As President and Chief Executive Officer of Community Foundations of Canada, Monica Patten has presided over a period of unprecedented growth in Canada's community foundation movement. Considered one of Canada's premiere movement builders, Monica was a featured guest in Tamarack Movement for Change seminar series.

On this page, Monica shares her experience and thoughts about movements generally, and the evolving community foundation movement in Canada.

On this page you'll find:

Monica Patten

As President and Chief Executive Officer of Community Foundations of Canada, Monica Patten has presided over a period of unprecedented growth in Canada’s community foundation movement.

When she took the helm of the fledging organization for Canada’s community foundations in 1992, it had 28 members with assets of $500 million. Today, those numbers have exploded to 154 community foundations in cities, towns and rural areas all across the country, and $2.3 billion in assets.

In 2005, Canada’s community foundations contributed $115 million to a vast array of charities – making the network one of the country’s largest grantmakers.

Under Monica’s leadership, Community Foundations of Canada (CFC) has also earned a national and international reputation for innovation and generosity.

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Community Foundations and Movements for Change: A Summary

What is a community foundation?

Community foundations are locally-run foundations that build and manage endowment funds to support charitable activities in their area. Each community foundation is autonomous and governed by a volunteer board of local leaders. They exist in every province and one territory and are linked and supported at the national level through their membership organization, Community Foundations of Canada.

Community foundations combine three main roles:

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Community Foundations in Canada

Winnipeg established Canada’s first community foundation in 1921. It was one of the first community foundations in North America. Today, community foundations exist in every province and one territory and are linked and supported at the national level through Community Foundations of Canada, but initial growth was slow.

As Canadians observed and learned from the fledgling community foundation movement in the U.S., we considered what this could mean in Canada: not so much the idea of what community foundations do locally, but what the power of coming together as a network could do.

When community foundations hit Canada though, they took a different shape to fit our culture.

In the early 1990’s a group of community foundation leaders came together to learn together, and share leanings and try to spread the work. That was the beginning of Community Foundations of Canada. The growth of community foundations has just taken off since then – from 30 to 155 foundations and it continues to grow.

Over the years we’ve come to realize that real power is at the local level so it makes sense to operate there – where people are committed to each other and want what’s best for their communities. But being connected across the regions and countries through a network in fact helps community foundations to do their local work more effectively, strengthening and influencing what happens at the local level.

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Community Foundations: The Movement

Community Foundations of Canada (CFC) is not a movement – it’s an organization that facilitates and enables a movement. The movement is of community foundations who share a common vision.

There is an energy in the CFC network that is characteristic of movements – that drives direction, that inspires the vision and hopes for stronger communities.

The collective energy, passion, and vision is played out in various ways and at various levels – from local through to national. But it comes together at a national level through meetings, tools, resources, peer learning, conferences, etc. The CFC role is to enable this, to facilitate the movement.

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Movements for Change

A movement is often evidenced by a number of people who share a common drive to accomplish a particular end – comes out of commitment and passion for something to be different or changed.

Movements often start through and by the inspiration of one or two people – the magic occurs when those people invite others to join them. That’s how a movement grows – the circle of invitation grows.

As the movement grows, people begin to start paying attention to how they should communicate; they become intent about drawing in a range of voices, hopes and listeners. This must be accompanied by powerful action. It is not enough to just talk about what needs to be changed, there needs to be demonstrable action. All of this also must be attended to by a degree of formality (e.g. through the development of email groups, mechanisms that support inclusivity), but only a degree.

Keeping in mind that community foundations are already a movement, CFC is now beginning to see the development of movements within the movement. For instance, when a member came forward wanting to become engaged with a corporate approach to looking after the environment. CFC were able to inform members quickly about that, invited them in, communicated well, based on research, expressed some enthusiasm for the idea and were blown away by the response. Now CFC has to move to action…and they will! Other examples of this include the youth in philanthropy initiative and the social justice philanthropy initiative.

There are rhythms within movements, and the convenor/facilitator needs to listen to those rhythms. Recognize that not everyone in the movement will be at the same place at the same time, but the facilitator still needs to respond.

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Challenges Movements Face

As organic, evolving entities, all movements face a series of challenges as part of their growth. Some of these include:

The minute we step back or sit down and say, "There, we've got it!" is when we'll stop being a movement. It's the movement piece that makes a movement - the action, the moving towards something.

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Thoughts for Further Exploration

We all know that working collaboratively with others – amongst ourselves and others – is how we will have impact on bigger issues. We have the language right, but not always the action – we say we are working nationally on some issues, but are we? We talk a good game, saying this is about partnership and collaboration. Do we fully understand what that means? How do we do that as a movement without risking the energy that makes us a movement and still collaborate with those we need to within our communities.

Movements are complex relationships. How do we create space to join with others, to truly collaborate, understanding that participants in networks have their own pace, their own priorities every day and that our pace is not always their pace, etc?

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Moving Forward

Monica is one of Canada's premiere movement builders. We asked her to share some ideas or advice for movement builders.

Monica shared two key learnings from her experience:

The focus on place is critical, and it's why community foundations are located in communities. We know we can make a difference there. But Monica encourages movement builders to balance a focus on local communities with the commitment to working together to tackle issues that all communities face.

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Related Resources and Links

Community Foundations of Canada

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