Our Journey
Since 2001, Social Capital Partners has invested in projects and people with the goal of creating greater economic opportunity in Canada. We excel at co-designing scalable solutions with our partners and we invest where we are uniquely placed to have a transformative impact.
Over the years we have had some big successes – and some failures! – supporting social finance, social enterprises, community infrastructure and demand-led social hiring. Some of our greatest accomplishments are made possible because we are independently funded and we take risks and pursue ideas that others cannot.
Most recently, SCP has focused on ownership. We worked with our expert and diverse network to change the policy landscape to make it easier for more workers to acquire an ownership stake in the businesses they work for – building wealth, financial security and economic resilience for themselves and their communities.
We are now embarking on SCP’s next strategic phase which will focus on solutions, projects, policy, advocacy and investments that reverse the trend towards increased wealth inequality, financialization of the economy, and the economic and political concentration of power that ensues. Extreme wealth inequality leads to a concentration of power, which is incompatible with economic resilience and sustainability. This is a natural extension of our work on ownership, which we will continue to pursue.
During this next phase, we will tell the truth as we see it. We will champion ideas that can have an enduring positive impact on communities and working people. We will challenge many of the conventional orthodox assumptions and narratives that dominate Canadian discussions of the economy, which are clearly no longer consistent with the reality of how our economy works.
2001-2006:
Social Enterprise
In our first five years, we facilitated access to financing and provided advisory services to build and scale social enterprises, which are businesses that integrate a social mission directly into their operations. In this phase, we helped establish and scale a portfolio of profitable social enterprises across Canada.
2006-2012:
Social Finance
The creation of our Community Employment Loan Program (CELP) in 2006 emerged as a way to engage traditional private sector players in the achievement of greater social impact and scale. Through the program, we facilitated access to subordinate debt financing for franchisees and small business owners. Loan rates were tied directly to employment outcomes; for every person hired through an employment service provider, the interest rate on the loan is reduced. We then launched Rate-Drop Rebate to scale this alongside the Government of Ontario and some of Canada’s largest banks.
2012-2017:
Demand-Led Employment & Training
Through our social finance work we learned a lot about Canada’s employment and training system. We used that experience to expand our focus to demand-led systems change. In order to find better ways of preparing job seekers to meet employer needs, we are bringing employers to the heart of the system, inviting them as partners in the design, delivery, and evaluation of training and development programs.
While we are no longer developing and implementing, or leading demand-led employment and training initiatives we are supporting the innovative systems change efforts of various partners within the workforce development sector.
2017-2023:
The Ownership Agenda
More Canadians should have the opportunity to own assets and build wealth. This is a building block of economic resilience. We led, along with HOOPP, the transition of Taylor Guitars to employee-owned and created the Ownership Fund to support business transitions. Our focus more recently has been advocating for policy changes to allow business owners to more easily sell their enterprises to their employees. We helped build a coalition to secure legislative changes that create Employee Ownership Trusts in Canada.
Today
We are now planning SCP’s next phase. We will focus on projects, policies and investments that reverse the trend towards increased concentration of wealth.