The Catalyst: Community Finance Initiative aims to enhance the ecosystem to support the start-up and scale up of place-based community finance organizations in urban, rural, and Northern communities across Canada.
What is Community Finance?
What We Do
We convene around community finance:
- Facilitating knowledge sharing amongst place-based finance organizations, investors, and capacity builders.
- Engaging existing and new community finance organizations that serve organizations, projects, and enterprises in urban, rural and Northern communities, alongside mainstream leaders in philanthropy, public policy, and financial institutions.
We offer programs to advance community finance:
- Supporting a learning community of current and interested place-based community capital stakeholders.
- Developing and curating tools, templates, and shared services for community capital leaders.
We engage to foster a united voice for community finance:
- Collectively designing relevant ecosystem and provincial public policy infrastructure to ensure that community finance organizations can successfully and sustainably start-up and scale their impact.
Nation Building Begins on Main Street: New Report Makes Economic Case for Canadian Community Finance Strategy
When we think about what makes Canada strong, we don’t start in Ottawa. We start in the neighbourhoods, towns, and regions where Canadians live, work, and build their futures. That’s where sovereignty takes root. And right now, those places are missing the capital tools they need to thrive.
Produced in partnership with Impact United Academy, and with the generous support of the Definity Foundation, our groundbreaking new report, Unlocking Capital: The Economic Case for Canadian Community Finance, makes the case that Canada can strengthen its economic sovereignty and prosperity by empowering communities with the financial infrastructure to build, own, adapt, and grow.
Unlocking Capital was researched, drafted, and produced by the University of New Brunswick’s Pond-Deshpande Centre. It was prepared by Simon Marmura Brown, PhD – Strategic Director, Research and Knowledge Mobilization at the Centre.
The economic case is clarion: when capital reaches communities, it multiplies.
Registration Open for the Catalyst: Community Finance Summit
May 26-29, 2026
Winnipeg, MB
The Summit is a pan-Canadian convening centred on community finance. We’re gathering community finance organizations, funders, investors, community connectors, social purpose organizations and ecosystem allies to advance the community finance sector together.
Join our network for and by community finance organizations
Catalyst is a network of place-based impact funds, community loan funds, investment co-operatives, community land trusts, local credit unions, and other community finance organizations. We are a collective that exists to advance the community finance sector in Canada. Join to gain access to peers, programming, tools, and resources.
Our Principles
Community-focus: We enable communities to thrive through access to community-centric capital.
Trust: We build high-trust relationships based on mutual respect to co-operate openly and transparently.
Meaningful engagement: We hear, learn, and take collective action informed from diverse community perspectives.
Humility: We recognize we don’t have all the answers and commit to making right what we get wrong.
Action-oriented: We advocate for community finance and take action rooted in our collective wisdom and continuous learning.
Belonging and reciprocity: We create collaborative relationships and strive to advance social justice, inclusion and equity.
Stewardship Group
Catalyst: Community Finance Initiative is a collaborative with a growing, wide range of networks, intermediaries and funders. The collaborative is stewarded by a number of key partners:
Be represented in the Community Finance ecosystem
Catalyst would like to be able to include you and your organization in our maps and directories of the community finance ecosystem. We have developed a brief survey linked below which will establish an overview of who you are and how you are connected to community finance. We would appreciate it if you could complete the survey and be reflected in this network.
This is Community Finance
Community Finance Profile: Rise
Rise is a Canadian organization that empowers individuals with mental health and addiction challenges to become entrepreneurs and transform their lives. Rise provides flexible, low-barrier loans and business support through a mental health-centred lens to help clients improve their well-being and succeed on their own terms.
Community Finance Profile: Fair Finance Fund
Fair Finance Fund is a non-profit social finance organization dedicated to strengthening Ontario’s local food and farm sector through accessible capital loans and mentorship. It is a community loan fund that provides flexible and patient capital to food and farm enterprises, particularly those with a focus on regenerative agriculture, environmental sustainability, and social inclusion.
Community Finance Profile: Indwell
Fifty years ago in Hamilton, a group of Christians came together to create solutions to support adults with mental health disabilities moving from institutions to community settings. Indwell has since grown across Ontario, with a legacy shaped by resilience, innovation, and transformative impact.
Mini-profiles
Community Futures Manitoba
Community Futures Manitoba fills a critical capital gap by providing loans specifically tailored for rural entrepreneurs. These loans address the limited access to conventional financing in rural areas where mainstream lenders often perceive small businesses as high-risk.
Canadian Worker Co-op Federation
CWCF and its financing arm, Common Good Capital (CGC), tackle several “missing‑middle” and equity‑related financing shortfalls in the Canadian worker‑co‑op sector, where traditional lenders often shy away from smaller, member‑owned enterprises with unconventional governance.
Raven Outcomes Fund
Raven’s mission is Investing with Indigenous communities to grow solutions that create meaningful, measurable change. Funding for Indigenous communities is usually slow, top-down, and not focused on what works. Raven Outcomes is changing that by putting communities in the lead and tying funding to real results.
Resources
Seeing Community: Mapping, Sensemaking and the Practice of Learning Together
When we first conceived of this series, we expected this second article to ask a practical question: How do we map community? Instead we are happy to learn that something different is required. Another (new?) question has emerged: How do we learn to see community? Read on and let us know how this resonates.
Rooted in Community: A new series offering
For those already rooted in community, or finding their way into community economic development work, one of the central challenges is making sense of where you sit within a field that is named in different ways. Community economic development, community wealth building, and community finance are often treated as distinct, but in practice they are deeply interconnected. This first article begins a conversation to support wayfinding and discuss how we may work better together. Read on.
Read our 2025 Pre-Budget Submission to the Federal Government
Build Canada Through Local Investment: A National Community Finance Strategy can provide the resources and enabling regulations to leverage existing infrastructure to mobilize new capital, create and maintain jobs, and create positive community benefits.
The world of community finance through my eyes: Reflections from an Impact Analyst
When I first joined Catalyst, I knew I was stepping into the world of community finance, but I didn’t expect to leave with a transformed understanding of what it truly means to invest in community power.
Four Key Policy Ideas to Support Community Finance in Canada
We look at four promising policies from around the world to bolster community finance in Canada.
Despite constrained resources, community finance organizations shaping future of rural, northern Canada
Three community finance intermediaries share creative ways to invest in ventures and grow local ecosystems in Northern and rural Canada.
Taking the long view, EntrepreNorth supports Northern Indigenous entrepreneurs to create transformative change
In convening partners to launch a Northern impact fund, EntrepreNorth brings a decolonization lens to financial equity and impact capital in the North.
FACE looks to support Black entrepreneurs beyond post-pandemic hardships
FACE administers loans of up to $250,000 to existing Black-owned businesses and $50,000 to start-up businesses with Black entrepreneurs at the helm.
Submission for Pre-Budget 2025 Consultations
We offer three recommendations to the Federal Government to implement key public policies and programs that advance community finance in Canada.