The nonprofit sector capital market in BC and Alberta

The Social Economy is a continuum that goes from the one end of totally voluntary organizations to the other end where the economic activity (social enterprise) blurs the line with the private sector.”1 With these broad definitions in mind, we take the Nonprofit Sector Capital Market to be the market which supports the financial needs of the nonprofit organizations within the social economy. [...] Over the past decade or so, changing investor sentiment and the increasingly complex needs of the nonprofit sector have contributed to the creation of many investment products that fall somewhere between the two extremes of pure financial returns and pure social returns. [...] Also, in a recent survey of nonprofit organizations in Canada, the US, and the UK, 69% of respondents agreed that philanthropists were increasingly adopting methods borrowed from for-profit investors.5 Another one of the oft cited reasons for the adoption of business principles, especially pertaining to social enterprises, is the belief that the application of traditional business rigor to nonprof [...] This is reflective of the fact that the Nonprofit Capital Market is in many ways neither fully developed nor mature.”18 Thus, it is widely believed that the development of the Nonprofit Sector Capital Market could better support the social economy by: • improving the efficiency of the existing system by creating new tools and services to better serve existing nonprofits and social enterprises; • c [...] The more “traditional” nonprofit types - Social Services, Development and Housing, Environment, and Grantmaking, Fundraising and Voluntarism Promotion - combine for 30% of the organizations and 24% of the revenues in BC26 and 25% of the organizations and 34% of the revenues in Alberta.27.