Theory of Change
The Vision
Canada is home to a vibrant social finance market, inclusive in its reach across diverse sectors, regions and populations. This market generates demonstrable positive, lasting social and environmental impacts, addressing the scale and complexity of our nation’s challenges. Social purpose organizations and social finance intermediaries are flourishing, forging connections with mainstream markets by offering diverse, robust sustainable investment opportunities, thereby contributing to systemic change in the broader financial sector. Capital is allocated in a sustainable and equitable way, creating a landscape of widespread prosperity and justice, accessible to all, through which we all benefit.
Leveraging the investment capital provided by the Government of Canada, we will engage in market-building and investment activities aimed at fostering systemic, sector-wide transformations in order to achieve our vision.
Measuring Success
The effectiveness of our market-building and investment activities will be gauged by the outcomes we hope to deliver:
- Canada’s social finance participants are more diverse and capital allocation occurs in a more inclusive manner*
- Communities have greater capital and decision-making control to address their own distinct and local challenges
- New impact investment funds enrich the social finance landscape, diversifying intermediaries and extending capital to
underrepresented areas and populations - Under-capitalized SPOs are accessing the capital needed to unleash their full potential
- Emerging social finance intermediaries are empowered with the technical skills, market knowledge and abilities necessary to successfully launch and manage impact investment funds
- Established social finance intermediaries leverage Realize Fund I’s catalytic investments to attract additional private sector investment
- A robust track record of market-rate returns across a diverse portfolio of investable opportunities has been substantiated, leading to sustainable private investment in Canada’s social finance market
- Increased private investment in Canada’s social finance market
- Social Finance Fund participants possess the essential skills, knowledge, and capabilities to measure and manage social and environmental impacts
- Social Finance Fund participants have adopted impact data standards, enabling the sharing, aggregation, and management of the social and environmental impacts of their investments while maintaining the flexibility to represent their unique impact models
Our commitment to these outcomes includes a rigorous, data-driven impact measurement and management approach to provide measurable, accountable and transparent progress, aligning our efforts with the urgent social and environmental challenges that both Canada and the world face.
* A Social Equity and Gender Equality Coding system is under development by Employment and Social Development Canada, which may lead to refinements to outcome definitions and measurement tools.