Thank you for your kind invitation to attend your 2010 Annual Meeting. It seems like not that long ago that Jennifer Partridge, our Community Grants Coordinator, brought greetings at the sod-turning for your new building. I know that she commended Welcome Place for its commitment to our community and its work helping newcomers in need. I echo those sentiments and congratulate you for more than 60 years of community service. We have a long history of working together.

Today I want to talk about how your work and ours intersect. In the end, I hope you will agree that we share the same values and the same aspirations.

Let me begin by referencing the tag line that is often used by The Winnipeg Foundation: “For Good. Forever.”

• The “for good” part refers to the many charitable activities we are able to support. Without partners like Welcome Place, the Foundation and its donors would have no impact. We need you to put our resources to effective use.
• The “forever” part refers to our mandate to provide an on-going source of funding to the charitable sector. Even in years like 2008 and 2009, when there was a total meltdown in the world’s financial system, the Foundation was able to be a steadfast partner to community agencies.

Our founder and his wife were dedicated community builders. With an initial gift of $100,000, William Alloway created Canada’s first community foundation. Back in 1921, this was an extremely generous gift and its structure was completely unique. The capital was to be invested and only the annual income generated could be used for grants to Winnipeg charities. As a result, our first grants came in 1922 when six organizations got $1,000 each.

Despite Alloway’s prominence, no other gifts were received until 1924. We are indeed very fortunate that the second gift was an anonymous donation of $15. It is “The Widow’s Mite” that made our foundation a community foundation. It is not the size of the gift but the giving that matters.

Since then, each gift, or group of gifts, has formed a fund at the Foundation. This past year, for example, the Charleswood Men’s Hockey League created a bursary fund to support neighbourhood students pursuing post secondary education.

People from all walks of life create endowment funds at the Foundation. Some are tributes, memorials or bequests; others support a particular field of interest like education or children. Each fund has its own purpose. In the past five years, we have received 105 gifts to the Winnipeg Chinese Community Fund—which in 2010 is providing a $7,200 grant to support the work of that organization.

So, starting with Alloway’s initial fund and The Widow’s Mite, and going forward to the Charleswood Men’s Hockey Bursary Fund and the Chinese Community Fund, we are building more and more endowments. And as the endowments grow, so do our grants to the community.

I won’t go through in great detail the pie chart which identifies the areas of community work we support. Suffice it to say that 670 different charities received grants from The Winnipeg Foundation in 2009. A total of $20.8 million was distributed to these community agencies.

I was recently quoted in the Free Press describing our work as a “Legacy of Dreams.” That’s because people who give to the Foundation have dreams of a better future. They give us the capacity to:

• Make grants that improve lives and neighbourhoods;
• Connect people who care with causes that matter; and, of course,
• Steward the community assets that have been entrusted to us.

Our average grant is about $15,000 but they vary from a few hundred dollars to amounts well in excess of $100,000. Mostly, we would be described as a broad grant maker supporting many diverse community causes.

From time to time, however, we will focus on some particular issue. From 2003 to 2007, for example, we gave special attention to the Centennial Neighbourhood Project—a dedicated effort at community development. With the support of many partners, we believe our efforts had a meaningful impact.

I have circulated a report on the Centennial Neighbourhood Project which includes a commentary on some of the lessons learned. Of course, a natural outcome of such intense effort is discussion about our role in public policy. Having more in-depth experience about how housing, employment or education issues bring stress to family life in our inner city, we had to ask ourselves: should our Foundation become more of an advocate? After much consideration, our Board determined that actions speak louder than words. As a result, we now spend more time telling the community at large ‘this is what we do and why we do it.’

So what do we believe?

First, we believe people are important and individuals can make a difference. I have already referred to the Charleswood Men’s Hockey League and this is but one of countless examples where people from all walks of life volunteer their time, provide leadership and resources to make our city a better place. The Centennial Neighbourhood Project clearly demonstrated how personal philanthropy has impact but also has its limits. In civil society, individuals must give attention to public policy, which means engaging in the various processes that shape our collective priorities.

Second, The Winnipeg Foundation is heavily invested in the markets and we believe in the free market system. We are not like most charities because we invest the gifts we receive rather than grant them immediately back to the community. That is to say, most charitable agencies are in the business of redistributing wealth—they receive donations from people who can afford to make them and the money received is spent delivering programs to individuals. In contrast, the gifts we receive are put to work in the Canadian and international financial markets. It is the wealth they generate that is distributed.

But, as we all know from recent experience, markets operate in cycles and they can be very volatile. Looking over the past two decades, we have seen annual returns as high as 20% and as low as minus 8%. So we have a “spending policy” which stabilizes the market – effectively regulating how the wealth is distributed each year. If you look at the steady growth of our community grants in recent years, you will see a very gradual increase from about $10 million in 2001 to almost $21 million in 2009.

Over the long term, we believe the financial markets will generate wealth for the benefit of our community but we also believe that you have to intervene with policy to produce the most meaningful impact.

Adam Smith, the 18th century philosopher, is widely regarded as the father of modern economics and certainly a proponent of free markets. I was interested to see him quoted in a recent book called The Spirit Level as having said:

“it is important to be able to present oneself credibly in society without the shame and stigma of apparent poverty.”

The authors of this book (Wilkenson and Pickett) argue persuasively that the problems in our society are mostly about the scale of material differences between people being too big. They say—“What matters is where we stand in relation to others in our own society.” We agree. For a community to be healthy, there must be an equitable distribution of prosperity.

We also believe in empowering agencies so the individuals they serve can enjoy a more equitable share of life in Canadian society. We believe that a healthy community has opportunity to make choices and we reserve the largest part of our grant making capacity to respond to applications.

The mission of the Winnipeg Foundation is to be a catalyst for strengthening community well-being. We believe that by promoting philanthropy, creating partnerships and supporting diverse charitable organizations, we are supporting a more equitable community.

A recent essay by Lynn Fernandez and Ian Hudson concludes that “as a province, we are more equal than the rest of the country, but less equal than we once were.” We believe that personal philanthropy has a role in addressing this growing inequity but we also look to government to fulfill its appropriate responsibilities in this regard.

You are all gathered for the Annual Meeting of Welcome Place and so, let me turn my attention to our grant support to newcomer organizations. In 2009, we made 24 grants directly to agencies that provide services and resources to make Manitoba a safe and comfortable home for families from around the world. Welcome Place received $150,000 for the new reception centre.

Grants to agencies that support newcomers represented about 7.5% of our discretionary community building grants in 2009. Welcome Place has a long-established reputation for helping newcomers settle successfully in our Province. With the number reaching 13,000 last year, and projected to go higher, it is good to see other agencies sharing the challenges of your important work.

But in addition, many of our grants go to agency programs that are absolutely consistent with your goals because a large proportion of their clientele are newcomers to our community. Some examples include:

• Central Park re-development where we invested $500,000 as part of our downtown green spaces strategy.
• In 2009, we made grants to 27 Early Learning Centres in high needs areas of our city.
• In a typical year, we will spend at least $150,000 on summer camps. Just recently, our Board approved a separate application stream for these programs so we could announce our annual grants a few months earlier than normal.
• We have a separate budget allocation to work with a number of downtown arts groups to provide programming that would otherwise not be available.

Of our 85 donor advised funds, The Moffat Family Fund is best known because it has supported hundreds of Winnipeg projects.

The vision of the Moffat Family Fund is a Canadian society where all individuals have equal opportunity to develop their potential.

The primary goal of the Moffat Family Fund is to support and advance the economic, social, physical and intellectual well-being of children and families, consistent with and in furtherance of the vision and mission of the Moffat Family Fund.

Two examples of Moffat Family projects are:

• The Teacher’s Discretionary Grants—where 665 inner-city teachers last year received $350 each to spend as they see fit in making the learning experience of their students more successful.
• Breakfast for Learning grants can be very important in helping children develop their potential and, last year, the Moffat Family Fund provided 49 nutrition grants.

But we have many other donor advised funds, such as the Derek and Polly Riley Bursaries which are given each year to students at the William Norrie Centre. In many cases, these $1,800 individual awards support newcomers as they advance their education.

The Laura Milner White Fund is another donor advised fund that is the catalyst behind the Inner City Soccer League. I recently attended their wrap-up event and as I looked out at 300 young participants, I saw the new face of Winnipeg.

We are all very fortunate to live in a community where people are extremely generous. For years, Manitobans have proven themselves to be the most giving of all Canadians. There are many statistics that support this claim, such as the portion of our income that we donate or the percentage of Manitobans who claim a charitable gift on their income tax form. The Fraser Institute has created a “Generosity Index” and I think we can all be proud that the Manitoba “bar” stands so much taller than the others.

This reality shapes some of the strategies we follow at The Winnipeg Foundation.

• We seek specific partnerships that encourage like-minded people to pool their resources for greater impact. For example, our Literacy for Life Fund has made countless grants of up to $4,000 each to support reading programs across the Province—many involving newcomers.
• We invest heavily in developing philanthropists of the future through Youth in Philanthropy. This year, 350 high school students from very diverse backgrounds participated in our program.
• We build revenue streams for organizations through a matching grant program that will hopefully help sustain the vibrancy of our charitable sector. With dedicated volunteer leadership, even a relatively small agency (like the Chinese Community Fund that I mentioned earlier) can create significant new resources over a period of several years.
• We have a Summer Internship Program aimed at giving students a more in-depth experience of working in the charitable sector and, this summer, one of our 8 interns will be spending their time at IRCOM.

We have recently sponsored some special celebrations in conjunction with “Canadian Citizenship Ceremonies.” Everyone in this room understands the excitement of becoming a new Canadian. But we also know there are many challenges associated with settling thousands of newcomers annually. Welcome Place is right on the front line and sees these personal struggles first hand.

While many of these challenges can only be addressed through public policy, there is a role for philanthropy. We work in a very generous province and we believe that with the right strategies, philanthropy can do more. Our vision is “a Winnipeg where community life flourishes” and we cannot imagine a flourishing community where there is not equal opportunity. We applaud your significant efforts to give everyone a better chance of enjoying the benefits of living in our remarkable city. Hopefully our work demonstrates that we share your values and we share your aspirations. Working together we can build a truly welcoming community.