Granting Criteria
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What We Do
We aim to establish long-term partnerships with our grantees, providing stable and sustainable funding over many years. This help ensures that our partners can scale their operations appropriately and focus on delivering impact, not on worrying whether they will be able to fundraise enough to sustain their operations in the future.
Typically, we provide unrestricted funding to our charitable partners since they know best where the most urgent needs for resources are. Sometimes, where an organization carries out complex or diverse activities, we will target individual programs that we believe have the most potential for community impact. In these cases, we will provide restricted funds to target these activities specifically.
What We Look For
We primarily seek to fund charities with the highest potential for generating social return on investment over the long-term. Some of the ways we attempt to evaluate this and other criteria we use to select grantees are as follows:
Registered Canadian Charity
To receive grants from a Canadian private foundation like Hadley Family Foundation an organization must be a qualified donee. In most cases, to be a qualified donee an organization must be a registered Canadian charity.
Impact
We look for charities with high potential for impact. This can most easily be demonstrated with evidence of past impact from the charity’s operations. Alternatively, a compelling case can be made for a novel program where the grantee has the capabilities to execute the initiative, there is a demonstrated community or social need, evidence supports a high-likelihood of impact, and the organization can show a clear need for funding. When evaluating impact, we employ a variety of metrics on a case-by-case basis to help determine the effectiveness of any particular program.
Transparency
We only partner with charities who have a high level of transparency. Transparency requirements include easily accessible financial statements, clear and rigorous reporting on their charitable programs and activities, and openness when sharing information and responding to informational requests. Our charitable partners typically have easy-to-understand operations and can clearly articulate the ways in which they benefit their communities.
Cost Efficiency
We look for charities which have, among other metrics, a high cents-to-the-cause in their operations and who keep overhead and administrative costs within a healthy range.
What We Do Not Grant To
- Projects focused on developed country healthcare
- Organizations or projects which exclusively serve religious purposes
- Political campaigns
Granting Process
The granting process starts by reaching out to us, or, in many cases, we find you. In your email, please describe your organization and what you do, what project(s) or activities you are seeking funding for, and a dollar estimate of the requested funds. The more data you can provide on your organization’s impact and the proposed use of funds, the better.
We are always open to discussing new initiatives with skilled charity operators. If we are interested in learning more, we will have more in-depth discussions about your work to help us evaluate your organization’s potential for receiving a grant. Once a grant has been decided on, we will develop a gifting agreement together and determine how best to deliver the grant.
