Plant a seed for the long-term sustainability of your organization

Instead of the cost and time involved to create a foundation or other special endowment housing facility, your charity can establish its endowment at Tides Canada.

This removes the complication of developing in-house investment expertise and ensures that your resources are managed using socially responsible investment principles.

Endowments can be started with a single donor's gift, or grown with a “planned giving” initiative that encourages long-term gifts from multiple donors through bequests to the organization's endowment.

If properly planned, an endowment:

• Will bring more resources to fulfill an organization's mission;
• Can use its income to help fund core expenses that project funding often overlooks;
• Will diversify income;
• Will create an opportunity for current funders to increase their support in a highly strategic way;
• Can be a vehicle to attract, through planned giving, a greater proportion of the pending and very large inter-generational transfer of wealth to go to the charitable sector.
• Can promote long term organizational financial planning;
• Can create a sense of permanence that benefits the organization by strengthening the institution and its stakeholders, enabling increased attention to achieving long-range programme objectives, and flexibility in working towards those goals.
• Can help be a catalyst for other strategic and organizational changes enhancing an institution's adaptive qualities;

Institutional endowments held at Tides Canada will be listed in our annual reports.

Tides Canada can provide support for endowment and bequest planning and can help explain the value of endowments to your donors, staff, volunteers and board members.

Endowment management that aligns with your charity's mission

The Foundation begins the investment management process with the recognition that its responsibility does not end with the traditional goals of maximizing return and minimizing risk. Effort to mitigate environmental destruction, address issues of social and economic justice, and promote healthy communities and societies will be successful to the extent that these concerns exist as central rather than peripheral issues to the business and investment communities.

Tides Canada Foundation Investment Policy

Increasingly, thoughtful organizations are recognizing that harmonizing the way their charitable dollars are invested in the marketplace with the mission that drives their program work is an integral part of social change.

At Tides Canada, all endowed funds are invested in businesses and institutions whose practices are as consistent as possible with the mission we share with all our donor and charitable partners: to support social justice and environmental protection.

Doing this means that we are making solid financial investments while also being part of a movement steering publicly-traded businesses towards greater social and environmental responsibility.

The basic tenets of our mission-based investing include screening, shareholder advocacy, economically targeted investments and social venture capital. To learn more, download our Investment Policies. (PDF, 168kb)

Open a long-term fund

Long-term funds are designed to realize the benefits of a endowed investment while still providing some flexibility in allowing access to the principal of the fund.

With long-term funds there is no 10-year hold on the principal. Unlike an endowment fund, both the earnings and the principal may be granted.

For more information on endowments, download:

Information on Endowments  (PDF, 250kb)

Contact Us:

Tricia Cummings
Client Services
T: 604.647.6611 ext. 243 or 1-866-843-3722 (866-TIDESCA)