About Us
Blended Finance Canada is a joint initiative founded by University of Victoria’s Impact Investing Hub, Scale Institute, and Spring.
Our three organizations bring complementary strengths in research, impact investing, innovation, social entrepreneurship, and ecosystem building.
Together, we are creating a national collaborative platform that connects capital and community priorities by sharing knowledge, and designing and scaling financing solutions that create lasting social and environmental impact.
This collaboration builds on three years of convenings, dialogue and shared learning among a broad network of organizations, initiated by Spring, Ontario Trillium Foundation and Thrive Impact Fund. Now primarily co-led by Scale and Spring, these convenings explored how blended finance can expand access to capital and enable Canadian communities to deliver greater impact.
That experience generated valuable insights from practitioners, revealing growing interest among organizations and investors seeking knowledge, examples, tools and practical guidance. The case for building a more durable learning platform was clear.
With initial funding from Canada First Research Excellence Fund, via the ACET initiative at University of Victoria, Blended Finance Canada will carry this work forward by creating the infrastructure for collaboration, learning, experimentation, and action. The three founding partners bring distinct but complementary capabilities to this work.
The Impact Investing Hub at the University of Victoria, together with the broader team of the Accelerating Community Energy Transformation (ACET) initiative, will contribute research, student engagement, talent development, and knowledge mobilization. This work builds on interdisciplinary expertise spanning sustainable finance, impact investing, community energy and business innovation for positive impact. Additional academic partners from Royal Roads University and the University of Waterloo, among others, will further broaden the initiative’s research capacity.
Scale Institute brings applied research leadership, community-based innovation and a strong track record of developing financial and organizational solutions for social enterprises and non-profit organizations. They are known for catalyzing and enabling transformative change across the social sector through practical tools, resources and implementation support.
Spring will contribute expertise in impact entrepreneurship, investment readiness, impact investing and the development and scaling of purpose-driven ventures. This expertise is grounded in years of experience in convening investors, entrepreneurs and ecosystem partners, expanding access to impact-investing knowledge, and broadening participation in the field.
Our collaborators & supporters
We are grateful to the many organizations and individuals whose support, participation and collaboration helped lay the groundwork for Blended Finance Canada.
Over several years, they contributed to convenings, practitioner dialogues, case studies, knowledge sharing, workshops, ecosystem-building activities and other efforts that deepened understanding of the challenges and opportunities for advancing blended finance in Canada. Their insights, experience and willingness to collaborate helped identify persistent gaps, emerging opportunities and the need for a more durable national platform to advance this work.
