Impact Investing and Canada’s Cultural Sector – Request for Proposals

Summary

The Metcalf Foundation, in partnership with the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, is excited to explore, understand, and support the growing interest in the potential relationship between impact investing and the cultural sector. To do this, we have developed a request for proposal to investigate the opportunities and challenges of deploying impact investing tools for the arts sector in Canada.

What is the problem we’re trying to solve?
Amidst growing international awareness that funding and business models for nonprofit cultural sectors are increasingly insufficient and unsustainable, cultural sectors need both new sources of capital to shore up their overall resource base, and, at the same time, new operational capacities, activities, markets, and earned revenue lines.

Over the past eight years, Nesta’s Arts & Culture Finance (ACF) initiative in the UK ran a pilot consisting of three separate funds. This made new sources of capital available to cultural organizations through a delivery mechanism focused on building capacity. In other words, ACF
did two things simultaneously: It brought a new form of capital to the sector, while proactively preparing the sector to work with that capital. To understand whether this initiative holds promise for Canada, the Metcalf Foundation, in collaboration with Camber Arts, and with the
support of the Canada Council for the Arts, held a July 2023 workshop that brought together a small group of financial and cultural leaders. The event revealed considerable enthusiasm for this opportunity.

The primary objectives of this project are as follows: 1) Assess Sectoral Funding Gaps 2) Evaluate Demand 3) Analyze Supply 4) Determine Development Pathways and 5) Create a Blueprint for Development.