Company Profile
London Community Foundation
Company Overview
Since 1979, London Community Foundation has provided steadfast support for our community and the charitable organizations that make it strong.
London Community Foundation is a charitable organization dedicated to improving communities across London and Middlesex County. We do this by pooling the charitable gifts of donors to create endowment funds and using the investment income to make grants. London Community Foundation also provides leadership — monitoring this area's quality of life and convening people, ideas, and resources to help build stronger and more resilient communities.
We are one of the largest of Canada's 165 community foundations. We have grown to hold over $45 million in assets and to work with hundreds of concerned Londoners and high-impact community organizations.
Our Mission
Through the power of giving, we create a vibrant and caring community by investing strategically in innovative community-based solutions.
Our Principles
We strengthen the community by investing in projects that:
emphasize prevention rather than remediation
encourage networking and collaboration among organizations
demonstrate innovative or interdisciplinary approaches
develop local leadership capacity
reflect diversity and inclusivity
provide leveraging possibilities in order to build skills, capabilities and assets of people and groups in our community.
Our Vision
A community working together so that each member has the opportunity for an enriched quality of life.
What we do:
All gifts are invested and held forever in an endowment. Through prudent investment and due diligence in grantmaking, the Foundation is able to ensure that our donors' wishes are respected in perpetuity. Only through London Community Foundation can a donor support multiple charities, specific areas of interest or create unique opportunities to leverage funding with others.
Company History
To ensure the long-term success of his community, banker and lawyer Frederick Goff founded the first community foundation, the Cleveland Foundation, in 1914.
His vision was to pool the charitable resources of Cleveland's philanthropists, living and dead, into one permanent endowment for the betterment of the city. Community leaders would then forever distribute the interest that the Foundation's resources would accrue to fund "such charitable purposes as will best make for the mental, moral, and physical improvement of the inhabitants of Cleveland."
London Community Foundation
The Winnipeg Foundation was Canada's first community foundation, established in 1921. In 1943, an ambitious young man from Winnipeg named J. Allyn Taylor, was transferred to London by his employer, Canada Trust.
Taylor understood the benefits that an independent community-based charitable endowment fund has in providing financial capital for a community as well as the leadership role it plays in building social capital – the glue that holds communities together.
By 1954, he had overseen the establishment and incorporation of a London Foundation. However, it was nothing more than a legal entity with virtually no capital. The assets of the Foundation at December 31st 1979 totalled $5,585.23, the net balance of capital from 1952 – 1979. In 1979 after retiring as president of Canada Trust, Taylor made London Foundation (since then renamed London Community Foundation) one of his primary projects.
Thanks to Taylor, the inaugural Board of Directors and the donations of so many who believe in the power of endowment, the Foundation continues to thrive and grants millions of dollars each year into the surrounding community.