Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting us to be present with you today, Madam Chair.
I am going to start by making a few comments about community foundations in Canada and talking for a very few moments about the role of private philanthropy in addressing issues related to poverty.
The first thing I want to tell you is that community foundations are place-based grant-makers. That's how we refer to them. There are 165 of those local foundations all across the country, and we make grants somewhere between $175 million and $200 million every year. Obviously, a lot of it depends on the economy and the returns we get in our investments.
Community foundations know their communities very well. They understand the complexity of community issues, a theme we're going to return to in a moment, and they understand the reality that there is no single sector—not government, not the private sector, not the not-for-profit sector, not the foundation or the philanthropy sector—that can tackle complex, deeply rooted, long-term problems, poverty being one of those issues. And we know that philanthropy has a role to play in addressing the systemic problems that we have been talking about.
Part of the reason that community foundations are able to do this is because we know our communities so well, because knowledge of community—community networks, community issues, community problems, community assets, the resources that every community has—is really at the core of the work we do. We have highly accountable volunteer boards and very skilled volunteers working in our organizations, and staff as well. So we believe that we're very well positioned to observe and understand emerging trends, what lies behind those trends and those issues, and to know appropriate responses for various stakeholders.
I'm going to ask my colleague, Sara, to describe to you very specifically and in the few moments that we have remaining some of the work that place-based foundations have done to address the issues of poverty.