The Foundation can make grants only for charitable purposes and only to organizations which have been issued a registered charity number by the Canada Revenue Agency or to Guaranteed Donees under the Income Tax Act of Canada. You can review our Grants Database to get a sense of our funding priorities. You may also want to read our Granting Frequently Asked Questions.
Our grant process beings with a submitting a short Letter of Intent (LOI) online. If Foundation staff sees alignment between your project and the Foundation’s goals, you may be invited to submit a formal Grant Application. Depending on the LOI, we may also engage some external reviewers to provide us with confidential feedback to help us make our decisions.
The Board of Directors typically reviews Grant Applications quarterly in February/March, May, September, and December. Only the Board approves funding requests. All granting decisions are final and there is no appeal process for requests that have been declined. Notification of Board funding decisions, both positive and negative, are usually provided within 48 hours of the Board meeting.
The final stage once funding has been awarded includes Foundation staff reaching out to complete a Funding Letter of Agreement. This document details the payment schedule, reporting expectations & timetables, and knowledge dissemination benchmarks that align with the grant recipient organization’s timing and project milestones. This process is typically completed within 30 days of notification of a successful grant application.
If you have any questions about our granting process, please contact Ben Liadsky at 416-923-8953 (extension 121) or at ben[at]counselling.net.
In 2018, The Counselling Foundation of Canada in collaboration with the Lawson Foundation, and the Laidlaw Foundation undertook a project to gather feedback from our grant recipients. GrantBook was hired to collect and synthesize the confidential feedback about grant recipients’ experiences of working with us. Today, as part of our efforts to be transparent and to encourage ongoing openness to talk about how we can continually improve, we are happy to share with you the final report. Grant recipients are indispensable partners in achieving our mission. Open dialogue and honest feedback are central to effective partnership, and while we strive to be responsive and open, we also know that it isn’t always easy to tell a funder that there is room for improvement. This survey represents a first step in our journey to better understand how we can support our grant recipients. Over the coming months, we will be taking further actions to learn more and make tweaks to how we operate. As we go, we’ll keep you in the loop.