Focus Areas: Communities, Reconciliation, and Climate

Focus Areas: Communities, Reconciliation, and Climate is sponsored by McConnell Foundation. The McConnell Foundation funds initiatives that tackle issues of generational importance affecting communities across Canada, focusing on Communities, Reconciliation, and Climate.

As a private philanthropic foundation, we aim to use our resources to help address some of society’s most important challenges. We have chosen to focus our funding on issues of generational importance, that are impacting communities across the country, and where we believe we can contribute to creating significant change. On this page you will find information about our focus areas, Capacity Strengthening and Montreal funding streams.

Our three main focus areas of Communities, Reconciliation and Climate represent what we believe to be some of the most pressing issues facing our society today. With our funding, we hope to help create significant positive impact and demonstrate that lasting change is possible across the country. Our focus areas honour the 85-year history of the Foundation and the legacy of our founder, J.

W. McConnell, who sought to find solutions to some of the most important issues of his time. While our focus areas tackle different issues, they are also interconnected.

For example, we know equity-deserving groups are disproportionately impacted by climate change, and that Indigenous leadership is essential to the clean energy transition. While you must choose one focus area to submit under, there is space to identify linkages with other areas. Additionally, we support partners to strengthen organizational capacity and leadership through our Sector Building stream .

We also occasionally direct modest amounts of funding to support unique and time-sensitive needs through our Opportunity funds, or to organizations that seek to test a new idea aligned with our focus areas through our Program Development funding. These contributions are discretionary and cannot be applied for.

To explore your project idea, or if you are unsure which focus area is right for your application, we invite you to book a 15-minute Virtual Office Hours appointment with a member of our program team. They will help you explore potential alignment between your project and our focus area funding and guide you to resources you may need as you consider applying.

We fund activities that align with at least one of our three focus areas: Communities , Reconciliation , Climate . Our Sector Building stream support s partners to bolster organizational capacity and leadership . Our Communities focus area aims to support the leadership of equity-deserving groups to collectively address systemic barriers to economic and social justice.

Our Reconciliation focus area aims to address – and redress – the socioeconomic gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples by building prosperity with and for Indigenous peoples. Our Climate focus area aims to tackle the climate crisis by funding climate mitigation solutions and by supporting the communities most impacted by climate change in designing and implementing solutions.

McConnell has a long history of sector building initiatives for the charitable and non-profit sector. The Foundation is working to build our knowledge, practices and policies related to Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility (EDIA). Similarly, we are committed to embedding reconciliation into all of our work.

On both fronts, we have undertaken training and sought external support to build our knowledge and understand where we should make changes to the way we work. These Foundation-wide priorities show up in many ways, including our funding. Therefore, while alignment with our focus area strategies is our primary lens, we also explore how proposed projects integrate EDIA and/or reconciliation to bolster their impact.

For more about how EDIA and reconciliation are integrated into our funding and partnerships, please refer to our Funding and Partnerships Guide. Get more information about how to apply for our Focus Area funding on our "For Applicants" page.