Past Projects

The Carleton Centre for Community Innovation began in 1997 and has delivered a number of major projects over the years focused on community economic development and the non-profit and voluntary sector.  Major multi-year projects have been undertaken for HRSDC and Canada Revenue Agency, Government of Canada; McConnell Foundation; and Trillium Foundation, just to name a few.

Past projects include:

  • Carleton’s Annual Community Campus Engagement Events

5th Annual Community Engagement Event 2019
6th Annual Community Campus Connections 2020: Building Connections for Community Well-Being

Organized by the Carleton Committee on Community Engaged Pedagogy, 3ci serves as the administrative home of these annual events. These half-day networking events are designed to connect members of the community with Carleton. By making connections, community-based organizations and Carleton are able to create meaningful collaborative outcomes that are tangible, relevant, and contribute to community well-being.

  • Canadian Impact Infrastructure Exchange (CIIX)

    The Canadian Impact Infrastructure Exchange (CIIX) is an information exchange that will bring together investors, including Canada’s largest pension plans, and infrastructure investment opportunities that feature positive social and environmental impacts for Canadian communities. CIIX is designed to help stimulate investment in impact infrastructure with high ESG standards that will help overcome Canada’s current infrastructure deficit. It does so by acting as a medium between private capital and Canada’s infrastructure requirements bringing ESG information to the market based on a lifecycle approach to infrastructure investment. It will feature infrastructure opportunities in Canada that provide both sound financial opportunities for investors and maximum positive environmental and social impacts for Canadian communities. CIIX will also act as an aggregator for smaller impact infrastructure projects,  bringing them to a scale attractive to large institutional investors, while assisting smaller communities to access these markets with bundled and structured opportunities.

    The CIIX improves the transparency of infrastructure projects by including analysis of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) aspects of these investments. Improved transparency advances investor confidence, making them more likely to invest in these assets, in addition by lowering risk in these transactions it reduces their required returns, making it less costly for the municipalities when utilizing such private funding.

    Currently, CIIX is involved in 3 pilot projects in 3 municipalities across Canada, Charlottetown, Vancouver and the City of Toronto. For more information on these pilots, please visit the project page.

  • Responsible Investing Initiative (RII)

    The objective of the Responsible Investing Initiative (RII) CURA is to have more Canadian institutional investors take up responsible investing with its attendant positive impacts for Canadian communities.  Such a shift to responsible investing requires deep changes at the institutional and policy level in order to move beyond advocating change to actual change in institutional behavior.  This requires permanent capacity be built within our institutions with time, resources and the necessary research on which to base these important investment decisions.  The RII CURA provides the necessary research and dissemination that such a change requires.

  • Impact Investing/Social Finance

    Social finance uses standard financial tools and instruments to leverage the economic, social and environmental value created by organizations in the non-profit and for-profit sectors or in the hybrid space between them. These organizations are usually mission-driven and seek to maximize all three forms of value. Increasingly main-stream investors are seeking opportunities to invest in organizations that generate ‘blended value’ also known as ‘double’ and even ‘triple’ bottom line investing. To be successful such investment requires a suite of financial tools, a cadre of new financial intermediaries, and a set of measurement metrics that capture the impact of the blended value return. These three key ingredients form the core of social finance. The Carleton Centre for Community Innovation provides tools and instruments essential for the implementation and measurement of social finance.

Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership

The four primary goals of the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation in this area include:

  • Enhancing understanding and knowledge of the distinctive contributions of the non-profit and voluntary sector to the quality of life of citizens and community vitality;
  • Promoting a broader knowledge of and response to the priorities and complex issues of the sector;
  • Strengthening the capacity of non-profit and voluntary organizations and of the sector as a whole; and
  • Encouraging closer co-operation between practitioners, academics, and policy makers

Improving Access to University Education in the Canadian Arctic

The goal of this project is to provide evidence-based research on Inuit participation in University education throughout Inuit Nunangat and to promote a national discussion amongst provider of university program in Inuit Nunangat, Northern institutions and Inuit organizations in order to develop a more coordinated effort in program delivery, curriculum development.

Other

3ci researchers are also engaging in research related to the Political Economy of Indigenous and Northern Communities and Housing and Homelessness, particularly in the Canadian Territorial North.

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