First, who we are. The Ontario Trillium Foundation – or OTF – is an agency of the Government of Ontario, and is fully funded by the government. Our mission is to build healthy and vibrant communities across Ontario, and we make grants in four sectors – arts and culture, the environment, social services, and sports and recreation. We believe that the not-for-profit organizations in each of these sectors make a significant contribution to the health and vibrancy of Ontario’s communities.

I’ll mention three aspects of our work that are critical to our grant-making. First, we have a highly regionalized structure, with 15 small regional offices outside Toronto, from Windsor to Ottawa, and from Thunder Bay to Niagara Falls.

Second, community volunteers play a very active role in recommending grants, as members of our community Grant Review Teams and the Board of Directors.   And third, there is, as you might expect, very high demand for OTF grants, with $3 to $4 in requests for every $1 that we have available to grant.

Having talked about what the Ontario Trillium Foundation is, I’d like to turn, for the major part of my remarks, to touch on examples of research that has been supported or funded by the Foundation. We conduct a limited amount of research internally – the work of our research staff. And we also fund external research through our grant-making. I’d like to note that, while much of this research may not have a direct poverty reduction objective, all of it contributes to building healthy and vibrant communities – our mission – which assumes a poverty reduction agenda.

Last year, we completed a major exercise in collaboration with Statistics Canada, called “Your Community in Profile”. Working from the 2006 Census, we were able to drill down to 16 reports – one for each of our administrative regions. Each report provides a wealth of economic, social and demographic data by region, and a final 17th report rolls up the provincial totals.

We learned about rapid population growth in the “905” areas, compared with flat or declining populations in the north. We learned about increasing diversity, particularly in the GTA. The rapidly growing urban Aboriginal population was an area of great interest. We summarized data on the varying rates of employment across the province.

What use is this data to us? Well, as a significant grant-maker, our staff and volunteers in each region are able to use the reports to better understand the social, economic and demographic realities in their areas, and to seek out granting opportunities that address the most important issues – grants that would better support newcomer communities, or Aboriginal youth, for example.

In addition to the value to us, we believe that the data is useful to other funders, to local government and the broader not-for-profit sector. All 17 reports are available on our website, www.trilliumfoundation.org, and they are downloaded regularly.

A second report, also commissioned as part of our internal research at OTF, was called “OTF and Ontario’s Aboriginal Communities: Learnings and Opportunities”. We learned about the significant diversity of Ontario’s on and off-reserve Aboriginal populations, and we achieved a better understanding of the barriers that often influence the high rates of poverty, unemployment and suicide.

Again, this information helped us better connect with the communities. It has resulted in significant increases in OTF granting to Aboriginal communities.

Still on the subject of research funded by the Foundation, I’ll turn now to external research activities that have been supported by OTF through our grant-making. I will provide several examples to illustrate the nature of the research initiatives we have supported.

We are a major supporter of the work of Tamarack and their Vital Communities initiative. The focus of Vital Communities is to bring a cross-section of people together in a given community, to develop a multi-sector poverty reduction plan for their community. 15 Canadian cities are now engaged in this process. The learning process is a critical ingredient, and OTF has been a funder for the dissemination of learnings, along with the development of outcome measures.

Tamarack does valuable work in larger communities, and for my second example I will go to some of Ontario’s smallest communities. OTF made a significant grant to an initiative called “Community Matters”, developed by 17 of Ontario’s smallest United Ways. In these parts of the province, the local United Way might typically have only one or two staff, and an annual fundraising goal of less than $1 million. Quite a far cry from the United Ways in cities like Toronto or Ottawa. With their tiny resources, these small United Ways had never done a community needs assessment, and our grant enabled them to do just that.

The resulting issues they identified were remarkably similar in these largely rural communities – young people who are disengaged, serious accessibility challenges caused by the absence of public transportation, and a surprising degree of rural poverty, often unrecognized because it is so thinly spread out.

My third example is a specific project in one community – this was a grant to the Social Planning Council of Cambridge and North Dumfries, to conduct the quantitative research phase of a 2008 neighbourhood profiles report. The goal here was to provide updates of the demographics, strengths and capacities of Cambridge neighbourhoods, in order to enhance service effectiveness.

And my fourth example is right here in Toronto – a grant to the Somali Immigrant Aid Organization, to pilot an educational program for low-income Somali seniors in Etobicoke, York, North York and Scarborough. The goal has been to work with members of the community to identify and alleviate the factors that contribute to poverty and health problems. The learnings from this pilot test will be shared with other agencies serving Toronto’s Somali communities.

Having provided several examples of internal and externally-funded research from our Foundation, I’d like to provide a few observations before I wrap up.

One, community-based funders like the Ontario Trillium Foundation are more frequent funders of applied research and pilot tests, rather than pure academic research. Every funder has a specific mandate and mission, and will operate according to that mission. Speaking for OTF, as my examples illustrate, community-based applied research and pilot tests are a good fit with our grant-making criteria.

Two, in our experience, poverty reduction strategies – the focus of much of today’s discussion – usually focus on urban poverty, and with good reason. That’s where the incidence of poverty is the highest. However, initiatives such as the small United Way’s Community Matters research serve to remind us that rural poverty is often poorly documented, and is frequently not even recognized.

Three, as illustrated by the work of the Somali Immigrant Aid Organization, and as everyone in this room knows, Toronto is an incredibly diverse city, and research to support a poverty reduction strategy needs to knowingly reflect this diversity.

Four, successful and well-communicated research can certainly influence public policy. In the examples I provided, the Community Matters initiatives have certainly resulted in discussions with municipal governments, who are working with others to address some of the issues identified by the research – the issue of disengaged youth has caught the attention of a number of smaller communities.

And five, documenting and sharing learnings continues to be a challenge and an opportunity. We have all seen strategies that have had some success in a particular community, but little has been done to share those success stories with other communities. The Tamarack approach to sharing learnings is an excellent example, and an area where funders can be particularly influential. I’d like to think that our approach at OTF, to share our Statistics Canada information in the “Your Community in Profile” reports has been helpful to others.

I’ll stop there, and I look forward to the discussion to follow. We’re all learning every day on this journey of building healthy and vibrant communities, and in many ways that journey has become more challenging in the current economy. I’m glad to be in a room with so many people who are committed to raising the bar for everybody.