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This week is Co-op Week, a time to celebrate the impact that the co-operative sector has had on communities across Canada, and reflect on co-operative values and principles.

So, what exactly is a co-op?

Co-operatives are people-centered enterprises that are owned and controlled by and for their members to bring about common economic, social, and/or cultural goals. Co-operatives bring people together in a democratic and equitable way, following the ‘one member, one vote’ principle. 

As a co-operative organization ourselves, and one that supports other co-operatives to raise community investment, we firmly believe in the benefits that co-operatives bring to society. Because they are not owned by shareholders, co-ops are a vehicle that allow people to take control of their economic future and retain economic and social benefits within their communities. 

More broadly than this, we believe in co-operation – co-operation among community members, among community organizations, among sectors – to create a better future. Co-operation is at the core of what we do, and the essence of community financing. We know that doing things together yields far better results than when done alone. 

To mark the occasion of Co-op Week, our team has been reflecting on this years’ theme: “Co-operation in the World of Tomorrow”. 

Mary Warner, Co-Executive Director 

“I believe in a future where profits are returned to supporters rather than banks, and where investors can feel proud that they put their money in something that they believe in. To me, ‘co-operation in the world of tomorrow’ means communities coming together to support a common goal and jointly investing the capital it will take to realize that vision.”

Satyameet Singh, Campaign Manager

“A Co-operative offers it’s members a concrete way to contribute to our inter-dependent reality; one where bridges replace walls. At Tapestry, when I see a cool Co-operative in action – one with shameless idealism and a strong collective resolve – I feel alive.” 

Karen Scottie, Human Resources and Administration Manager 

“I imagine a world where problems, such as climate change, homelessness and poverty, are not shrugged off due to profit’s bottom line. I see inclusive communities whose inhabitants, both human and non-human, flourish with home-fullness, vibrant public and active transportation, and an economy based on the health of the planet. One step toward this vision is if community members could raise their own funds for their projects, to be the investors themselves. Community bonds make this possible.”

For the past 5 months, the Tapestry team has had the pleasure of working with Suzanne Faiza. Suzanne, joined our team as a Researcher, supporting Tapestry’s involvement in the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge, as well as a clean energy project in Atlantic Canada. 

This fall Suzanne will be returning to her Masters of Planning program at the University of Toronto, equipped with new experience and expertise in social finance and community economic development. 

Suzanne, who originally trained and worked as an architect, contributed a wealth of understanding of the affordable housing sector to our growing team. Beyond her knowledge, she brought incredible enthusiasm and excitement to every aspect of work she engaged in. 

“Working on the Housing Supply Challenge was an incredible experience,” she shares, “It gave me an amazing opportunity to understand the affordable housing landscape in Ontario, learn first hand from those actively trying to solve what is one of our country’s greatest challenges, and see the role that social finance can play in increasing Canada’s affordable housing supply.” 

One of Suzanne’s key responsibilities was coordinating and leading stakeholder research. Engaging with co-ops, government bodies, non-profits, and investors, Suzanne always came prepared with creative questions and eagerness to learn from those we consulted with. 

“Attempting to find out what people need is really the bread and butter of being a planner, so it was great to put my facilitation skills to use.”

Contributing to a clean energy project was something new and exciting for Suzanne.

“I’ll be honest, at the beginning it was a little daunting for me because I had to play catch up and learn so many new terms and acronyms!” Suzanne admits. “I really appreciated that the team gave me the opportunity to just absorb information when I needed to,” she said, “In our housing work, I was building off previous experience, but in our clean energy project, a lot of it was completely new to me, so it was very rewarding.”

Reflecting on her experience with the Tapestry team, Suzanne shared that she appreciated the lack of hierarchy in sharing and contributing ideas, the strong commitment of the organization to work-life balance, and the support which she received to grow in her role. 

“Easily the best place I’ve ever worked at!” Suzanne concludes with a big smile. 

We are eager to see where Suzanne’s next year of her Masters program takes her and know that we will be collaborating again in the near future! 

Are you interested in social finance and the work that we do at Tapestry? Keep an eye on our Careers page for new opportunities and sign up to our newsletter for the most current updates on open positions.

We are thrilled to welcome three new team members to Tapestry! As our team grows, so too does our breath and depth of expertise. Marzie Aghdaee, Suzanne Faiza and Baljmaa Zorig are helping us to expand the reach of the community bond model through research and innovation in the affordable housing and clean energy arenas. 

Meet our new team members below!

Marzie Aghdaee, Senior Researcher, Affordable Housing

Marzie describes herself as a jack of all trades, with a career path that led her from cell biology to civic tech, youth empowerment, political engagement and education. The constant throughout her career has been her deep interest in, and passion for, systems thinking and people-centered research design. She has spent the vast majority of her career working with nonprofits, first with rural and marginalized communities in Iran, and more recently in Peru and Canada. For the past 8 years, she has focused on mix-method research, and measurement and evaluation. 

Marzie has joined our team to design and lead an in-depth stakeholder engagement with affordable housing providers, supporters and activators, as part of Tapestry’s participation in the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge. Marzie brings a personal lens to this work. “Being an immigrant to Canada, and coming from a low-income background, I understand the anxiety of finding affordable housing. Affordable housing is one of, if not the greatest, challenges faced by our country today,” she shares. 

Suzanne Faiza, Researcher

Suzanne is currently pursuing her Masters in Planning at the University of Toronto, with a concentration in Housing and Community Economic Development. The focus of her research is to assess the feasibility of crowdfunding platforms to facilitate land acquisition groups such as community land trusts. Suzanne is joining our team in a part-time capacity while she completes her studies and is working with Marzie and support our progress in the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge.

Suzanne is trained as an architect, and worked in the field for 6 years before beginning her Masters program. She brings a new element of creativity to our team, with excellent graphic design skills and a love of finding ways to display complex information in easily digestible formats. She is an active volunteer in her community, working closely with the Muslim Food Bank & Community Services, COVID-19 Coming Together Vancouver, and the B.C. Community Alliance, and is passionate about finding innovative solutions to Canada’s affordable housing crisis. 

Baljmaa Zorig, Climate Finance Specialist

Baljmaa’s interest in climate change mitigation began early in her career while she was working as an internal auditor at a commercial bank in Mongolia. Her role took her to remote regions of the country where she could see the impacts that climate change was having on local people and businesses, from drought to extreme heat waves. 

With a strong desire to build a more technical skillset, she pursued her Masters in Quantitative Finance at Bentley University as a Fulbright Scholar. During her graduate studies she helped to establish and manage an ESG strategy for the university’s endowment fund, gaining valuable experience in capital markets. She then went on to work with a boutique ESG investment firm in Boston, and later with two international development financing organizations.

Baljmaa joins the Tapestry team to support a new project we are undertaking with a municipality in Eastern Canada to design and implement an investment system to finance their community energy ambitions. Baljmaa loves big data, financial modeling and finding creative financing solutions. “We don’t need fancy solutions, we need practical solutions,” she shares. “As an ESG professional, creating a circular economy is the goal. I think community bonds offer a double win of raising impact capital while also sending profits back into the community.” 

Last week, our Co-Executive Director, Ryan Collins-Swartz, had the pleasure of joining Tim Nash on the Toronto Star podcast Responsible Investing for a Sustainable Economy. 

Host Tim Nash is the founder of Good Investing and has been a leader in responsible investing and the green economy for more than a decade. 

In this episode, the topic of discussion is impact investing – a strategy that seeks to generate financial returns while also creating a positive social or environmental impact.

Are you interested in investing with impact or raising investment from your community for an impactful project? Delve into the the recording and transcript of Ryan and Tim’s conversation on the world of Community Bonds.

Tim: Today I am with Ryan-Collins Swartz, Co-Executive Director of Tapestry Community Capital. Ryan, thanks so much for joining me.

Ryan: Great to be here Tim.

Tim: Now, you’ve been in the impact investment space for a little while now, how did you first get involved in this ecosystem?

Ryan: It’s been a long road Tim. I would say, looking back to when I was in school, my first real job was working at a residential real estate investment trust. At that point, I was amazed by how big capital could be put to use – in this case, for apartment buildings. 

Then I discovered social enterprise while at Ivey Business school. I learnt that non-profits can create side activities that are revenue generating, that can allow them to operate more sustainably. Afterwards, I became involved in different non-profits – I did a research project with the Toronto Public Library, a fellowship at the Mars discovery district here in Toronto, and worked with several social service agencies. 

I started to see two clear perspectives. First, going back to that real estate investment trust, I saw how capital is mobilized and how investments are made, but I also saw the reality for a lot of organizations searching for funding. And there are a lot of barriers there – especially for non-profits, charities and different social enterprises. 

I became introduced to the community bond model because I was a member of the Centre for Social Innovation. Then I was reached out to by the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative (TREC), who had for the past 20 years been raising impact investment for local renewable energy projects. Their first example, that a lot of people know of, is the wind turbine down at exhibition place, which is half owned by Toronto Hydro and half owned by 500 community investors. 

What I learnt was that a lot of organizations were starting to duplicate this model. The Centre for Social Innovation was one, and several other co-working spaces did it, but there wasn’t a lot of support or an easy solution for other organizations that wanted to raise this type of impact investment. So, I joined TREC and about 6 months later we launched Tapestry Community Capital, as an organization that provides end-to-end support to both raise and manage impact investments.

Tim: I love it. So basically, your job is doing these social finance campaigns. Finding non-profits that want to raise money, who probably have an asset they need that money for, and then raising a successful campaign so that they can buy that asset. As part of your job, you often meet with non-profits who are thinking about raising capital. How do they initially feel about doing this?

Ryan: I think the first emotion for a lot of them is excitement. They might come with a lot of frustration about the existing ways that they can raise funding for their organization. So for example, donation campaigns can be difficult, donors can be tapped out depending on the community, they are also a more old-fashioned way of raising a lot of money from a small group of wealthy individuals. Secondly, they could have had difficulty working with financial institutions and banks. And then, they might also be very grant dependent. 

Grants are difficult – although you don’t have to pay them back, you also don’t have a lot of choice once you receive them or if you receive them. There can be a lot of limitations on what you can spend the funds on. So a lot of organizations get really excited about raising funds in this new way, because with community bonds they get to set the terms (i.e. decide the rate of return, maturity, etc.).

Tim: I often joke that for a lot of non-profits, debt is a four-letter word that they are just not used to dealing with. What do you think really needs to click with them psychologically before they are really ready to move forward?

Ryan: I think really understanding how this all works, learning from the stories of other organizations who have done this before, and feeling confident that Tapestry is here to support them every step of the way. There is definitely excitement as the first emotion, but then they may also feel apprehension – the, “oh my god, are we really going to do this?”

For some organizations that have a longer track record with fundraising, they might be concerned that if they are offering people the opportunity to invest (i.e. make a return and also get their money back), why would someone make a donation? So I think there is also a realization that, no, this isn’t cannibalizing your donor base. This is a chance to engage a whole new community of people who might not be making large donations into capital campaigns, but like me, have a small pool of money they want to put to work locally to make an impact. 

Tim: You talk about investors that do want to earn a financial return, but they also want to feel good about their investment. So tell me, what role does story-telling play in an impact investment campaign? 

Ryan: Storytelling is vital. When we think of an impact investment, it’s really about understanding what the impact of this project is and who it is impacting, down to an individual level or environmental level, and getting that message out. This is where a community bond investment varies from the rest of the investments in your portfolio. This is likely the only investment where you can actually see, feel, touch, visit, and know where your money has gone. So yes, it’s vital. 

But I would say Tim, it’s not on its own what’s going to close the deal. So maybe that’s where impact investing and traditional fundraising shares a lot in common in the value of storytelling. But the separation is that the story will get someone in the door, but then they need to understand the business model, the repayment strategy, and have confidence in the team that this is a fair and wise investment.

Tim: Yes, I think confidence plays a huge role. This is a bit of a new thing to both non-profits, who might be raising capital for the first time, but also for the investors that are often making these types of impact investment for the first time. Having that transparency and being on the same page is key. Understanding that risk return, just like we do for any other investment, and really having that information allows us to make confident investments – both from a financial standpoint but also from that impact standpoint. People do want to make sure that their investments are having an impact. Do you agree with that?

Ryan: The first, and exciting thing, is that this is new for everyone. Anytime I meet with an organization thinking about issuing an impact investment, it’s the first time that their staff and their Board is learning about it. And likewise, when they go out to their community of investors, it’s the first time that that community is learning about investing in community bonds. It’s still very nascent and new. I was reflecting back to a few years ago when we could all be in person at the Social Finance Forum at Mars, when you were moderating a session on impact investing and you asked the panellists and the crowd “how many of you have made an impact investment, raise your hand?”. Do you remember what the response was like?

Tim: It wasn’t a huge number of people in the room.

Ryan: So even in the “in group” of people who know about impact investing, they aren’t that personally involved with making these types of investments. That’s changed a lot over the past few years due to the availability of more products, but I’m excited to see the space of impact investing grow from everyone involved to friends and families, to colleagues and institutions, and outwards from there. 

Tim: I think it’s cool that when I deal with clients, it’s often the first time they make an impact investment. That first time is often the toughest decision they make, and then after they do it, the experiential learning kicks in, such that once they’ve made one investment they tend to be a lot more open and receptive to other impact investments on the market. 

Are there any impact investments of organizations that you are working with now that you can share with us? 

Ryan: One that I’m really excited about is Earth Day Canada (Jour de la Terre) based in Quebec. They are developing Canada’s first non-profit, community owned, electric vehicle charging network. This project, called EcoCharge, is starting with 100 charging stations across Quebec and New Brunswick and is going to be scaling across Canada. Anyone across Canada is able to invest as little as $1000 and make 3.5% a year on a 5-year bond. That’s one that I’m really excited about. (To learn more about the EcoCharge investment opportunity, visit the Earth Day Canada website here)

Tim: Same. I don’t own an electric vehicle but when I talk to people that do, they often worry about this idea of range anxiety, and not being able to take a road trip. So, I love this idea of being able to finance charging stations. I think it’s along the trans-Canada highway and they’ve partnered with grocery stores, such that when you are along the highway, you don’t really have to worry about it – there will be somewhere to charge your car. You can go in, have a little bite and take a break on the roadtrip that you’d want to take anyway.

This is a great opportunity where investors can put up some of that upfront capital, earn an interest rate on that community green bond and hopefully have that network of charging stations across the country. 

Thanks for joining us Ryan! 

For those that are interested in learning more about impact investing, check out Tim’s Good Investing online Course here.

There is a critical need for flexible sources of financing that can be designed to meet the budgets and timelines of affordable housing providers. At the same time, there is a need for greater, and more meaningful participation of communities in affordable housing projects. 

Tapestry Community Capital is leading the development of a social finance program, specifically designed to meet these complex needs of affordable housing providers. 

Tapestry has been shortlisted by the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge program to work on this idea. We are recruiting non-profit and co-operative housing providers from across Canada that are interested in the use of community bonds to help inform the design of the program. 

We are offering:

• Coaching to your team and Board to understand how community bonds could be used by your organization 
• An assessment of your project financing and viability to utilize community bonds to unlock private capital within your community 
• Preferential participation in the implemented program, which may involve financial support to launch a community bond campaign 

To find more details, click here. 

If you are interested in this idea or want to know more, please contact info@tapestrycapital.ca.

About Tapestry Community Capital

Tapestry is a non-profit organization that supports social purpose organizations across Canada to raise impact investments using a social finance tool, called a Community Bond.

We have developed a straightforward process that allows organizations to efficiently use community bonds to achieve their funding goals within 8-12 months. We help them to structure their investment offering, take their product to the community to raise investment, and professionally manage their investors.

In the past 8 years, we have supported in raising over $90 million in community investment from more than 4,000+ investors. This capital has been deployed by our non-profit and co-op clients to develop a range of essential community assets, including those in renewable energy, arts & culture, and education. 

We hope to connect with you!

Tapestry is catalyzing a vibrant community investment marketplace to finance iconic community projects. We work with a wide range of partners to help them tap into their network of supporters, raise investment, and grow their impact.

To date, we have helped to raise $80 million in community financing to fund 59 projects across Canada. Each of these projects strives to make our country a more sustainable, inclusive and resilient place.

We have recently undertaken two new research projects in the fields of affordable housing and community energy. Both require that we dig deep into the existing literature on the use of social finance tools in these sectors, engage stakeholders, and ask important questions about where challenges exist.

This is why we are hiring a Senior Researcher to join our team. We are looking for someone energetic, dedicated and resourceful, who can be responsible for the project management of these two portfolios. They will spend the majority of their time engaging a wide range of stakeholders to uncover barriers and opportunities, and work with the Tapestry team to conceptualize solutions.

The individual selected will be hired on as a fulltime consultant for a duration of six months, however, there may be a longer term opportunity available at the end of this period. In recognition of differing situations and availability, we are also open to considering a reduced time commitment with a focus on one of the two projects.

To learn more about this option, the details of the projects, and what we are looking for, please read the full job description here. Please note that the application deadline has been extended to Feb. 22, 2022.

So, why should you be interested in working with Tapestry?

1. We are an innovative and growing social enterprise, working in a rapidly expanding sector. Now more than ever, people are interested in investing their money not only to make a fair return, but to also have a positive impact. At the same time, growing demands on the social purpose sector are pressing organizations to think more creatively about financing solutions. We are contributing to the creation of a vibrant marketplace where impact investments can flow directly to community-based organizations that are addressing local needs.

2. We are working hard to address some of Canada’s greatest challenges. We offer you the chance to be involved in finding and implementing realistic solutions. Our organization was involved in one of Canada’s first community-financed and community-owned renewable energy projects over 20 years ago. We are continually building on our knowledge and experience to evolve our process and harness of the power of community.

3. We believe in work/life balance and take pride in our office culture. Our office supports 100% remote working and offers flexible hours to meet your needs. Our team members come from a wide range of backgrounds including marketing, banking, social services, music production, real estate, and policy. We value diverse perspectives and know that our team is our greatest strength.

Tapestry Community Capital is fully committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We value contributions from our employees coming from diverse backgrounds and lived experiences. We welcome applications from all people, especially equity-seeking groups, racialized people, women, people with disabilities, members of sexual minority groups, and any others with a non-binary or traditional background who may be interested in the position. If you have questions or require special arrangements, please let us know via email at careers@tapestrycapital.ca.

We look forward to hearing from you, and to growing our tapestry!