Thistledown Foundation founders Fiona McKean and Tobi Lütke.
When Fiona McKean and Tobi Lütke launched the Thistledown Foundation in January, the couple seeded their charity with a $150-million endowment and focused on carbon removal technologies. McKean, who runs The Opinicon Dining and Resort southwest of Ottawa and has a master’s degree from Carleton’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, and Lütke, the founder and CEO of Shopify, want to support climate change solutions through philanthropy. Then the pandemic hit and Thistledown set its sights on improving supply chains for personal protective equipment and accelerating COVID-19 research, the latter through a $5-million contribution to an organization called Fast Grants.
In January, I was with three people in Thistledown’s temporary office — an abandoned Italian restaurant in Ottawa that smelled like sour beer — talking about carbon. Then, in March, a huge shift took place. It was a surreal moment that felt like we were suspended in time and nobody knew what was on the other side. We faced an existential threat. So we started talking to doctors and scientists we knew. We read research papers and data sets. It was terrifying and intense, and we didn’t have enough info to know what to do. Then Fast Grants came to our attention. It’s an American project with a panel of biomedical scientists who make funding recommendations, and we sort of shoved a wedge under the door so we could support Canadian research.
Clearly, right now we need doctors, we need epidemiologists and we need biologists, and we need their research, but from a donor’s perspective, I can’t vet them. How do you gauge the veracity of all the claims you’re bombarded with? You turn to the experts. Even though everybody was busy and scrambling, Fast Grants funded more than 130 projects within 48 hours of the first call for applications in April and responded to the second round of applicants in July within two weeks.
Canada has a long history of quietly putting our elbows up to make sure that we have a seat at the table. If we’re not included, then the solutions do not have our particular problems in mind. Every country is having a different experience during the pandemic, and even though we’re all dealing with the same virus, every country’s toolkit is different.
One example of somebody we supported is Dr. John Bell, a cancer researcher at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. He immediately switched gears to see if the work that his lab was doing could be applied to COVID. [Dr. Bell’s research is “trying to create multiple vaccines … delivering coronavirus proteins directly to the critical cells required to generate an effective immune response.”]
The connection between climate change and COVID is at the species level. Thistledown believes that technology can help address hard problems. The question was never if we could try to help during the pandemic, but how — how can we go beyond sprinkling money around with little impact? I think people shy away from philanthropy because of that, but we took a leap. We found the right people to support, and now we’re leaving them alone to do their work.
