RLCF Announcement | July 22, 2016

You might have noticed that our website looks a bit different these days – we gave it a summer makeover! Over the past fiscal year, we’ve done some reflection on our operations, best practices, strategy and effectiveness. This work resulted in a slight shift in direction. Our hope is that the change will allow us to stay true to our mission and focus, be a better funding partner and more specific in the impact we wish to have.

What follows is a new approach to grant making. We are moving away from an open call for applications and towards a top-down, internally-led and initiated selection process. The top-down approach means that the RLCF board will define our focus area (education, health care, poverty or arts), and we will then explore an emergent thesis which will shape our direction. The next step is to immerse ourselves into investigating and learning about the sector, ecosystem, theme and organizations. We conduct a screen of organizations in the province and narrow down potential ways in which we could engage. We then approach organizations directly and explore potential funding partnerships.

You’ll notice we have eliminated the application page from our website. As a result of our change in direction, we will not have the capacity to review applications and unsolicited requests that may come through. We have fully committed our funding for the current fiscal year (one month into it!) and are working on developing a granting strategy for the fiscal year 2017-18. As we implement our new way of operating, we are keeping the things from prior years that we know work well, such as our two main granting vehicles, the Conconi Challenge and Legacy Grants.

Our intention is to be transparent about our work and we will be posting updates on our progress and learnings along the way.

Sincerely,

Sanja Simic, Executive Director