We’re Thrilled to Announce SVP’s Game-Changing Giving.

What is it?  An exciting new granting approach for SVP Vancouver. 

With Game-Changing Giving, we will help high-impact nonprofits:

1. reach more kids
2. try new groundbreaking ideas
3. collaborate on cutting-edge initiatives

All while helping improve how the non-profit sector operates. Our goal is to triple our venture philanthropy support, starting today. To do this, we plan to raise $1 million over the next year and an additional $1 million by 2027. 

Why are we doing this? 

Innovation is a cornerstone of SVP’s values. We innovate, so our organizations can too. It’s in the DNA of who we are at SVP Vancouver—to be constantly asking ourselves how we can evolve and grow to better serve our nonprofits and the children and youth they support. 

At SVP we FIND, FUND, and STRENGTHEN organizations through our venture philanthropy model, forming close, trusting relationships with them. We’ve excelled at this for 23 years, finding organizations that make a profound difference in the lives of children and youth, granting them multi-year operational support, and providing tailored capacity-building support that go beyond the dollar to help them stabilize, evolve, and grow. Now we want to help organizations go even further; to level up and do even more. We want to change the game for the non-profits we work with, the kids they support, and the non-profit sector as a whole. 

After they stabilize and grow, many of the non-profits we support have amazing ideas to take their organizations to the next level—to collaborate, innovate, and scale. To reach more kids and deepen their impact. But the investments needed to help them do this aren’t readily available. That’s where Game-Changing Giving comes in. 

We trialed. We tested. We learned.

Funding organizations to scale their impact is not an entirely new concept at SVP Vancouver. It’s something we tested with our three scaling grants in 2016–2018, and then again with our Early Years Innovation Fund. 

A few years ago, our SVP Partners came up with a great idea: to focus our granting on the Early Years, an age band where investments have been demonstrated to show a 10:1 social return on investment (SROI). We listened to our Partners and launched the Early Years Innovation Fund in 2021. Through this fund, we explored what kind of impact investing exclusively in an earlier age band (0–6) would have. We also tested a new granting approach to see what it would look like to help these organizations to launch or test a new program, collaborate with others, or scale their operations. It was a huge success and we learned a lot. We saw organizations like LDS – Learn. Develop. Succeed., Down Syndrome Resource Foundation, New Westminster Family Place, Richmond Family Place, BabyGoRound, and A:lmélháwtxw Early Education Centre – Stó:lō Service Agency all take risks and scale their impact with our support of their Early Years initiatives. 

Two key learnings from the Early Years trial were: 

1. We are fuelling ground-breaking ideas that others won’t fund. This type of support—unrestricted multi-year operational support to help an organization innovate, collaborate, and scale—has a huge impact on an organization’s ability to try new things that can have a deep and positive impact on the kids and families they serve. We also learned that other funders often aren’t willing to fund these types of initiatives, especially when they are in a nascent stage. New West Family Place’s “Bringing Family Place to the Streets” is a great example of this. 
2. Our investments will lead to lifelong changes in the children served by our Investees. These longer-term impacts can include increasing the chances these children graduate from high school, have greater mental and physical health, avoid getting tangled in the legal system, and ultimately be thriving, self-sufficient adults.

We are taking these learnings from the Early Years Innovation Trial and revamping SVP Vancouver’s overall granting approach with Game-Changing Giving.  

What will Game-Changing Giving look like at SVP Vancouver? 

• We will continue to help organizations stabilize, improve operations, and grow. We’ve re-branded this as our ‘Series A’ funding. 
• We will launch our ‘Series B’ funding to help organizations in the SVP community scale their impact and support innovation, collaboration, and catalytic growth. What could this look like?
  • Scaling a hands-on healthy lunch program for vulnerable kids to schools across the province
  • Using cutting-edge technology to drastically scale program delivery
  • Conducting a longitudinal study of the impact of transition housing for newcomers to Canada 
• We will increase the size and length of our grants.  We won’t necessarily be granting to significantly more organizations, but will be increasing the amount and duration of our grants, to match inflation and organizational needs.
• We will direct 50% of our multi-year grants towards Early Childhood Initiatives. 
• We will increase our investment in the tailored capacity-building resources we offer that go beyond TREASURE—our TIME, TALENT, and TIES. We will offer non-profit leaders new and increased opportunities to learn and evolve, including additional and increased access to skills-based volunteers, sectoral experts, and thought partners. We will also develop new capacity-building programming to reflect the needs of organizations in the growth phase of their life-cycle. 

We know our venture philanthropy support—our TIES, TALENT, TREASURE, and TIES—is changing the game for kids, non-profits, and the sector. And our support is needed more than ever; the need in our communities continues to grow: 

• 1 in 7 children in B.C. lived in poverty in 2021. The child poverty rate in B.C. was 14.3%, up from 13.3% in 2020.
• 13.8% is B.C.’s Early Years child poverty rate in 2021, a 6.2% increase from the previous year.
• 1 in 3 children in Vancouver enter Grade 1 poorly prepared to learn.
• Demand for non-profit services has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, and only 29.6% of non-profits nationally state that they can meet the need with their organization’s current resources.
• 55% of charities are reporting a decline in their number of volunteers.
• Charitable giving across Canada has fallen to a historical low.

Why do these stats matter? And why do they matter now? Because child poverty negatively affects children’s health, educational outcomes, and overall well-being. And things haven’t been trending in the right direction for years. The number of kids getting left behind is increasing—and the organizations that provide them with crucial and critical services and supports are challenged with an increase in demand for services, but a decrease in donations and volunteers. 

We know we are making an immediate and long-term difference for organizations with our unrestricted multi-year financial support—our TREASURE—but also with the TIME, TALENT, and TIES we offer. Now it’s time to make an even bigger difference. That’s what Game-Changing Giving is here to do. 

By tripling our venture philanthropy support, we can help non-profits reach more kids, try new groundbreaking ideas, and collaborate on cutting edge initiatives.

Join a movement that is making a profound and positive difference in the lives of children and youth AND the nonprofit sector. For the last two decades, our approach has been to find, fund, and strengthen. Now we are going to take it one step further: to find, fund, strengthen, and Change the Game.