Community Vitality in Action

Lake Winnipeg Watershed Initiative

Community Foundations of Canada

THE PROJECT
In 2008, Community Foundations of Canada named Vicki Burns as the coordinator of its Foundations in the Lake Winnipeg Watershed Initiative.  This collaborative effort among community foundations and other funders in the region is intended to determine how philanthropy can help address the crisis in this massive body of water upon which so many communities rely.  This crucial lake and its watershed are under severe stress due to excess nutrients from urbanization, agriculture and economic development.

The goal of the initiative is to develop a framework that foundations can use so that their combined actions will have significant positive effect on water quality throughout the region. To date, 13 community foundations have come together to put resources into various parts of work around the initiative (whose geography spreads from the Rocky Mountains to Winnipeg). Foundations including the Edmonton, Calgary, and Winnipeg Foundations started something that had never been done before – responding collaboratively with efforts to benefit the watershed, which is thousands of miles from where the foundations are actually located.  These community foundations have demonstrated tremendous leadership in putting resources towards this project; the management of this initiative also set a standard, as this is the first time community foundations in Canada combined such a magnitude of resources in one collective effort.   Among some of the accomplishments include combined funding from community and private foundations, support for the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium, and multiple meetings of foundations to support public awareness of related environmental challenges and opportunities to respond to them.

LESSONS LEARNED

  1. Adjust the time commitment as required.   Vicki shares that in order to sustain such a large scale project, extending the time commitment is essential.  While many community foundations across the prairies are supportive of the project, it is quite valuable that all participating foundations are flexible in adjusting the length of time that they can commit.
  2. Respond as needed in times of economic uncertainty.  The financial world experienced a tremendous downturn, causing many foundations to lose value in their assets.  This translated into foundations making smaller grants and not considering any new initiatives.  This certainly impacted projects like the Lake Winnipeg Water Initiative, which had to adapt to the changing needs of the community and reprioritize what it set out to accomplish.
  3. Remain sensitive to the needs of the whole community.  Collaboration on a project that involves a number of communities calls for foundations to consider the needs of all stakeholders in each geographic area. In this case, the significance of successful agricultural practices was handled with sensitivity and understanding, which was important to the private sector, government agencies, and individual community members. 

NEXT STEPS

In order to develop strategies that respond to large scale environmental challenges, community foundations could look beyond the geographic boundaries that they serve.  The area of concern, in this project, is a body of water that flows from the Rocky Mountains in the west through four provinces, and this area does not fall in the territory of only one community foundation.  In relation to this work, the community foundations and other stakeholders intend to extend the reach of this program to other communities, organizations, and foundations so that they, too, can join in this collaborative effort.