective of our philanthropy. So we think our approach, being in a place long-term, accompanying the government long-term, accompanies communities long-term, and knowing that this will surpass all our lifetimes, you know, in a place like Sierra Leone or Liberia or Malawi, where the per capita expenditure on health in Malawi might be somewhere around $30 per capita that the Ministry of Health has to spend per person, where in Canada, it’s over 6,000.

And so we look at those gradients of inequity, right? And that should shape how we do the work in terms of what does long-term accompany mean. And we know that we need to have projects as part of what it means to do philanthropy and compliance with CRA. But we tend to think of, as Michelle said, what does the relationship look like so that we know we can navigate this work long term together. And that when we go through bumps in the road, like the USAID crisis, like the global health crisis that we’re facing now, it is a really, really hard time.

But hopefully, we’re going to still be with each other three and four and five and six years from now. And part of that journey is being able to lean on each other to walk through it. And that applies for philanthropy. It especially applies in the places where we work, and that our staff is leaning on each other, our patients are leaning on each other. And that has to be a really, we think, a really fundamental part of the work when we think about what does effective implementation look like and effective philanthropy.

Joanne Kviring
Thank you, Mark. Yeah, picking up on that, because I think that’s a really interesting lens you put on it around risk and expectations and, you know, putting it back to Chrisoula and Aled in particular, what does responsible risk taking look like in international philanthropy, really, you know, how would other people might, you know, from your experiences approach it, building off of what Mark talked about?

Chrisoula Mirkopoulos
I’ll start. I think it kind of goes back to what Marks was saying about finding the experts. How do you find the experts? How do you go about getting that information? You can avoid a whole lot of risk or feel better about it depending on your tolerance for risk by really, you know,
finding them in the place where they are, meeting them where they are at.

You know, it’s even, I think about, you know, back in the day when I was like, oh, you know, I would love to date or marry a tennis player. Well, I’m not going to meet a tennis player at the bar. So what am I doing at the bar? If I want to meet the tennis player, I need to go to a tennis court. If you want to meet the expert in a certain thing you have to find them in that environment, in that community. So I think that’s a big part of it, of heading it off, is how are you finding your experts? Where are you finding your experts?

Aled Hollingworth
Joanne, it’s a really interesting question because I think there’s, again, I’m on the fundraising side, so there’s the risk of like the donor side and the use of, you know, an individual or the philanthropy money side of the risk piece, right? Where it’s like, where do you establish or get money from and how do you raise that money and the risk that’s associated with that and then implementing it globally.

But I think ultimately, I want to focus a little bit more, kind of like what Mark and then Chrisoula were talking about, is in the countries in the context that we work on on the ground, there may be different levels of risk that we have to take, right? So for example, in international development work, if you’re working with really rural remote communities, you may have to travel really, really far to get there. And there’s a level of risk that our staff may need to take to get resources to the community, to get supplies to the community. And that’s ultimately going to cost a little bit more to make that happen, right? But the community is really in need. And it’s not even a conversation. It needs to happen. We got to find a way to make that work.

Additionally, I think, you know, as I alluded to earlier, like there’s certain countries that we are currently working in that have gone through coups or that have massive political instability. And the other side of the risk is that you as an organization need to have the right guardrails, the right protocols in place, the right plans in place in case any issue is to come up.

But at the end of the day, we have to remember the folks that we’re working with. And we have to remember that longer term, you know, commitment that we have. One thing that we as an organization in 2016, so 10 years ago, was our 25 year anniversary. And we were challenged to look at what the next 25 years would look like. Crazy dream in our world, right?

But we came up with a vision of where we want to be in 25 years. We didn’t say we wanted to be in 40 countries around the world. And we wanted, no, we said we wanted to build it, continue to build in the eight countries that we were in, and to make sure that we are going deeper and scaling deeper in those countries to create more of a systemic change in those countries, as opposed to scaling far and wide. And what we found is that we’ve been able to be a lot more resilient in those situations.

So in Nicaragua, for example, where there’s been a lot of challenges with a lot of organizations, we’ve been able to continue our commitment and work there. In other places, we’ve been able to continue to have that larger footprint and work more closely with governments and different entities to ensure that we’re continuing to do our work. Different level of risk, I understand that, but I think it is important at the end of the day to think of like longevity and what is your ultimate impact?

You know, and I think from the philanthropy side of things, like if there is a way that people can make bolder commitments now, you’re going to tackle health crises now, not in 10 years. You’re going to tackle education now. What’s the outcomes that’s going to happen in 10 years? And that’s one of the things we really look at, is how do we make a bigger impact today, not thinking about how do we spread it out over the next 10 years to make that impact.

Joanne Kviring
Thank you. Yeah, I feel we could talk more about that. And I think another question that has come up around this work is, what are some practical ways funders can support accountability without creating unnecessary administrative burden?

And I’m going to kind of go first with, you know, because that’s one of the challenges that CAF Canada, like in my role, we have to work within a very stringent regulatory framework. And it’s a constant sort of, for myself and my team, it’s a conversation we continue to have, right? And with our partners and, you know, Aled and Chrisoula, ’cause we work with both of you, you know, balancing that.

And, you know, one of the pieces, we’re very frank up front with what the requirements are. First with our donors who come to us, letting them know how we work and what’s required. And then, you know, so the donor understands what options, back to Michelle’s at the top right, of all the options that are available to Canadians, wanting to do good, wanting to contribute in Canada, and making sure that they’re really well informed of what’s involved in this particular approach. And then having that initial fit discussion with the charity, making sure that they’re really, you know, well informed of what’s involved and how they can structure it. And then quite honestly, in identifying the project, you know, it’s a bit of a matrixed approach of what can Canada, CAF Canada support from our charitable purposes? What is the expertise of the international charity? What is the donor hoping to achieve?

But also looking at what activities and how they go about the work doesn’t create additional work for them. And so, for instance, you know, one of the requirements, right, is in the, you know, contracting and intermediary is requiring supporting documentation, receipts, invoices, certified true copies kind of thing, right? And so thinking through, you know, knowing that, and especially in some communities where it just, it might not be practical to have a receipt for every expense, you know, in a very informal economy, say.

And so are there other… ways that we can approach it. So it’s being creative within the framework. And so turning it back to each of you, how in each of your roles, you navigate the uniquely Canadian regulations and all of that, and, you know, to, and even, you know, a lead, you know, as a global citizen, but even within your own work, right? Balancing across countries and managing for that risk. So turning it back to the panel.

Aled Hollingworth
Joanne, I’m happy to jump in because I will be very transparent. You have helped to guide this process for us a lot. So I’m going to start by saying that. But I will also say that this, you know, from the partner side of it, for us at least, it is one of those things that we’ve had to really lean on you to understand, like, what is it that we can and can’t you know, do in this in the agreement, right? And creating the project agreement for that. And then figuring out if there’s other funders or other places, you know, outside of Canada that we have to go and identify to work with, we can do that and work within our parameters here in the US.

But that’s that I’ll just start by saying that I agree with it that as the partner here, when it comes to receipts and those sorts of pieces, there definitely is those challenges. But again, just having to work within the framework of the agreement that we’ve established is where we have to kind of continue to work. So I’ll let the rest of you answer it though.

Mark Brender
Yeah, I can jump in. Thanks. It’s not a unique situation, but Partners in Health Canada, as far as the CRA is concerned, has no relationship with Partners in Health Liberia or Partners Health Sierra Leone or Partners Health Rwanda or PH in Haiti. We are totally separate organizations. And so we have the same requirements as does any foundation. So our very, very wonderful, longstanding generous partner with Pathy Family Foundation and Michelle, we have an agreement with the foundation. And then for the work that the foundation is supporting, we have another agreement with Partners in Health Sierra Leone that requires us to have a discrete budget with line items that we get receipts back. We do spot checks with our colleagues, who we are working with all the time. And it is in both of our best interests from PH Canada and PH Sierra Leone that we minimize that in as much as we can to be compliant without cutting corners, but to follow the regulations so that they can focus on what they should be focusing on, which is the work.

And I think, you know, I might agree that all the kinds of places that we work are under-resourced in terms of people doing implementation. So we don’t have enough programs, people to say nothing of doctors and nurses and pharmacists and lab techs and drivers right across the board. But the more that we can do to minimize the work that our colleagues spend doing grant reporting and writing, the more time that they have to really be implementing and doing the work. And so we try to be as flexible as we can within the confines of CRA as well.

I guess I’ll say one more thing on the risk side, which is a little different from this conversation. I think from a nonprofit implementer standpoint,
There’s also risk in terms of how much do we push, you know, in terms of how ambitious do you want to be in order to try to prove that, you know, again, for us, healthcare, I think this can apply across the board, but if we think it’s a human right, then all people are deserving of the same standards, right? And the fact that many of us are in settings of privilege, we might have higher standards of care that’s expected. Part of our job is to go into places with our colleagues who are doing the work and to prove that the same standards are possible, right? In the kinds of places where we work in order to elevate everybody’s idea, including government, including community, including various ministries, civil society, of what the standard should be.

And there’s another term that, going back to Paul Farmer again, used to be called, you know, that he talked often about socialized for scarcity.
And the kinds of places where we work, they’re socialized for scarcity. And so it’s no blame to the colleagues at ministries or civil society if they don’t know what very high quality maternal care looks like, because they’ve never seen it. Doctors have never been trained in it, or that they’ve been trained in things. that they’ve never had the equipment to deliver on. And so one of the risks that we are continually talking about internally is how far do we push.

One of the things we’ve done in Sierra Leone is build a maternal center of excellence in partnership with the government, which is a very large, 120 bed essentially A tertiary referral center where we want all the highest burden cases to come to that center so that we can prove that if there’s a mother that’s in obstetric hemorrhage, that we can treat that and we have a blood bank and we have qualified conditions and that maternal mortality isn’t something to be accepted in a poor place. And the trade-off, again, of doing that and raising that money and ensuring that is there’s many other parts in the district of the country where we can’t do other things.

So I think those are things that donors also can think about, too, about where is your risk appetite and the kinds of work that you want to do, just to say, though, that all the work is needed, right? We need to elevate standards everywhere, and we need to, as Aled said, and we have the same model, it’s not about going to 14 new countries. Everywhere we work, we need to be able to go deeper to prove that you can actually build a system, and that this is the standards that the globe needs to be reaching as opposed to lower standards in poorer places.

Michelle LeDonne
I would just echo that. And if we think back to our position in the social change puzzle of being resource holders and funders, I think that same dynamic, and I know this is a rough comparison, so, but exactly what you said, Mark, about how communities have been socialized into a certain kind of relationship and accepting less, I see the same thing in the donor grantee partner relationship. There’s a lot of just the lack of transparency over time about these regulations, about the kind of ivory towerness of philanthropy over decades. There’s so much kind of systems changing that we can do in the relational work, even though the regulations themselves remain just by being transparent and upfront about them.

And like you said, Mark and Aled, when our teams and the resource holders can take on any piece of that administrative burden, any piece of the onus of the reporting, that in and of itself is a change, even if the regulations themselves are still there, being upfront and honest, transparent, naming the constraints and naming how you are going to use the pieces that you do have control over to minimize that burden on them. I think that’s like already, if you do nothing else, that’s a huge shift that is still meaningful. And there’s a ripple effect and an education then that kind of goes out to the other funders and hopefully starts to touch GAC. And we’ve done some work on that with GAC.

I think it’s a teeny, teeny piece, but it’s something that we can actually contribute to as funders without spending any money or changing our charitable articles or anything like that. You can make that relational shift. And I think it’s something that we’ve been kind of saying
in little ways, but I wanted to name it more explicitly.

Joanne Kviring
Chrisoula, I don’t know. Like I feel like that, yeah, you’d have a perspective on this.

Chrisoula Mirkopoulos
Yeah. I mean, you guys have covered A lot. No, I’ll echo what everybody said. I mean, especially what Alice said. Thank you, Joanne and the CAF team, because you really have helped educate us and level up our knowledge on all of it in order to create a framework that really sets our partners up for success. Just like Michelle said, like. if people don’t know what they don’t know, if being upfront with the partners about the requirements and ensuring that, you know, the requirements also will meet the gift value. If it’s a small value and there’s all these owners of quality, then maybe this is not the best, you know, vehicle to be using. Let’s go back to the drawing board and think again.

But until you get to that point, you know, it’s people, again, they don’t know what they don’t know. And at the end of the day, in Canada, philanthropy is as much a tax planning tool as it is a meaningful way to people to leave legacy, right? So operating within the constraints of that cog is important to know how to do.

Joanne Kviring
Yeah, I really think like knowledge is, like Michelle, you said it at the top, like, and I didn’t know you were going to say that, but you talked about knowledge is power. And it really is understanding all of these things. And that’s one of the, you know, navigating. Because once you know what’s there, then you’re able to identify the paths forward. Because if you don’t know, you’re just kind of feeling around in the dark. And so yeah, shifting to a, you know, another kind of question around that. And it’s how do you assess impact when change is long-term, locally defined, and sometimes difficult to capture through conventional metrics. And I think sort of maybe a plain language rephrasing of that in each of our seats, right, of it’s not easy.

And I think Aled and Mark especially have spoken to the challenges you’re seeing in your, you know, right now, how do you keep going? How do you know you’re making a difference? I don’t know who’d like to go first with that one. Oh, Mark, okay.

Mark Brender
Aled, do you want to go?

Joanne Kviring
Over to you.

Aled Hollingworth
Take it away, Mark, and then then I’ll follow up.

Mark Brender
Yeah, I think it’s something that within Partners in Health, we’re talking about all the time. And I think one of the reasons is there are so many levels of impact. You know, we can talk about number of patients. So you can have just very, very statistical level. How many people did we see There are all kinds of quality of care indicators.

One of the ironies, as we’re talking about again in health per se, in a place of scarcity, is that often when ee put more resources in a place, so you open a new facility, a new center. Right away, and this is kind of, it’s part of the education, both within the sector, within philanthropy, the metrics that we will use for quality of care often initially will go down. And why do they go down? Because the place will be flooded with patients, right? And so in places where of scarcity, where we may charge user, people may charge user fees, Partners of Health doesn’t.

Often, you know, if people have to pay 3 or $4 to access care, it will make the difference plus they have to pay $5, the equivalent, to get on the back of a motorbike to travel an hour and a half to get to a clinic. That makes all the difference in the world of them showing up or not. And so when you actually start some of the work, because in our case, doctors and nurses and pharmacists and the system and community health workers, the demand really grows up high, that some of the metrics about percentage of successful outcomes will go down. And so that education and understanding is something we need to communicate.

I think there’s also, you know, how do you measure short-term impact in terms of number of patients seen versus the long-term impact of working with the Ministry of Health? We did some work on Malawi that was funded by the Government of Canada and other very prominent foundation here for which we’re very grateful that helped out. One of the consequences of that work, that was a lot around gender-based violence. We worked in one district, working through the public sector, kind of a very comprehensive approach that involved working with the judiciary, with police, with health care provision. And one of the main drivers of this work was the fact that there were no gender-based violence registers in hospitals or clinics. And so if there’s not dedicated resources to start tracking something, the numbers will show very good because people will say, oh, we don’t have any cases of gender-based violence because there hasn’t been the systems in place to start to track it.

In our case, this was set up. The registers, we started to put in systems that would allow women to access care safely and confidentially, provide treatment. The numbers went through the roof. It didn’t mean the cases weren’t there before. They just started to be able to be safe, feel safe to access care. And as a result, working with the Ministry of Health, the ministry rolled out that gender-based violence register across the country. So now every district in the country has that register. And if there is a district that has zero cases, when they return the register, we know, we know it’s not 0 cases. We know it’s, well, obviously there are problems with accessing care.

And so how does that, what kind of impact data, how do you quantify that? And I think that’s something we talk about a lot internally because to do that requires A long-term approach. It requires working with governments. And these are the most difficult things that we do. I think another one of our co-founders, Ophelia Dall, said, the most important thing we do is work with governments. The most difficult thing we do is work with governments. But if you don’t do the work, then that kind of scaling and replicating model and I think there are a lot of kind of charity evaluation systems that have these very hard to find metrics. And when we go to that level of rigidity, you can’t capture the kind of system change impacts that so many of us are working on and struggling to balance between how do we deliver on our obligations to patients and how do we deliver on our mission to be able to advance system level change so the governments eventually will be able to take this on on their own.

Aled Hollingworth
Mark, I love your answer. And I think one of the things that I would really recommend, and when you think about all of this for us, and this is not a recommendation to Mark, but just in terms of the context of the work that we’re in, is really understanding and having a clearly defined theory of change, right? And that is important because ultimately it is very easy then if you don’t have some very like structured outcomes, outputs, ultimate impact you want to have, it’s very easy to kind of just, the way I would say is like just to go as the river runs, right? If a funder wants you to measure something, you may take that on, then you may drift in a different direction, but ultimately as an organization, you want to have some theory of like, hey, if we do this activity, this is what we should anticipate short term, what should be long term, and then what should be our ultimate impact. And that’s something we’ve done a lot of work on in the last few years as well.

And exactly what Mark mentioned, we also build in Malawi. And one of the things that for us is that 35 years ago, our first school was built in Malawi. Wonderful. Then we went and built in other countries and did that work. And then, as I mentioned earlier, 25 years in, we really made an intentional decision to build and work in very specific districts in a very tight geographical area in our partner countries. And the reason we wanted to do that is to understand if we do this work in this area, can we see that the number of children completing primary school goes up? The number of enrolled girls goes up? And then what does that look like compared to other districts in other parts of the country? And then we could start to say we are having an ultimate impact in this area and in this different capacity. We can go somewhere else and continue to do the work or do we need to modify what we’re doing? And I think that that’s the other side of it.

The other piece that I’ll throw out there is that, as I mentioned earlier, we have started to do a lot more independent evaluation. We were funded last year by a very generous contribution, some of you, Mark, just to look at our monitoring and evaluation work. And they, you know, we were able to go on and hire contractors and, you know, independent numerators and people that were going to go out and conduct the interviews. And then they did all the work to evaluate it. And they presented us like a 200 page report on the ultimate impact of our work. That’s a lot of information for us to digest, right? And it was wonderful because we can take key areas of it and say, hey, this is what we now know is true based on the number of people we interviewed, over 2,000 people interviewed and 30 plus communities.

And then now our plan is to go to a different country and conduct that same level of intricacy and a detail, and then our staff to continue to run the research and the monitoring evaluation and be able to track the same, you know, outcomes on a consistent basis in every community that we’re working in. But again, it has to be long term. There has to be that commitment to do it. And it can’t just be something you do one off and then leave and wait five or 10 years to come back and do it again. And that’s where I think resources are really, really important in terms of the work on the ground and being able to establish those processes for every project that you’re working on.

Joanne Kviring
Chrisoula, it strikes me because I know the work that Ancestors of Tomorrow is doing and the partners you have and the challenges you’re tackling. And it strikes me that there’s an incremental approach. You have the end goal. And maybe if you wanted to share a little bit about that.

Chrisoula Mirkopoulos
Mhm. Yeah, so I spoke a little bit earlier about our return on regeneration framework that we try to use to measure outcome because we’re working with projects across totally different sectors from land management projects to First Nations outreach. So it was difficult for us to create like 1
overarching that everything like how do you measure what someone got away from an exposure trip versus, you know, creating a 34 acre wildfire buffer zone in the Greek Olympus mountain range. So if I use that Greece example to kind of go through it, you know, we funded a project in the Olympus Mountain area of Greece to do fire remediation and protection work. In the first year, the seed that was planted is 34 acres of wildfire Bradach zones were created. The growth we saw is that eight Greek youth actually joined the trail team as full time paid members now of that. And then where was our ripple? 1200 local residents in that community were engaged as a result in climate conservation Projects and topics individually.

So we kind of look at that progression. We, you know, like we said, this is a longer term project. We’re not going to know until the unfortunate next wildfire hits how well that 34 acres project worked out. But we see that growth and that ripple throughout come on a shorter timeline. So I think it’s important to when you’re looking at how you measure it, look at the projects that you’re working at. Some can be very financially driven. Some can be driven by very tangible metrics. Others, you have to be a little bit more open-minded or creative, I think, with how you measure the outcome, both on the short and the long term.

Another example I could share is with the Indigenous outreach We See You trips that we’ve supported. So many years ago, there was a group of eight First Nations youth who traveled into the Vancouver area. This particular trip was very focused on food exposure what a grocery store is like, what fresh food looks like, and kind of sparking interest in food preparation. One of the girls really took a love to it, went back to her tribe, started a little jam business, and secured 150 jar national order for her little business. So that again is kind of this longer, short-term measure of how you can see that seed growth ripple take place. So those are just kind of a couple examples I can share with you guys on how we look at measuring the impact.

Joanne Kviring
Thank you. It’s so inspiring. I feel like we could talk more and more. And, you know, I think probably, Michelle, do you have any other questions before we move into our sort of final question for the panel?

Michelle LeDonne
Go ahead, Joanne.

Joanne Kviring
Yeah, so we wanted to end on sort of that type of lightning round kind of summary, and I’m still processing this conversation, which is fantastic, right? Because I think there’s some great pieces, but I think for the audience, you know, what we wanted to ask and raise here is, you know, what is the most important take away you hope Canadian funders remember when considering international philanthropy. And maybe, you know, we can go and, you know, sort of around kind of Michelle, you’re at the top of my screen clockwise if we want to do that.

Michelle LeDonne
Yeah, I mean, I think this was so rich and wonderful to hear. And thank you, the three of you, for sharing so eloquently about what you see every day and how you’re navigating it. And this was just great. And I think even in the little microcosm of this webinar is just such a good illustration of why it’s not on philanthropy to define what success looks like. It’s the people doing the work every day. And so I really like that as a take away. And that’s how I would have answered that last question right as we just went around.

But the main thing I would love Canadian funders to think about is around that question of risk and remembering as a resource holder, what is at your disposition to facilitate and minimize this idea that this is somehow more risky or impossible or not worth doing. We even straight up tell our partners if a major foundation is telling you they can’t grant internationally, they’re BSing you because they can. They just don’t want to take on the additional administrative burden. And I think as resource holders who are a bit more practiced in that, us spreading that word is really important and modeling that is important, but also putting that pressure on and sharing that idea of, you know, in a lot of ways, this is antiquated and we’re holding ourselves back in a moment of real need and real crisis where we have an opportunity to shape how these relationships look different.

Again, that transparency, that openness, that trust and values alignment. So yeah, that’s how I would sign off. Thank you all.

Joanne Kviring
Aled.

Aled Hollingworth
Yeah, tough tougher one thing as a take away, but I think the biggest kind of piece of encouragement that I would share with everybody listening is find your cause. Find what it is that you’re passionate about. Find what it is that you really care about. Then go and find an organization that’s trusted and it’s doing the work and it has, you know, kind of a proven impact model ensure that in Canada, they’re checking all the boxes, they’re doing all the right pieces.

And then, you know, as we think about this, the name of this webinar of how Canadian philanthropy can meet the moment, I would really encourage everybody to think about what that looks like for you as an individual or as a family or as a foundation because we don’t want this moment to continue when we talk about it long term. We don’t want this to be a drawn out moment of children or parents or community members or, you know, folks in our global context continuing to experience the challenges that they’re experiencing because of maybe an administrative burden on our end. I would go to say, we’re lucky we can take on that administrative burden to ensure that children have access to school or the community members have access to health care. View it as our privilege in this moment.

And it is a moment, I think, for all of us when we think of our global work, there is need, there’s massive need globally, and we all have the ability to take action now. We’re here as resources. I think all of us on the call have shown that it is a proven way that we can have this impact. And so I would encourage everyone to join in and think about what they can do to make this world a better place.

Joanne Kviring
Thank you.
Mark or Chrisoula.

Chrisoula Mirkopoulos
All right, I’ll go next. I can be nice and quick too. This was something that was asked of my sister and I a while back. And so it kind of was the reason why we’re called what we’re called. So I’ll leave this last thought with you. We are all ancestors of tomorrow collectively. What do we want to be remembered for? What do you want to be remembered for as an ancestor of tomorrow?

Mark.

Mark Brender
Yeah, thanks, Chrisoula. I’ll be super quick as well. I think the long-term notion that we’ve all talked about, I think, is really important. And then I guess if it’s two questions, who can you learn from and where can you plug in? And I think that plugging in notion takes away the burden of saying, I need to lead something. I need to create something. I need to… drive something. Things are going to be effective anywhere if you plug in to the people that will be there long term and are already doing the work. And that is the most effective way of driving impact. The upfront work about finding out. Who you can learn from and where can you plug in? That’s the hard stuff. The implementation is hard, of course, but if you’re successful in that upfront work, then the relationship is going to go really, really well long term.

Joanne Kviring
Thank you. I get to wrap up and but it’s those insights are hard to follow and but I would also somewhat echo my co-host around what’s possible. You know, I think what we tried to highlight today and I think what each of you have done so well is that there are there are approaches, right? Different approaches, different ways of working. It’s about asking what is possible of partners, you know, you know, foundations, funders, what’s possible within the regulatory framework, what’s possible for you personally, I think as individual donors. And then most importantly, asking the community what is possible.

And so sort of ending on that note, wrapping up a few minutes early, because I know everyone loves to get a like that extra little bit of time in their calendars.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you, especially to Michelle, Crucella, Alad, Mark so much.

This really exceeded my expectations when I asked Michelle about co-hosting this conversation. I’d love to continue it. But hopefully we will again, and to all those who took the time to watch, and then we will be sharing this out again. So people who catch it after the fact, we appreciate it. And we hope to continue the conversation in a range of ways, because there is so much need and in the world to respond to. And I, you know, that’s an opportunity. So for all of us. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. Thank you. Take care. Bye.