Centraide’s Collective Impact Project: Poverty Reduction in Montreal
Nancy Pole with Myriam Bérubé
Chapter 12 in Philanthropic Foundations in Canada: Landscapes, Indigenous Perspectives and Pathways to Change.
Launched in late 2015, Montreal’s Collective Impact Project (CIP) is a collaborative philanthropic initiative that describes itself as an accelerator of community change. As of June 2018, the CIP’s governance was composed of ten philanthropic partners and three non-funding strategic partners.
Through the pooling of financial and non-financial resources, the CIP aims to intensify and ensure greater coherence to supports given to comprehensive community change processes in Montreal. The project is based on the assumption that, if both funding support and funders’ strategic actions are coordinated, local communities will be able to achieve more meaningful results with regard to poverty reduction.
This chapter discusses the CIP as a case study highlighting possibilities and challenges relating to funder collaboration as a means of shifting the dynamics associated with complex funding ecologies. By introducing a new opportunity for funders, grantees and policymakers to come together and test out new ways of working, this initiative shines a light on existing relationships and system dynamics, while casting ripples that may (or may not) have a lasting effect elsewhere in the system. This case study also shines a light on the evolving expression of community leadership by place-based foundations.