Funder Focus: Barbara McInnes and the Community Foundation of Ottawa

Charity Village Cover Story

March 1, 2004
By Nicole Zummach

This month in our Funder Focus, we feature the Community Foundation of Ottawa , which enables people in Ottawa to give back to their community in meaningful and lasting ways. CharityVillage spoke with president and CEO Barbara McInnes about the early years of the foundation, its influence on philanthropy in the city, and its approach to sustainable community development.

CharityVillage: The foundation was established in 1987, making it fairly young compared to some of the community foundations in other cities across Canada. What have you learned during this initial period of the foundation's existence?

Barbara McInnes: We do consider ourselves to be quite an astonishing success. It is a really short period of time to have come from absolutely nothing but a gleam and a dream to the present $70 million in assets we are now holding. It's especially impressive because community foundations have traditionally relied on after-lifetime gifts for their growth, primarily. Of course, with such a young foundation, very little of the money we have is from after-lifetime gifts, but that will happen is due course.

We have learned a great deal along the way. One of the things that led to our success was our ability, during the key years of the tech boom, to work with professional advisors and high tech leaders so that they knew about the existence of the community foundation at a time when they were able to exercise options. [The tech boom] made several people in Ottawa very wealthy, very quickly. It was very fortunate that the community foundation had spent some time with people like that, showing them how they could make gifts of stock options. We also worked a lot with the professional community in Ottawa - lawyers, accountants, and so on - so that they knew that the community foundation was a very viable alternative to setting up a private foundation. As a result of that, it was our most significant growth year and we took in close to $40 million in about six months. Success isn't always measured by dollars of course, but it is one aspect of success.

CV: Did the downturn in the tech sector negatively affect the foundation?

BM: We didn't expect it to last and we didn't have any plans that were based on it lasting. We saw it as a moment in time, and the beauty of a community foundation is that it is primarily about endowment. So when you have those really booming years, the gifts that come in are permanent and the effect of those gifts is felt forever afterwards. It's not like annual campaigning, which depends very much on the continuing generosity of individuals. A community foundation doesn't ever depend on that. It assumes that people will make one gift, perhaps two - maybe one during their lifetime and then an after-lifetime gift.

It wasn't the downturn that affected us so much actually, it was the upturn. As soon as we accepted all those assets we tripled in size. We, therefore, needed to plan very carefully how we were going to manage ourselves into the future. We needed to add staff, clearly, and we needed to undertake a major restructuring.

CV: What role does the foundation play in enhancing the nature and scope of philanthropy in the local community and beyond? How has philanthropy changed in Ottawa because of your presence?

BM: I think it has made a big difference to have a community foundation in Ottawa. One major difference is that it has provided local people with a way of giving back to the community in general. They don't have to specifically say it will be the Children's Aid Society, or the Boys and Girls Club, or the local environmental group. They can say they want to enhance the quality of life in general and the community foundation can then handle that. It has allowed people to make more substantive gifts in a more flexible kind of way, and people have taken advantage of that.

The other thing though, is that because the community foundation is here, we become a source of information that is completely neutral. People are increasingly comfortable coming to the foundation saying, 'I have X amount of dollars I'd like to give and here is my general idea about that. I'd like some advice from you on how to have the biggest impact.' So, we've become a trusted source of philanthropic information and advice. It's not all about the money that the community foundation manages; it's becoming more about the money that the foundation can influence.

CV: In 2002 your Board endorsed a grantmaking approach based on Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) to support initiatives in affordable housing, micro and small enterprise, training, and education. Why did you decide on the ABCD approach and what results are you seeing so far?

BM: When the Board endorsed that approach it was partly because the grants committee had been doing it for quite a long time anyway, and it then became an organizational philosophy instead of just a grantmaking philosophy. It wasn't a sudden move. Asset Based Community Development was something that was very much on our minds, and I must say that from the very beginning the community foundation has always felt that the heart and soul of our work was in the grantmaking. We've always spent a great deal of time thinking about that. So, when we decided that we would take an asset-based approach, it allowed us to look at the community through a slightly different lens.

We're very concerned about putting our money where it will have an impact in terms of sustainability, and encouraging people to move into the economic mainstream rather than just supporting them while they stay outside of it. Those are the kinds of issues that we felt were very important. We've got some wonderful examples now in Ottawa of that kind of thing. The first one that comes to mind is the Ottawa Community Loan Fund. It's now showing real results. It's still early days but so far they have a 100% payback rate, and they have been able to help little businesses ratchet themselves up to the next level so that a family can actually be supported through a small cleaning company or corner store.

The other thing that they are doing, which is really important in our community, is that they are providing small loans to foreign-trained professionals who need to get accreditation here. One of the hurdles immigrants face is that it costs them money to get accredited and there are no sources for them to get that money, so the Community Loan Fund is a very good place for them to go.

CV: What was your total grantmaking for 2003? Do you anticipate the same level of granting this year?

BM: It's astonishing. Last year, we gave away $5.85 million. It probably won't be at the same level this year because in 2003 we gave away a large number of funds on behalf of donors who simply used the foundation for flow-through. These are people who already have an endowment with us and they supplement that endowment sometimes with flow-through. It's very unpredictable. Some years we do a great deal of that, and some years less.

CV: Your general grant program is quite broad, focusing on social services, health, education, and environmental sectors. You also have several other funds to support the arts and literacy. Why were these areas chosen for more specific granting?

BM: We started our Community Arts Fund - it's not large but it's important - several years ago when our grants committee, and then in turn our Board, struggled very hard with what to do with the arts in terms of grantmaking when the requests from arts organizations were competing with things like homelessness and hunger. It's a very difficult conversation for any grantmaker to have. So we decided that we should at least relieve some of that by setting up a separate community arts fund. That way, the arts are competing against each other for funding, and that's a much easier thing to deal with. We have a number of donors who will be making after-lifetime gifts to the fund, so it's small during my lifetime but I think in the next generation it will start to make a significant difference.

In the case of literacy, we work closely with the Ottawa Citizen . Several years ago, they decided that they wanted to set up a corporate foundation focusing on literacy. They looked at the community foundation as one option, and decided that that was the way they would do it. So we actually run the Ottawa Citizen Literacy Foundation. They put money into that fund on an ongoing basis and we manage it and also manage the grantmaking on their behalf, as well.

CV: You recently held a panel discussion and town hall meeting about work in the not-for-profit sector. What was learned from this discussion and what are the issues facing the sector in Ottawa?

BM: It was a very, very successful panel. We had a capacity crowd and we are still getting feedback from it. It was extremely successful from a number of points of view, but primarily because we had some of the best people you could get anywhere sitting on that panel. We had three people addressing three aspects of work in the not-for profit sector. Lynne Toupin, from Community Foundations of Canada, talked about the human resources issues in the sector, which are really quite astonishing in terms of benefits, who the sector is attracting, and why the sector is not able to retain people in midlife. The second person was Ron Robertson of Ray & Berndtson Robertson Surrette, one of Canada's leading not-for-profit executive search firms. He talked about what it takes to become a leader in the nonprofit sector. The third person was Bibi Patel, our director of development and donor services. She is the poster child for the person who moves from one industry to another. She spent 18 years in the high tech industry at Nortel and we enticed her away from that into our little organization, where she is thriving. The switch from that sector to this one is something that is of interest to a lot of people, especially here in Ottawa where the meltdown has meant that there are a lot of unemployed high tech people.

CV: In your discussion did you talk about what the sector as a whole needs to do to attract more people?

BM: We did, and Bibi in particular talked about how she made the decision to move into the nonprofit sector, what the considerations were. There is no point in people getting into this sector if what's really important to them is benefits and high salary. We can't compete in Ottawa especially, because government is our main competition here. When we are trying to attract people into the sector it's important to ask, 'what's your bottom line?' For Bibi, and for many others like myself who thrive in this sector, the bottom line for us in the values. It's knowing everyday that everything you do affects something fairly directly, and that you can have an impact on the quality of life in your community and in the lives of individuals. Ron Robertson talked about recruiting executives for the nonprofit sector and trying to figure out whether there is an emotional connection, because if it isn't there it isn't going to work.

CV: Where do you see the community foundation movement heading? Will this model continue to flourish?

BM: Community foundations are springing up all over the world and it's fascinating to watch. We're very interested in what's happening in the rest of the world and in promoting that and learning from it. All of it comes back to benefit us in our own community. For example, if we know what's happening in community-based philanthropy in Poland, then we will know more about how to serve the Polish people in our community. We've been very fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in the Trans Atlantic Network of Community Foundations. We've learned a great deal from that and I think we've been able to pass on a great deal as well.

The other answer to your question about the proliferation of community foundations is that we can't keep creating new community foundations in Canada without there being consequences. All of the major centres in Canada are now covered by a community foundation and what I think is likely to happen is that we are going to start to see groupings of community foundations so that they can share the back office support. We are starting here in Ottawa, and I know we're not the only ones, to do outreach to the communities around us. We now manage the Brockville Community Foundation's funds, and the Deep River Community Foundation has the intention of getting us to manage their funds once they reach a certain size. That may be the way of the future.

Barbara McInnes has been with the Community Foundation of Ottawa since its inception in 1987.

www.communityfoundationottawa.ca

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