Maximizing human, social and climate impact in Canada
The Northpine Foundation focuses on investments that have accountable outcomes, a way forward that supports people to live thriving lives, and a stronger Canada — more inclusive and thoughtful of the land we steward and all its people.
Through risk capital and non-financial supports, the Northpine Foundation tests and proves the scalability and accountability of ventures led by people within the country and around the world who are passionate about a thriving Canada.
The Northpine Process
With a focus on the end user, we choose investments that maximize impact and build momentum.
We work with people who bravely take on risks to find, test and prove ways to deliver change, creating a catalog of ventures that can be replicated and scaled.
We approach venture philanthropy through exploring unmet opportunities, understanding alignment, designing ventures, and establishing relationships on the journey to a point of completion.
Continuously evolving our approach and portfolios as we learn, we offer support through:
- Tailored financing to shape capital according to stages of development — to facilitate scalable models
- Commitment of time, expertise, networks and other non-financial supports — to accelerate scaling up or failing forward
- Impact measurement and management — to ensure accountability
Focus Areas
Formerly Incarcerated Persons
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Refugees
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Rural Newfoundland & Labrador
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Scarborough
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Formerly Incarcerated Persons
We focus on persons who have recently exited the Canadian prison system, through people who provide supports including accessible legal services, affordable supportive housing, accessible post-secondary education, equitable and accessible healthcare, and accelerate attainment of meaningful and sustainable employment for formerly incarcerated persons, and more.
Some of our current investments include:
Refugees
We focus on newly arrived refugees in Canada, through people who provide supports including accelerated attainment of meaningful and sustainable employment, maximizing the potential of Canada’s private sponsorship of refugees, scaling supports for refugee claimants, building entrepreneurship and business development opportunities, and improving accessibility to stable and affordable permanent housing, and more.
Some of our current investments include:
Rural Newfoundland & Labrador
We focus on socio-economic development in rural and remote communities in Newfoundland and Labrador through people who provide supports in areas including accessibility and inclusivity for persons with disabilities, accessible mental health services, affordable and healthy food, preservation of Indigenous culture, overall improved health, and more.
Some of our current investments include:
Scarborough
We focus on socio-economic development in Scarborough, through people who provide supports in areas including improving access to health, literacy, meaningful employment, affordable and nutritious food, and more.
Some of our current investments include:
Bayan Khatib is a co-founder of the Syrian Canadian Foundation, dedicated to empowering newcomers and people of diverse backgrounds, and fostering cross-cultural connections in Canada. Serving as the organization’s Executive Director for three years, she helped build SCF from the ground up and pioneered innovative programs for newcomers.
Bayan co-founded the annual Syria Film Festival in Toronto, giving voice to the struggles and hopes of the Syrian people. During the 2011 Syrian uprising, Bayan led a multinational media campaign and spoke at local and international events and conferences about the struggle for freedom in Syria and the ensuing humanitarian crisis.
Bayan is a skilled writer, having translated “Just Five Minutes: Nine Years in the Prisons of Syria,” a memoir of a female political prisoner, and authored a series of short stories, and opinion pieces in The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.
Today, at The Northpine Foundation, Bayan continues her commitment to refugee and marginalized communities, to make a lasting impact.
What is your favourite quote?
We have made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. ― Quran, 49:13
I love this verse because it speaks to the beauty of diversity and the importance of cross-cultural connection. When we get to know someone, we are less likely to fear them & more likely to care for them.
What are you grateful for?
I am grateful for my father who taught me independence and problem solving. I am grateful for my mother who taught me compassion and acceptance. She taught me to look beneath the surface and gain a deeper understanding of people’s journeys.
What drives you?
I want to pay forward the kindness friends and strangers showed my family when we arrived in Canada as refugees over 30 years ago.
Mark has lived in Holyrood, NL since 1982. He holds a B.Sc. from Memorial University, an Advanced Aquaculture Diploma from the Fisheries and Marine Institute, and an Applied Business Information Technology Graduate Diploma from the College of the North Atlantic. Mark has also completed certificates in Leadership and Sustainable Business Strategy through Harvard University.
His work experience includes a 20+ year military career as a commissioned officer in the Canadian Forces, and owner/operator of several small businesses. Previously he was the Executive Director of the Newfoundland and Labrador Aquaculture Industry Association, a member-based organization with a mandate to facilitate and promote commercial development of aquaculture.
Mark is married to Rhonda (nee Tulk) and is a proud father to two beautiful children, Sam and Anna.
What is your favourite quote?
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. ― Benjamin Franklin
What is kindness?
To understand and accept all people through an empathetic lens.
What drives you?
Collective problem solving.
Naomi (she/her), is a Kenyan and first-generation Canadian, who moved about ten years ago and lives on Treaty 1 territory – Winnipeg.
Before Northpine, she was a Community Investment Manager at United Way Winnipeg, managing a portfolio of United Way-funded agencies, a capital grant, and an organizational effectiveness grant, and building trusting relationships with agency partners and other non-profits in Winnipeg.
Previously, she worked in the settlement sector supporting refugee families.
Outside of Northpine, Naomi spends her time volunteering in the community, learning French and reading books.
Where do you call home?
It’s challenging to define what home means to a person who moved to a new country. Once, I was on a flight from Kenya to Canada. I wondered if it was appropriate to say, “I am leaving home and I am going home.”
Home is where I have family. I have a community that is like family to me in Nairobi and Winnipeg. These are the places I call home.
What is kindness?
Kindness means being selfless, sincere, caring, compassionate and graceful, even when it is challenging to do so.
Kindness is empathy for all and not just those perceived as worthy.
What is the best part about working at Northpine?
Hands down, the people! Each team member is authentic and brings their true self to work. We have a unique opportunity to serve underserved communities. It is a privilege to work with transformative leaders and the people we support.
Sara A. Tessier is a social justice advocate with lived experience, and eight years dedicated to working on behalf of some of the most marginalized, victimized, criminalized, and institutionalized men, women, and youth in Canada.
She has worked with the John Howard Society, Elizabeth Fry Mainland Nova Scotia, and Coverdale Justice Society, supporting those leaving provincial jails during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sara also served as an Outreach Worker for the G.A.T.E. program and a Peer Mentor with Coverdale.
Her influence extends to advisory roles and board memberships, including the African Nova Scotian Affairs Mobilizing Partnership Program, Scientific Advisory Committee for the Nurse Practitioner Research Project with Wellness Within/IWK/ WAGE, YWCA’s Trafficking & Exploitation Services System LGBTQ+ cultural group and the CAEFS Lived Experience Committee.
Sara volunteers at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law, Saint Mary’s University Criminology Department, and the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies assisting the ongoing educational and professional development of students and professors, staff and members and Correctional Service of Canada contractors and volunteers.
She testified before Senate Committees on prisoners’ human rights and legislative changes. Sara has written articles and spoken on panels about prison issues, carceral law, advocacy, human rights, sexual violence, reproductive justice, LGBTQ+ topics, and mental health.
What is your favourite quote?
There’s a new reality born every minute. Unless one is a believer in predestination (in which case I’ll call the prestidigitator), or other puppet-like restraints on our powers, one is free to imagine and effect changes on the world. And if enough people do it, there are big changes. These things happen. Anything can.
― Neil Peart
What are you grateful for?
I am grateful for my amazing family. They support and encourage me to be a better person in all I do, every day.
What is the best part about working at Northpine?
I get to live my passion and help those impacted by the criminal justice system. As a formerly incarcerated person, I know the barriers and stigma that stop successful reintegration into our communities. Northpine gave me an avenue to help break those barriers.
Climate Innovation Capital
The Northpine Foundation invested with Climate Innovation Capital, a private equity fund that will use growth equity to accelerate the adoption and rapid deployment of decarbonizing technology and services in the Energy, Power & Storage, Transportation & Mobility, Industrial Processes & Management, Agriculture, Buildings and Waste, Plastic & Recycling sectors.
The 51
Investing in initiatives with women founders, focused on technology that transforms the business of food and agriculture with an integrated commercialization approach to sector profitability, sustainable food, customer-driven innovation and reimagining the value chain.
Carbon Removal Canada
This investment in Carbon Removal Canada aims to accelerate the growth of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects through a strategy of attracting investment, advocating for policy changes, launching an industry-NGO network, and accelerating Canadian leadership in the CDR sector.
Sustainable Capacity Foundation
This investment in the Sustainable Capacity Foundation’s Faithfully Green Fund will provide financing in the form of loans, to faith communities in the Ottawa area to implement sustainable retrofit projects in an aim to reduce emissions.
Trintiy Centres Foundation
This investment supports the Trinity Centres Foundation work to increase the number of investment-ready faith properties that can be transformed into social purpose real estate assets through educating faith communities around leveraging social finance for redevelopment, socializing investors towards the possibility of transforming faith properties, and advocating for a supportive policy environment.
Fresh City Farms
This investment supports Fresh City Farms’ goals of leveraging urban farming to build a conscious community around sustainable food production by connecting sustainable, organic producers and suppliers to more mainstream consumers in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.
Coverdale Justice Society
This investment will reduce recidivism, remand, and the homelessness-jail cycle for women in the region, by providing community-based alternatives to incarceration that do not otherwise exist, including supported housing, bail support and wrap-around therapeutic services.
PATH (Prisoner Advocacy & Transformational Hub)
PATH plans to expand its justice services beyond their current gender-based parameters to protect the human rights of prisoners and formerly incarcerated persons throughout Canada, starting in the Atlantic region. This investment is targeted at reducing recidivism, by increasing access to legal services and clients served.
Vancouver Island University
This investment will support and expand the Vancouver Island University Inside-Out course — part of their criminology program — that pairs students, both inside and outside prison, to learn about each other’s experiences.
Men of The North
This investment will help Men of The North provide mental health support and services, as well as employment training and additional support for greater success for those facing barriers to employment in Northern Saskatchewan.
Youth Association for Academics, Athletics and Character Education (Y.A.A.A.C.E)
This investment will pilot Dynamic and Transitional Custody models for effective reintegration of formerly incarcerated individuals.
Native Clan Organization
This investment will support the NCO’s Indigenous-focused case management and approach, aiming to reduce recidivism and over-representation of Indigenous people in the prison system by establishing interventions and support in the community.
Seventh Step Society of Canada
This investment will enable the organization to train and employ FIPs as volunteers and facilitators across Canada, as well as providing assistance for pardon services.
Justice Fund
Urban Rez Solutions
HanVoice
The Northpine Foundation invested in the HanVoice initiative to ensure the success of the Canadian government pilot to resettle 5 North Korean families in Canada. Its success could support a follow-on policy to scale the existing program and create a permanent and sustainable pathway for North Korean refugees to resettle and succeed in Canada.
Jumpstart Refugee Talent
This initiative connects refugees to meaningful employment through career readiness assessments, system navigation, developing hiring channels and employer awareness & training.
Sakeenah Homes
This investment scales Sakeenah Homes to 3 provinces with Canada’s highest rates of domestic violence, high numbers of newcomer refugees and the lowest contribution of philanthropic dollars: Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. Our aim is that 85% of women seeking shelter support in these underserved areas become self-sustainable.
The Refugee Centre
This investment pilots the relocation of refugees from big cities to smaller towns, reducing barriers to resettlement and integration time for refugees, as well as boosting economic and social development through population growth for these towns.
FCJ Refugee Centre
This investment aims to scale up FCJ remote services to refugee claimants in small municipalities and rural areas across Canada where these services are minimal or absent. Supported by this investment, FCJ will use their expertise to train organizations across Canada to further scale the best possible support and services for refugee claimants.
Islamic Family & Social Services Association
Happipad
This investment will support Happipad’s innovative solution for refugee housing that supports home sharing programs at scale, covering the entire lifecycle of home sharing rentals from background screening to compatibility matching, rental contracts, rent payments, as well as conflict prevention and resolution.
Savyn Tech Inc.
This investment will support Savyn Tech Inc. to partner with refugee settlement organizations to offer Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy digitally, to address the critical gap in mental health care faced by refugee newcomers across Canada.
Coalition of Persons with Disabilities – Newfoundland & Labrador
This investment increases the inclusivity and accessibility of rural Newfoundland and Labrador for persons with disabilities by solving real-life challenges for persons with disabilities through awareness, digitization, innovation and early interventions.
Dollar a Day Foundation
This investment ensures that victims of domestic and sexual violence in the West Coast and Northern Peninsula on the island of Newfoundland have access to mental health counselling and wrap-around services including legal, housing and employment supports leading to wellbeing and self-sustainability.
FoodFirst – Newfoundland & Labrador
This investment will transform the policy underpinnings of food insecurity in Newfoundland and Labrador. In parallel, it will establish the infrastructure for a more resilient food production and distribution system through scaling up the “Food Hub” pilot to include more communities, regions, and capacity.
Smallwood Crescent Community Centre
This investment in the Smallwood Crescent Community Centre aims to reduce dropout rates and improve student retention and attendance through a range of initiatives such as early warning systems, mentoring programs, alternative education, family engagement, and community partnerships.
Big Feed Club Grocery Delivery
Get Coding
Team Broken Earth
Amp Health
Community Sector Council Newfoundland and Labrador (CSCNL)
Scarborough Health Network
This investment in the SHN Foundation will create Canada’s first no-wait emergency department, modernize diagnostic imaging, and create a surgical quality excellence program, supporting Scarborough’s diverse population.
The Reading Partnership
This investment will help The Reading Partnership develop a sustainable business model for the commercialization of their solutions, with the goal of generating revenues that can sustain their early literacy initiatives.
SAAAC Autism Centre
This investment will drive meaningful employment opportunities for Scarborough’s young, neurodiverse adults and empower them to lead fulfilling lives in their communities.