For decades, the Metcalf Foundation has supported artists, cultural organizations, and sector development initiatives while helping advance policy ideas and practical tools to improve long-term sustainability across the arts and culture sector. In recent years, this work has increasingly focused on how social finance might strengthen the resilience and adaptive capacity of Canada’s cultural nonprofit sector at a moment of growing structural pressure.

Arts & Social Finance emerged from that work. Developed through years of research, workshops, cross-country engagement, and dialogue with governments, investors, policymakers, and arts organizations, the initiative is designed as a practical response to deepening precarity across the cultural ecosystem. This work is being advanced in collaboration with Rally Assets, one of Canada’s leading impact investment firms with extensive experience building social finance infrastructure and mobilizing public and private capital through the Government of Canada’s Social Finance Fund. Together, Metcalf and Rally have examined how social finance operates across other public benefit sectors in Canada, as well as in cultural sectors internationally, asking whether similar tools could help strengthen Canada’s arts and cultural landscape.

At its core, Arts & Social Finance is a proposal to introduce low-interest, patient, repayable capital into Canada’s cultural nonprofit sector, supported by grant-based readiness and capacity-building programs. The initiative is designed to be additive — not a replacement for grants, but a resource designed to help organizations diversify revenue, strengthen fiscal capacity, build adaptive capability, and increase long-term resilience.