Economic Trust of the Southern Interior

The trust is governed by a 13-member board of directors appointed from communities across the Southern Interior region. Paul Donald, a member of the Simpcw First Nation, serves as Board Chair. Alan Harrison, the mayor of Salmon Arm, is Vice Chair. The board is responsible for both investment strategy and grant allocation, with day-to-day operations delegated to CEO Laurel Douglas through the subsidiary ETSI-BC.

The trust was seeded with a one-time $50 million endowment from the Province of British Columbia in 2006. It does not receive ongoing provincial appropriations. The trust is required under its establishing legislation to preserve the inflation-adjusted value of the original endowment in perpetuity while deploying investment returns into regional economic development grants.

The trust maintains a dual structure. The permanent investment portfolio is held directly by the trust and managed for long-term returns. Grant-making is conducted through a wholly owned subsidiary, the Economic Trust of the Southern Interior, known as ETSI-BC. This separation allows the investment function to focus on capital preservation while the operating subsidiary handles community-facing programming.

The trust's legislated mandate covers the Southern Interior of British Columbia, which includes the Okanagan, Thompson, Nicola, Shuswap, Columbia, and Kootenay regions. The trust is headquartered in Kelowna. Investment returns and grant dollars cannot be deployed outside this defined geography except for trust operating costs.

The trust has co-invested through grant partnerships. Mitacs, a national innovation intermediary backed by federal and provincial governments, has been a named co-investor on research and innovation projects. The trust also collaborates with Community Futures organizations, which are federally funded regional development entities, for community-level project funding.

Yes. British Columbia established three regional development initiative trusts in 2006 — the Northern Development Initiative Trust, the Southern Interior Development Initiative Trust, and the Island Coastal Economic Trust — each seeded with provincial capital and governed locally. They operate independently with their own boards and regional mandates but share a common legislative origin. The Northern trust is the largest and most active of the three.

Board Chair Paul Donald is a member of the Simpcw First Nation, bringing direct Indigenous governance representation to the trust's leadership. The trust maintains a relationship with Cando, the Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers, through Donald's participation. Grant programs through ETSI-BC are open to First Nations communities within the Southern Interior, though the trust does not have an exclusively Indigenous mandate.