Welcome to our 2024 Year in Review

As we prepared this year in review, it was challenging to situate ourselves back in 2024. At first the tumultuous start of 2025 made the events of last year feel very distant, but as we looked back, we realized that 2024 was a big year for the McConnell Foundation.

This Year in Review offers insight into the impact our partners are making in their communities, along with an overview of our finances and funding, and an update on our investments.
After accomplishing an ambitious change agenda, Lili-Anna Pereša moved on and Jane was named as President and CEO of the Foundation, after serving for three years as Chief Program Officer. This new leadership begins with a deep understanding of our mission, vision and partnerships, and a long track record of impact in the charitable and non-profit sector.

In 2024 we made the decision to establish our head office in Toronto. We are excited about the opportunity to broaden and deepen our work as a national organization. As we build the Toronto office, we remain committed to serving partners in French and English, and we continue to have a dynamic team in Montreal alongside staff based in the National Capital Region and on the West Coast.

Last year we explored the theme of affordable housing, with a series of spotlights highlighting the work of our partners. This included: ACORN Canada, who is integrating climate justice into housing advocacy, ensuring that energy-efficient upgrades do not lead to increased rents or tenant displacement; Wahkohtowin’s Tree to Home project, addressing housing shortages by producing homes using locally sourced wood and developing a “Train to Employ” program to build local skills; advocacy by the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts (CNCLT) for solutions to housing affordability; and UTILE’s student housing affordability work. You can read about Wahkohhtowin and CNCLT in two of the Year in Review’s partner profiles.

2024 was also a big year for “non-qualified donees.” This term is used by the Canada Revenue Agency to describe organizations that are doing impactful work in communities but do not have charitable status (such as non-profits, grassroots organizations, international charities, and others). In partnership with the Fondation Lucie et André Chagnon, Inspirit Foundation and the Laidlaw Foundation, we created a toolkit to help and encourage more funders to support non-qualified donees. We continue to engage with colleagues in philanthropy to promote uptake of this toolkit, share skills and knowledge, and celebrate the work of high impact non-profits without charitable status.

On the investing side, we remain on track to achieve our net-zero carbon and impact investment targets as outlined in our investment strategy. In 2024 we began assessing impact investment opportunities in public equities - a first for the Foundation. We created an Impact Advisory Committee to inform our impact practices. Additionally, we undertook and completed an impact assessment by BlueMark, which awarded McConnell Platinum rating in their Endowment Impact Benchmark.

Our Board of Directors convened in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to meet partners in person and see their work up close. We were fortunate to visit Akoma, the second oldest African Nova Scotian organization in the province. You can learn how Akoma is transforming 320 acres of land into an Africentric hub for economic and social development in one of this report’s partner profiles.

As an organization approaching its 90th birthday, we have experienced many social, political and economic ups and downs. Being a family foundation and an organization guided by principles of reconciliation, we apply an intergenerational view to challenges and opportunities. With a mandate to support the public good in Canada, we continue on through challenging times, guided by the many bright lights we see in communities across the country and by pushing ourselves to the highest possible standard of positive impact.