Ottawa Community Foundation

Ottawa Community Foundation

The Ottawa Community Foundation launched in 1987 under founding CEO Michael Maidment, creating a permanent endowment structure that channels philanthropic capital into the Ottawa region. Unlike private foundations tied to a single family's wealth, OCF aggregates contributions from hundreds of local donors into a growing pool that funds charitable grants across education, health, and community development. The investment portfolio allocates across public equities, fixed income, and alternative assets, with a deliberately carved-out Impact Investing Portfolio targeting local ventures. The foundation pursues opportunities from seed to late-stage expansion, with a mandate for venture-style direct investments in Ottawa-based enterprises. Asset class exposure includes private credit, real estate, and early-stage equity — aligned with the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment, which OCF signed in November 2012. The geographic focus stays anchored in Ottawa, though the foundation participates in the national Community Foundations of Canada network, linking it to over 200 peer foundations for co-investment and knowledge-sharing. Total assets under management sit in the $200M to $250M band (Altss estimate), with the foundation maintaining a lean operating structure led by Maidment and a board-level investment committee. Julie Champagne, a Managing Director at the Bank of Canada, chairs the Finance and Audit Committee. Paul Jenkins applies his central-bank macro expertise to portfolio construction, a governance arrangement that places institutional-grade risk management at the top of a community-focused entity. Separate philanthropic structures include the Black Canadian Scholarship Fund and the Ottawa Climate Action Fund, which sit alongside the endowment as programmatic vehicles rather than investment pools. OCF's structural differentiator is the pairing of a community foundation's perpetual capital timeline with a central-bank-caliber investment committee. Where most community foundations outsource portfolio oversight entirely, OCF keeps a Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada as its investment chair — an unusual governance density for an institution of its size. This creates a hybrid posture: the foundation can act as both a long-duration limited partner and a direct impact investor deploying catalytic capital into Ottawa ventures that traditional funds overlook.