Community resilience is not a theory. Across every province and territory, people are already lending, guaranteeing, and investing in the places they live. And they have great stories. Here are over 30 of them, representing opportunities for greater scale with the right kind of support.
Learn more about Canadian stories in community resilience.
Retail impact deposit at a credit union·Vancouver, British Columbia
In January 2026 Vancity opened a one-year term deposit with an unusual promise attached: the money would be lent against projects meeting the credit union's sustainability criteria, across affordable housing, clean energy, Indigenous businesses, socioeconomic advancement and women entrepreneurs. Members could put in as little as $500, the rate was 3.00 percent, or 3.10 percent inside an RRSP or TFSA, and their deposits were fully guaranteed by the Credit Union Deposit Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, which currently guarantees BC credit union deposits without limit. The product hit its $250 million ceiling and closed to new deposits. That is the detail worth sitting with. A mainstream savings product, with ordinary deposit protection and an ordinary rate, sold out because people wanted to know where their money went.
The Social Enterprise Fund was created in 2008 by Edmonton Community Foundation and the City of Edmonton to lend where banks would not, and it has since put more than $90 million into over 110 projects, with more than $40 million already repaid and recycled into new loans. It lends on five to ten year terms at one to three points above prime, to non-profits, co-operatives and businesses with a public purpose: CKUA radio, the Edmonton Ski Club, Teatro Live!, the Jerry Forbes Centre. In May 2026 Edmonton Community Foundation committed a further $20 million through the fund for affordable housing, aiming to house 5,000 Edmontonians by the end of 2028. It is the clearest Canadian example of a community foundation behaving like a bank for the things a bank will not touch.
Community ownership co-operative·Edmonton, Alberta
The Alberta Block has stood at Jasper Avenue and 105th Street since 1909. Homestead Investment Co-operative is working to buy it, for about $9 million, using money from several hundred ordinary Albertans rather than from a real estate investment trust or a handful of wealthy investors. A $250 membership share buys a vote; investment shares start at $10,000 and are eligible for RRSPs and TFSAs through the Canadian Worker Co-operative Federation, held for a minimum of five years against a projected return of at least six percent. The building is already ninety-six percent occupied on long leases. Founder Tegan Martin-Drysdale sits alongside a board that includes former Edmonton mayor Don Iveson. The question the co-operative is really asking is who should own a city's main streets, and whether the answer can be the people who walk down them.
Métis development finance institution·Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Since 1998 the Clarence Campeau Development Fund has approved just over $91 million for Métis-owned businesses in Saskatchewan and pulled a further $206 million out of conventional lenders alongside it, financing 1,273 businesses and 4,062 jobs. It combines things that usually come separately: non-repayable equity grants, interest-free loans, interest-bearing loans, and money to pay for the business plan and the management training that make a venture bankable in the first place. Its capital is not charity. It receives a quarter of Saskatchewan's Community Initiatives Fund, equal to 6.25 percent of all off-reserve gaming revenue in the province, which makes it one of the few community lenders in Canada with a permanent public revenue share rather than an annual appropriation to worry about.
The Jubilee Fund does something most people do not know is possible: it lends nothing and unlocks a great deal. Manitobans buy Jubilee Investment Certificates in three and five year terms, accepting one percent less than the posted GIC rate, and the fund uses that capital to guarantee loans made by Assiniboine Credit Union to non-profits and social enterprises the credit union could not otherwise approve. Because a guarantee need only cover part of a loan, roughly $2.2 million of certificates currently supports $1.3 million of guarantees, which in turn unlocks substantially more bank credit. In 2022 it extended the same logic to households, launching a Rent Guarantee Program that co-signs leases for women facing housing barriers, removing the first-and-last-month wall that keeps people out of safe housing. As one staff member put it, what the fund is really saying to those women is that it believes in them.
Indwell builds supportive housing, the kind with staff on site for people coming out of homelessness or hospital, and in March 2024 it went looking for the money in an unusual place. It offered community bonds directly to the public in five series, from $1,000 up, paying between 3.5 and 5 percent over three to five years, with one series eligible for RRSPs and TFSAs. It asked for $5 million and closed in December with $6 million. The money went into four Hamilton buildings, including Acorn Flats on Robert Street, Indwell's first housing built for families, where $934,000 of bond money sat alongside $3.4 million from the City and $845,000 from donors. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation wrote the case up itself, making the point plainly: community bonds filled the pre-development financing gap that conventional lenders would not.
Community loan fund financed by community bonds·Ontario
The Fair Finance Fund lends to the part of the food system that banks find illegible: small farms, food hubs, processors, the businesses between a field and a plate. It makes loans of $20,000 to $200,000 at 7.5 percent fixed over five years, and it raises much of its own capital the same way its borrowers might, through community bonds, of which it has raised more than $4.3 million. Since 2019 it has put out more than $5.2 million across 63 loans. Half of its 2024 borrowers were BIPOC-led and seven in ten were women-led or women-managed, which is not an accident of the portfolio but a consequence of lending on character and cash flow rather than on collateral most young farmers do not have.
Farmland has become close to unbuyable for anyone without existing wealth, and for Black farmers the barrier compounds. Inclusive Prosperity, which grew out of the Fair Finance Fund and became independent in 2026, runs the African Canadian Farmers Fund, which removes the two obstacles that stop most people before they start: the down payment and the mortgage approval. A farmer identifies a property and the fund buys it outright, using money raised from investors at a $50,000 minimum over ten years, and holds the title itself. The farmer signs a ten-year lease and begins farming immediately. Roughly half of every lease payment is credited as equity rather than disappearing as rent, building to about a quarter of the property over the decade, at which point the farmer has first right to buy it with a deposit already in hand. It is a mortgage turned inside out, with patient capital sitting where the bank would normally be.
Rise lends up to $10,000 at prime plus 2.5 percent to people starting businesses while living with mental health and addiction challenges, a group almost no lender will touch. It grew out of a 2009 partnership between the Rotman School and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and has since made more than 1,000 loans worth over $4 million, with an 85 percent repayment rate. Nine in ten borrowers work alone, six in ten are women, and 62 percent are racialized. One borrower's line about the organization is the whole argument for lending on character: Rise was the first place that treated them as a human being rather than a patient.
Place-based social finance fund·London and southwestern Ontario
VERGE Capital began in 2013 as Social Finance London and now runs three funds built from local money: credit unions, foundations, religious congregations and individual investors across southwestern Ontario. A Start-up Fund makes small loans to early-stage enterprises. Breakthrough Fund I closed at $2.26 million from twenty local investors, structured over seven years at a three percent target return with $375,000 of first-loss capital from the Province of Ontario standing in front of them. Breakthrough Fund II has since passed $4 million and carries the larger work, in housing, climate and equity. More than half the portfolio has been majority women-owned. Sandra Maniago of Loko Sport put the gap plainly when she said it is so hard for small business owners to get funding through banks that VERGE was a wonderful option.
Places for People is a small rural housing charity that was carrying a six percent vendor take-back mortgage on a fiveplex and could not get out from under it. It raised $850,000 in community bonds, sold out in nine weeks, refinanced the mortgage, consolidated its debt, bought a sixth property adding eight more units, and then, for the first time in its life, was offered a line of credit by a local credit union. It now runs eighteen deeply affordable rentals. Founder Fay Martin described what the money let them do in one sentence: they very quickly did what they said they would do, which was keep using their assets to build or buy more housing in Haliburton County, and they did it with amazing speed.
Community land trust financed by community bonds·Ottawa, Ontario
A community land trust is a non-profit, controlled by the people who live in a place, that buys land and buildings and then never sells them, so the homes on that land stay affordable permanently instead of only until the next sale. Roughly forty now operate in Canada. Ottawa's buys small apartment buildings that are about to be sold to private investors, keeps the sitting tenants at their existing rents, and pays for it with Housing Forever Bonds sold in $1,000 units to ordinary Ottawa residents. It bought its first building on Kirkwood Avenue, six units, for $1.7 million in late 2023, has raised $5.1 million from more than two hundred investors since, and now owns three buildings including one housing thirty-one households. Lucie Huneault had lived in the Kirkwood building for twenty years and was afraid of what she would find if she had to move. She said she was happy they bought it, because she knew they were going to keep that low-income rent.
Community bond placed with accredited investors·Waterloo Region, Ontario
House of Friendship had been running live-in addiction treatment out of a 130-year-old farmhouse and needed $4.5 million to move into a proper building in Cambridge, taking indoor space from 3,000 to 19,500 square feet. It issued a $1 million bond secured against the property. Twelve investors took it up, led by Waterloo Region Community Foundation, and it was oversubscribed to $1.2 million within two months. Chief executive Jennifer Scott said afterwards that using the model gained them much more than financial support, and one investor later donated their entire principal back to the organization rather than take it. This is a smaller, quieter version of the community bond than a public campaign, and it is worth showing precisely because it is different: twelve cheques, not a thousand.
Community bond intermediary·Toronto, Ontario, working nationally
Tapestry exists because most charities that could issue a community bond have no idea how. It designs the campaign, writes the offering documents, markets to investors and administers the bonds afterwards. Organizations working with it have raised roughly $148 million as at the end of 2025, across 24 issuers and about 6,800 individual investments, returning $23 million in interest to the people who invested. Its clients run from SolarShare at $80 million to the Argonaut Rowing Club at $1.2 million. In 2025 it launched Weave, a pooled fund that lends to community bond issuers across Canada. Community bonds are legal in every province and territory, because securities law lets qualified non-profit issuers deal directly with the public.
Labour-sponsored development fund with a tax credit·Montreal, Quebec
Fondaction is what happens when a tax credit is pointed at local investment rather than at the stock market. Quebec workers buy shares that are RRSP-eligible and carry a 15 percent Quebec credit and a 15 percent federal credit on the first $5,000 invested each year, so up to $1,500 back on top of the RRSP deduction. In exchange, the fund is required by its constituting statute to keep at least 65 percent of its net assets invested in Quebec. It now holds $4.54 billion for 229,186 shareholders and returned 9.2 percent over the year to May 2026. Whatever one thinks of the cost, the mechanism does the thing it was built to do: it keeps a very large pool of retirement savings inside the province that produced it.
Community bond anchored by a foundation·Quebec City, Quebec
Groupe TAQ employs about 310 people in Quebec City doing industrial and food-sector contract work, and roughly 80 percent of them are people living with a disability. In 2025 it raised $5,011,200 in community bonds from about 65 investors across six series, paying between 3.5 and 5 percent over three to seven years. The anchor was $3 million from the Fondation Lucie et André Chagnon, which is worth pausing on: a private foundation putting endowment capital, not grant money, into a social enterprise's debt. The proceeds are funding a new facility in Portneuf, two new food preparation areas, and a redesigned Faber snowshoe made entirely from Canadian components, replacing a supply chain that was about half Chinese parts assembled here.
Solidarity credit union·Quebec City and across Quebec
The Caisse d'économie solidaire is a credit union that decided its members would be co-operatives, non-profits, unions and cultural organizations as much as individuals, with one vote each either way. It holds $2.4 billion in assets for 21,964 members, and more than sixty percent of its financing goes into housing, which is why its residential mortgage book is larger than its business book: the mortgages are on housing co-operatives. Its community development assistance fund held $6.57 million at the end of 2025 and spent $3.18 million during the year. Its members have repeatedly voted to send part of their patronage rebates to collective projects instead of to themselves, which is the kind of decision that only becomes possible when the depositors and the borrowers are the same community.
RISQ has been lending to Quebec co-operatives and non-profits since 1997, which makes it about as old as the idea that this sector needs its own finance. Its loans are small and unsecured, typically $20,000 to $100,000 at five to eight percent, and they are designed not to fund a project but to make it fundable: a RISQ loan sits at the bottom of the stack so that a bank, a caisse or a government programme can sit on top of it. Since 1997 it has committed $45.5 million across 1,493 loans to 1,103 distinct enterprises, and those loans have sat inside $530 million of total project investment, supporting 14,866 jobs. The ratio is the point. Every dollar RISQ puts in is there to move eleven that would not otherwise arrive.
The Fiducie makes a loan with one unusual feature that changes everything downstream: for fifteen years the borrower repays no principal at all, paying only fixed interest, with the whole amount falling due at maturity and early repayment allowed without penalty. Because the debt behaves like equity on the balance sheet, a co-operative or non-profit can carry it and still qualify for a mortgage on top. It lends $50,000 to $400,000 for operations without security, and up to $2.5 million for real estate. Since 2007 it has deployed more than $137 million into 420 collective projects, and those projects have drawn $882.9 million in total investment. It was recapitalized in June 2024 with a further $55 million from the Fonds de solidarité FTQ, Fondaction, Investissement Québec and Canada's Social Finance Fund.
Community Futures network with a shared capital arm·All regions of Quebec
Rural Quebec is served by 57 Sociétés d'aide au développement des collectivités and 10 Centres d'aide aux entreprises, all independent local non-profits, all governed by boards of people who live there, and together they are Quebec's arm of the national Community Futures system. They lend from revolving funds to businesses banks will not take, typically to a ceiling of $150,000, with patient terms, interest moratoriums for young entrepreneurs and free advisory support alongside the money. They invest more than $100 million a year and work with around 10,000 businesses. Behind them sits Capital Réseau SADC et CAE, a pooled vehicle the 67 organizations built and own between them, holding about $142 million and existing for one purpose: so that a local office with a good loan in front of it and no cash in the drawer can still write it. It enables roughly 300 loans a year that would otherwise not happen.
CEDIF, a community economic development investment fund·Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia
New Dawn calls itself Canada's oldest community development corporation, founded in Sydney in 1976, and it has spent much of the last two decades financing itself with money from its own neighbours. Nova Scotia's CEDIF rules give an investor a 35 percent provincial tax credit on up to $50,000 a year, worth up to $17,500 back, provided the shares are held five years, with further credits of 20 and 10 percent for holding ten and fifteen years. New Dawn has raised more than $11 million in Cape Breton this way and paid out $1.2 million in dividends to its investors. Among other things the money helped turn the former Holy Angels convent into the Eltuek Arts Centre, a $15 million conversion of a heritage building into more than twenty artist studios, a gallery and a café, renamed in Mi'kmaq at a ceremony in October 2021.
Community bond for arts space·Halifax, Nova Scotia
RadStorm is a Halifax arts and media space that had been pushed from building to building by the rental market and decided to stop moving. It set out to buy its own premises on Gottingen Street with $350,000 in community bonds, $50,000 in donations and $100,000 in grants against a $500,000 total, with the owners offering favourable terms to keep the building in community hands. The bond campaign has since closed. It has 343 members and hosts roughly a thousand bookings a year. Co-founder Capp Larsen made the case for ownership rather than rent in a way that applies far beyond the arts: if organizations could actually own and control their space, it would mean longevity, instead of bouncing from one place to another.
Retail tax credit vehicle·Province-wide, Prince Edward Island
The fishers of Tignish have owned their own plant since 1925, when twenty-five of them incorporated the first fishermen's union in Canada. When it needed to expand, they did not go to a bank first. They sold shares to Islanders through a subsidiary co-operative under Prince Edward Island's CEDB programme, which gives a resident investor a 35 percent provincial tax credit on up to $20,000 a year against a five year hold, and their raise became the largest under the programme. It is a small scheme that has done real work: alongside the Tignish plant it has financed a solar installer and a brewery, each funded by neighbours who got their tax money back the same year rather than waiting. Compare it with New Brunswick, which offers a far more generous 50 percent credit and has produced almost nothing, and the lesson is that the rate is rarely the bottleneck.
Retail tax credit vehicle·Province-wide, New Brunswick
New Brunswick offers the most generous retail community investment incentive in Canada. An individual who invests in a registered Community Economic Development Corporation receives a 50 percent non-refundable provincial tax credit, against a four year hold, and the province says plainly that this is the highest rate in the country. A single corporation can raise up to $3 million in a twelve month period without filing a prospectus. And almost nobody uses it. The provincial securities regulator's own reporting shows just four corporations ever approved, and the largest amount raised under the exemption is about $440,000. The lesson is not that incentives do not work. It is that an incentive without infrastructure, without anyone to design the offering, market it and administer it, is a door with no path leading to it.
Community-owned social business·Fogo Island, Newfoundland and Labrador
After the cod moratorium took the economic floor out from under Fogo Island, Zita Cobb and her brothers built a charity that owns businesses rather than one that asks for money. Shorefast owns the Fogo Island Inn, Fogo Island Workshops, Fogo Island Fish and Growlers Ice Cream, and states that all operating surpluses from them go back into the island through its own programmes, including a business assistance fund that has lent to more than twenty new island businesses. In 2024 it employed 317 people, 270 of them living on Fogo Island, and bought $1.3 million of goods and services on the island plus $1.9 million elsewhere in the province. A hydroponic farmer named Dwight Budden started with a $7,500 microloan from the fund.
däna Näye Ventures is a First Nation-controlled lender in Whitehorse that finances businesses across Yukon and three northern British Columbia communities, Atlin, Good Hope Lake and Lower Post, lending to Indigenous and non-Indigenous borrowers alike. It runs short and long-term business loans, operating lines, commercial mortgages, a Yukon micro loan programme and a micro-loan stream for Indigenous women entrepreneurs, on a commercial loan portfolio of around $15 million. It has also been developing home ownership loan products aimed at fourteen First Nation communities across Yukon and northern BC. Cathy Isaac took a micro loan in 2006 to start Bearpaw Music and Gifts, came back for financing to move into a larger store, and came back again to open a second location at Carcross Commons.
Territorial development lender·Yellowknife, serving all five NWT regions
Prosper NWT is the territorial government's development finance corporation, and it lends where commercial banks will not, with an explicit priority on businesses outside Yellowknife. It carries a $42 million loan portfolio, assisted 129 businesses in 2024 and 2025 and more than 780 since 2005, and reports over 2,000 jobs created or maintained. Simpson Air, 51 percent Indigenous-owned and woman-led, run by Vanessa and Garry Murtsell, is among its borrowers and recently hired the first Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation pilot. In a territory where air service is not a convenience but the only road, a developmental lender keeping a small airline flying is infrastructure policy conducted through a loan book.
Inuit-owned development finance·Rankin Inlet, Nunavut
Atuqtuarvik was created in 2000 by Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. with a simple mandate: make sure Inuit own a real share of the economic activity happening in Nunavut, rather than watching it pass through. It provides debt and equity to Inuit-owned businesses, currently considering financing between $150,000 and $3 million, and holds a long-term stake in First Nations Bank of Canada. Unusually among Canada's Indigenous lenders, it was capitalized from Nunavut Trust investment income rather than from a federal programme, which gives it a different kind of independence. Wilfred Wilcox and Ruth Niptanatiak-Wilcox built Jago Services in Cambridge Bay into a plumbing, heating and electrical contractor employing fifteen people, about half of them Inuit, and Atuqtuarvik financed their move into running Umingmak Lodge alongside it.
National network of Indigenous lenders·Every province and territory
This is the part of Canadian community finance with the longest track record, and the least recognition. Fifty-one Indigenous Financial Institutions, Indigenous-owned and Indigenous-controlled, have made 54,484 loans totalling $3.56 billion since the 1980s to entrepreneurs and communities that mainstream banks would not serve. Roughly half of the businesses they support are rural or remote and 45 percent are on reserve. In the year to March 2025 the network issued $175.7 million in new lending across 1,142 loans, on a $425 million portfolio, and wrote off 0.51 percent. The Conference Board of Canada found that for every dollar these institutions lent between 2016 and 2021, the economy produced $3.60 in GDP. Thirty-five years, three and a half billion dollars, and a loss rate a commercial bank would be pleased with.
Community bonds for on-reserve housing·Wendake, Quebec, lending in Quebec
The Indian Act makes conventional mortgages on reserve close to impossible, because a lender cannot take the land as security, and the usual workaround is a Band Council or ministerial guarantee that puts the community's balance sheet at risk for every household loan. ABSCAN found another way. It sells fixed-rate bonds to First Nations savers, on which interest is tax-free for status Indian investors, and lends the proceeds to First Nations individuals to buy, build or renovate homes, underwriting on the borrower's capacity and the value of the house rather than on anyone's guarantee. It reports $28 million invested and around 300 homes financed with no recorded loan losses. In 2024 it helped create Yänonhchia' Housing Finance to take the model national.
FACE is the front door for Black-owned businesses applying to the federal Black Entrepreneurship Loan Fund. It lends directly up to $100,000, and for amounts up to $250,000 it shares the credit risk with the Business Development Bank of Canada. Since 2021 it reports disbursing $50.4 million to nearly 600 Black-owned businesses, with $67.1 million approved, at an average loan of about $80,000. Forty-six percent of loans disbursed between 2023 and 2024 went to newcomers. The gap FACE exists to close is measurable: Black-owned businesses are 2.4 percent of Canadian businesses, and chief executive Tiffany Callender has described the organization's job not as eliminating risk but as measuring it properly, which is a different thing and the reason a specialist lender sees what a generalist does not.
Microlending for credential recognition·National, lending in every province and territory
Canada admits engineers, doctors, nurses and accountants and then requires them to pay for credential assessments, licensing exams and bridging courses before they can work in their field, which is why people arrive with a profession and end up driving. Windmill lends up to $15,000, unsecured, at 5.95 percent, or 4.45 percent for healthcare reaccreditation, to cover exactly those costs, and pairs the loan with coaching. Since 2005 it has approved $165 million for more than 15,000 clients from over 150 countries, at a 94.1 percent repayment rate. Among clients who finished their plan and repaid in full, average income roughly triples. Its loan capital is about sixty percent private donations and forty percent federal.
Capacity building for northern Indigenous entrepreneurs·Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut
EntrepreNorth has supported more than 250 Indigenous entrepreneurs across the three territories since 2018 through cohort programmes that bring people together in person in Yellowknife, Iqaluit and Whitehorse, built around an approach that treats Indigenous knowledge systems as business infrastructure rather than as decoration. In April 2026 it became an independent Indigenous-owned charity after eight years on the MakeWay platform, and it is standing up the Sinew Impact Fund to lend and invest between $50,000 and $1 million directly. Its alumni include Brenda Dragon of Aurora Heat, Joella Hogan of the Yukon Soaps Company and Tania Larsson, whose jewellery has been shown internationally. Vashti Zetzel of Golden Eye Designs put the value of it simply: she left with far more confidence than she had when she started.
