In 2021, after the Swedish private equity giant Nordic Capital acquired RLDatix, a Toronto-based health care tech firm, Sarah Paul and her husband Cary Lavine, one of the company’s early finance partners, both quit their jobs and set up a family foundation, endowing it with $6-million. They decided to focus on community giving. Ms. Paul, who has a background in public policy and an interest in climate change, identified affordable housing as one potential channel for their philanthropy.
She did some research and came across Resolve, a Calgary-based partnership involving developers, philanthropists, non-profits and all three orders of government. Between 2012 and 2018, it raised $75-million in private donations and leveraged another $200-million in public dollars to construct 21 new affordable housing projects with about 2,000 units, mainly for homeless individuals and low-income seniors.
“I read about [Resolve], and I said, ‘Okay, this exists in Toronto, right?’ I tried to network in Toronto, but I couldn’t find anything.” While talking up the Calgary initiative at philanthropic conferences, Ms. Paul met Jolene Livingston, a Calgary fundraising executive who was familiar with the Resolve campaign. They embarked on an effort to scale that Calgary model nationally, so local philanthropists could easily contribute to a range of affordable housing projects, either in the form of capital contributions or support for programs, like rent stabilization.
The result, launching this month, is Partners for Affordable Housing, which aims to fill a void. Housing non-profits, as Ms. Livingston says, “don’t have fundraising resources within their teams.” Her goal is ambitious: She expects to be raising $200-million a year within a decade, and also hopes to attract government funding as well as “impact investors,” funders who direct their capital to specific causes – like low-income housing – with the expectation of a return. Donors can consult a directory of projects from across Canada and select how they’d like to contribute.