A New Financial Engine for Community Renewal
SPREIIT (Social Purpose Real Estate Impact Investing Trust) is a Canadian community resilience initiative from Relèven, with support from the Raven Outcomes - currently in concept and consortium formation.
SPREIIT responds to the urgent need to preserve and repurpose Canada’s underutilized community properties—such as youth, cultural, community and faith centres —at a time of rising urban inequality and social fragmentation. From east to west, left to right, anglophone to francophone, rural to urban and reaching also to First Peoples’ reserves and territories, the redeployment of community properties resonates with need to support community, housing and economic development opportunities.
Unlocking Private Capital for Public Good
SPREIIT aims to create large-scale, investment-grade debt to support the work of multiple SPRE initiatives across Canada, basing its model on the investment profile of the Bank of Canada 30-year bond, thus unlocking private capital for long-term public benefit, without relying on public operating budgets.
SPREIIT capital would be deployed as equity-type debt through local, regional and national placement partners whose credibility and track record with SPRE, is proven. Their ability to bring blended finance solutions together with this unified larger vehicle, helps multiply impacts and significantly reduce and diversify risk. SPREIIT is modeled on rated impact bond issuances from around the world.
Relèven is now actively building a national national collaboration of government, financial, philanthropic and place-based SPRE actors to develop a framework that supports housing, heritage, and community infrastructure across the country.
A Concept in Formation—With Urgent Momentum
No part of this notice may be taken as promise of performance, assurance of risk or any other type of reliance upon the concept above which remains within both model and participant formation. Please note that SPREIIT has been submitted as a proposal with the Federal Government of Canada pre-budget consultation process and may be subject to change, as consultations and consortium formation proceed.
Please see our public stakeholder engagement concept announcement, on LinkedIn and Facebook.
national letters of support
“ SPREIIT offers a promising solution. The proposed vehicle would deploy non-extractive, equity-type debt to stabilize and develop community properties, enabling charities and non-profits to remain securely located while maintaining long-term affordability. In collaboration with partners across the philanthropic and non-profit sectors, we believe there is strong demand for such an instrument, as well as significant capacity within our sector to support the conditions necessary for repayment over a 30-year horizon.”
Andrew Chunilall,
CEO, Community Foundations of Canada
“ The physical infrastructure that supports community services is gradually deteriorating, even as demand for these services continues to grow. Without intervention, communities will lose the spaces that have served them for generations, and replacing them will cost public funds several times what it would have cost to preserve them. It is precisely this gap that SPREIIT seeks to fill. Rather than acquiring or consolidating community real estate, SPREIIT invests alongside nonprofit owners by providing quasi-equity capital that strengthens their balance sheets and unlocks their ability to preserve, modernize, and develop assets essential to their mission. By channeling patient institutional capital into the sector, the Relèven Foundation’s model offers what the sector has long awaited: a structural source of long-term capital that complements—rather than replaces—philanthropy and public funding. Above all, ownership, control over the mission, and accountability to the community remain in the hands of the organizations themselves—SPREIIT strengthens nonprofits as owners, rather than replacing them.”
Pascale Audette,
President and CEO, YMCA Québec
“ Today, our physical infrastructure is under significant pressure. Aging buildings require capital we cannot raise through philanthropy and program revenue alone; properties in revitalizing neighbourhoods are subject to escalating land values and speculative pressure; and our balance sheet, while strong by charitable-sector standards, is not structured to compete in commercial real estate markets. The result is that the physical infrastructure underpinning community services is eroding precisely when demand for those services is growing.
From the YMCAs perspective, SPREIIT could support our ability to maintain and expand the facilities through which we serve our mission across Canada. More broadly, it would give the entire community sector a credible pathway to long-term real estate stability.”
Peter Dinsdale,
President and CEO, YMCA Canada
On behalf of United Way Centraide Canada, I am writing to offer our support for the Social Purpose Real Estate Impact Investment Trust (SPREIIT), advanced by The Relèven Foundation. […]
United Ways and Centraides are active investors in community infrastructure and affordable housing. Across our movement, community hubs and deliberate strategies to secure community space – including the Initiative immobilière communautaire du Grand Montréal and the Community Real Estate Initiative in Toronto – build on decades of neighbourhood-focused work to help community organizations secure stable, long-term space and expand their programming to meet local needs. This experience has taught us that strong communities need community spaces, and that access to affordable, long-term capital allows organizations to plan and develop with a long-term mindset.
It is in this spirit that we offer our support. SPREIIT is a promising means of expanding access to stable, affordable, and long-term capital the sector needs, allowing community organizations to plan, invest, innovate and serve with confidence well into the future.
Dan Clement,
President and CEO, United Way Centraide Canada
