The proposal comes from the recognition that an enormous amount of charitable capital is not deployed in support of charitable activity. I'm providing that from an endowment foundation perspective, where the money essentially dribbles out every year in small increments and the large amount of money that sits in capital in those foundations is not employed towards the mission of those organizations.
In much of the sector over the last five years, the conversation has been is there some way in which we could enable the deployment of charitable capital more directly towards charitable missions? How would we go about doing that and what are the enabling steps that we could take to make that capital work more directly towards the kind of charitable purposes the organization is set out to support?
I think we're getting there slowly. There's an enormous interest now in much of the foundation and endowment sector in pursuing that idea a little more muscularly and imaginatively, and the Canadian Task Force on Social Finance was very influential in that regard.
The challenges start to come in as foundations and other funders look at the possibilities of how they would make those sorts of investments. The ability to do that is severely restricted by the kinds of corporate and legal structures that they're permitted to support and the ones that they aren't. So the suggestion we're making is to be more flexible on the types of structures and tie the investment to the charitable purpose that the investment is designed to support.
I think with those intentions and some regard to the nature of the investment, the effect could be to more readily deploy a very large amount of money, currently sitting largely idle, in support of the larger charitable sector.