The loss, or realignment, of a funder affects the entire charitable sector, and how it chooses to say its goodbyes has far-reaching implications, both practical and emotional, contributor Angela Long writes.
We are here today to mark the realignment of a funder once celebrated for its “vision and generosity” as one of Canada’s top gift-giving foundations. We also mark the loss of several of its thought leaders, who “elevated the role of corporate philanthropy and responsible giving.” They leave behind a legacy of non-restrictive funding strategies, reconciliation, and learning.
And so might begin a eulogy for Suncor Energy Foundation (SEF) if the sector were ever to write such a thing. As the charitable arm of Suncor Energy Inc., SEF spent 25-plus years building relationships and trust before beginning to shift focus in 2024. And while news of Suncor’s cancellation of an annual Christmas turkey giveaway didn’t spread much further than the local paper, SEF’s alleged withdrawal of a pledge for half a million dollars in May 2025 for The Resilience Institute has caused a sector-wide stir.
“Increasingly, we have a new attitude and a new culture – competitive, result-oriented, and determined,” CEO Rich Kruger writes in Suncor’s latest annual report, suggesting that this is all business as usual, nothing personal. Oh, but it is.
Things get personal pretty quickly in the sector. On more than one occasion I’ve shed a few tears with people I’m interviewing. They know about my divorce, the death of my father. We’ve met for smoothies, shared hand salve. This might not sound very professional of me, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned: the personal is the professional in Canada’s philanthropic sector.
To eulogize a funder or its leaders is to recognize the sector as a realm steeped in relationship. Any “death,” whether natural or artificially induced, affects the entire sector. How a funder chooses to say its goodbyes has far-reaching implications, both practical and emotional.
Conversations surrounding SEF’s refocusing don’t mince words: trust-shattering, irresponsible. For those long wary of the motives of a corporate foundation, this could be a “told you so” moment. But as the number of corporate foundations – and their economic clout – grows, the sector can’t afford to look away. The “uncomfortable paradox” surrounding a corporation’s effort “to ‘do good’ while at the same time continuing with business practices that create the issues in the first place” may persist, but another ball is rolling. A recent Milken Institute report notes that stakeholders are pushing corporations from old paradigms, such as philanthropy-as-PR-tool, toward a “force for realizing social change and protecting the planet.”
When SEF, once described as a philanthropic “model” for other companies, appears to buck that trend, reducing its team significantly, sending out emails warning of a “dialling back” of support, scrubbing content from its website – while touting record-making profits – we mourn the deeper implications. A course reversal from “change-oriented” philanthropy, set out in report after report, to right historic wrongs and to advance equity and inclusion.
So often the loss is felt really deeply across communities and institutional relationships.
Danya Pastuszek, Tamarack Institute
And perhaps it means an erosion of faith, that we’re in this together, fighting the good fight. After 25 years of working in systems change, Danya Pastuszek, president and CEO of the Tamarack Institute, understands this “good fight” well. Sector relationships are not merely transactional, she says. “So often the loss is felt really deeply across communities and institutional relationships.” It’s easy to see the tangibles when you lose a funder or a leader – the loss of programs, a turnover of staff and volunteers. What you don’t see are the “trust-momentum relationships that have been built,” Pastuszek says.
To achieve missions such as Tamarack’s to end poverty in all its forms takes more than money; it takes faith. “You need to believe that change is possible, and that prosperity for every living thing on this planet is possible and probable if we’re working together toward it,” Pastuszek says. What’s at stake when this falters is “the persistent, unshakable belief that many, many people have to hold if we’re going to work at the scale that our communities and those experiencing the most harm need us to.”
An open letter published by Tamarack rallies the sector to keep the faith. “The time is now to advance trust-based community investment, not slide backwards,” it states. With 121 signatories at last count, the letter highlights the interconnectedness of the sector, and its role as “a strategic partner in building a resilient, inclusive Canada.”
In May 2025, Lori Hewson, former executive director at SEF, wrote her own kind of eulogy to mark “an abrupt ending to years of funding impactful programs”: “Endings and beginnings, and their kin; grief and honouring. This is where I’d like to begin.”
What are we missing by not taking time to be in the space of grieving and acknowledging loss?
Lori Hewson, formerly of Suncor Energy Foundation
One might question what place grief has in the philanthropic sector. Hewson thinks it’s time to find out: “What are we missing by not taking time to be in the space of grieving and acknowledging loss?” she asks. Taking this time, she says, could be an opportunity “to really deepen the innovation ecosystem.”
Hewson is not alone in this sentiment. In a recent Fund the People podcast episode, Meico Marquette Whitlock compares the repression of what he calls “social impact grief” to “driving with the parking brake on.” The Method Collective views our collective resistance to make space for grief as a systemic failure. While the sector tackles other societal challenges, “grief remains an overlooked crisis, despite its profound ripple effects on families, workplaces, and entire communities,” they note, urging us to address, plan, and design for grief in everything from healthcare to housing to workplace policies.
Grief is unavoidable in a sector where the professional is the personal. Whether you’re a philanthropist or on the front lines, “you are in relationship to individuals, to issues that matter deeply,” Hewson says. And whether you’re working to improve health outcomes or address the climate emergency, loss is “always present.” The real question is how do we keep moving forward?
Terms such as “creative destruction” and “adaptive cycle” form part of the lexicon of social innovation, Hewson notes. But those kinds of frameworks, which once helped guide Hewson’s work, “are most irrelevant when you’re in the space of destruction,” she says. “I think this is why I’m trying to find a different language.” With grief, “we move from the head to the heart, to the deep internal work,” she says, “and there’s no road map for that.”
Hewson learned this the hard way, after her husband died in 2022. Feeling her way by instinct and emotion, she began to see ways to integrate her grieving journey into her life’s work. From Janine Benyus’s biomimicry movement to Robert Macfarlane’s book Is a River Alive? she found cues in the natural world about how to frame a new approach. It’s not about how to control, she says; “it’s about how to be in relationship with.”
So much of the sector’s work is grounded in relationship, Hewson says; that’s why “abrupt change” might feel like “a really bad breakup.” When the “what” is beyond our control, the “how” can make such a difference. Rather than a “rip-off-the-Band-Aid approach” and let everything sort itself out, “there’s a kinder, more loving, more caring way to do it that is honouring and acknowledges.”
During her decades-long career in foundation philanthropy, Hilary Pearson has learned a thing or two about the “whats” and the “hows.” In her book From Charity to Change, she focuses on 20 foundations practising a transformative set of “hows” that get at the heart of the “why” – why foundations matter, why they can be “critical to solving our world’s most complex challenges.”
The shift from transactional to more relational philanthropy underscores another reality: foundations are people-powered, and people have different personalities. From the head of a family to the CEO of a company, from a board member to a granting officer, their roles, Pearson says, “cannot be underestimated.”
A reliance on the “who,” however, can invite vulnerability. In what many observers, including Pearson, describe as the “opaque” world of foundations, SEF was an anomaly. It openly positioned itself as a leader in social innovation – funding, and documenting, innovative programs. But a new CEO with a different worldview, Suncor’s Kruger for example (the “nightmare on Oil Street” for some and Canadian Business Leader of the Year for others), can easily lead to the dismantling, or realignment, of nearly three decades of funding priorities and strategies.
In such an environment, Pearson invites us to look at the bigger picture. If we’re talking about how the sector is affected by the “death” of a foundation, whether natural or artificially induced, it’s important to understand the nature of their mortality, or, in some cases, immortality.
Questions of life and death are top of mind in the boardrooms of Canada’s 11,000 foundations. “Let’s not even talk about perpetuity,” Pearson says. “Can we talk about a generation? Can we talk about 30 years? Can we talk about 10 years? What’s a relevant period in which we can say, ‘Let’s have the most impact we can have and then we’ll just dismantle ourselves.’”
[It can be productive for funders] to talk about ‘What if we didn’t exist? What kind of legacy do we want to leave?’
Hilary Pearson
Perhaps more eulogies wouldn’t be such a bad thing. “I don’t think foundations should assume they have eternal life,” Pearson says. This can be a productive and creative conversation, she says, “to talk about ‘What if we didn’t exist? What kind of legacy do we want to leave?’”
In 1966, McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation, asked similar questions, saying, “A foundation should regularly ask itself if it could do more good dead than alive.” Chuck Feeney, pioneer of the spend-down movement, coined phrases such as “Giving while living” and “Zero is the hero.” In Canada, views of mortality span from the Ivey Foundation opting to spend down its $100-million endowment by the end of 2027, to the Winnipeg Foundation’s motto “For Good. Forever.”
Pearson notes that while philanthropy has been evolving since the Middle Ages, the idea of an endowed foundation with a staff and a board and assets to manage and grants to make every year is only a hundred years old. She wonders if this model has simply outlived its use. “So, you know, I could say, ‘OK, this is actually a good time for a whole paradigm change.’”
Books such as A New Era of Philanthropy, by Dimple Abichandani, which Pearson reviewed, help lay the groundwork for this. Abichandani attempts “to rethink, reimagine foundations for a new time,” Pearson says.
Rethinking includes shifting power, relinquishing control to a whole new crop of leaders. “You know, it used to be a mystery how leaders of foundations got into their jobs,” Pearson says. In the case of family foundations, positions would simply be announced. Now you’re beginning to see more outside searches, she says. Now people are thinking, “What kind of leader do we want?”
As the role of a leader shifts, so does the sector’s relationship with them. In From Philanthropoid to Foundation Professional: Reflecting on a Century of Staff Role Development in US Private Foundations, Michele Fugiel Gartner, adjunct research professor at Carleton University’s School of Public Policy and Administration and lead researcher at Philanthropic Foundations Canada, notes that this role is more critical, and more nuanced, than ever: “The staff who translate values into action, who negotiate between donor vision and community need, are neither passive actors nor omnipotent strategists.”
In 2023, a sector stakeholder I interviewed said that SEF’s team went beyond “being the manager of the purse strings” to understanding “the importance of the wider dimensions of what it is to be human: the heart, the spirit, the soul.” When Kelli Stevens, SEF’s former manager of community investment and social innovation, posted about her role being eliminated “due to budget cuts and restructuring,” hundreds reacted, many expressing shock, anger, and sadness.
While a people-powered sector invites vulnerability, it also unites. Leaders have the power to create networks, to create legacy through shared learning. Pearson learned this through painful circumstances. In 2008, her sister Katharine, former program director of the McConnell Family Foundation, died at the age of 52 from breast cancer. At the memorial service in Montreal, at least 400 people came to pay their respects. “I had no idea that she’d had this kind of impact,” Pearson says. “In the middle of the pain, it was overwhelming to hear the tributes.”
Seventeen years later, Pearson sends me a PDF – Katharine’s 2006 publication Accelerating Our Impact: Philanthropy, Innovation and Social Change. A book marking 10 years of Social Innovation Generation acknowledges how Katharine “nurtured the systems thinking” leading to SiG’s creation. “Sow what you know. Seed the ground. Tell them what you’ve learned. Tell them what your lessons are,” Pearson says, referencing one of her sister’s oft-used phrases. “I think that’s really important as part of a philanthropic role: you don’t just do – you also share what you do.”
For funders working to address the climate and biodiversity crises, conversations about grief and mortality will have to wait. “Change course now,” says António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, as we face the inevitability of “devastating consequences.” The latest Global Tipping Points Report warns that we’ve entered a danger zone posing “catastrophic risks for billions of people.”
Devika Shah, executive director of Environment Funders Canada, has also reached a tipping point. If she were to write a eulogy, it might go like this: We are gathered here today to mark the loss of an extractive system steeped in systemic failings.
If you are not going to honour a verbal pledge, then you need to give people a much longer runway to be able to find alternative sources of revenue.
Devika Shah, Environment Funders Canada
The loss of a funder takes on a whole other dimension for the environmental sector. If corporate funders “want to play” in philanthropic circles, for whatever reason, they need to play fair, Shah says. “If you are not going to honour a verbal pledge, then you need to give people a much longer runway to be able to find alternative sources of revenue.” Funders need to understand that “the two sectors are not equal,” she says. The environmental sector’s resources are no match for multibillion-dollar corporations. Their funding pool is already so small, she says, and growing smaller. According to the Clean Economy Fund, the most recent figures mirror a “persistent shortage” of climate philanthropy at a time when it “matters more than ever” – a scant 1.5% of total Canadian charitable giving.
For Shah, this disconnect indicates a bigger issue: capitalism. This “extractive version of capitalism is not serving us,” she says. But even those who suffer most aren’t sure how to give it up. It’s like a religion, she says, with tenets such as the “trickle down” belief and that wealth is based on merit embedded in our DNA. The system needs some major tweaks, “so that it’s designed for the well-being of the maximum number of people and not designed to make five people really, really, really rich,” she says.
The philanthropic sector is by its very nature part of this system. But Shah resists “knocking philanthropy,” she says, “because there are many cases where I’ve looked around and thought, ‘Thank god that amount of money is being controlled by that enlightened philanthropist instead of the government.’” On the other hand, there are times when Shah thinks, “‘My god, this person should not be able to control that much capital.’”
The hard reality is that the demand for philanthropy far exceeds the support available. Whether a foundation funds in perpetuity or spends down is only a part of the puzzle, Shah says. To shift this system, we need private capital and all levels of government on board. “Unless we change the underpinnings of our economic model, we’re just fooling ourselves,” she says. “This is my personal take and where I think we have a major blind spot.”
Such a take reflects what the authors of Philanthropic Foundations in Canada define as one of the roles of a foundation: “a mirror of tensions that exist between capitalist ideologies, individual benefit and the public good.”
For the CEO of Philanthropic Foundations Canada, such tensions form part of the balancing act of his day-to-day conversations. But Jean-Marc Mangin tries to keep his eye on the ball: “There’s always a way to do it better, and that openness to learning is important. But the complexities of today’s issues require a multitude of approaches.”
You can do it well or poorly whether or not you have a long-term endowment model, whether or not you have a spending-down model.
Jean-Marc Mangin, Philanthropic Foundations Canada
Every foundation – corporate, family, public – has a different answer to the “what” – to what they fund, to what their lifespan will be. But the “how” is what matters most, Mangin says: “You can do it well or poorly whether or not you have a long-term endowment model, whether or not you have a spending-down model.” The principles of developing good partnerships, notably how you start and end a relationship, remain the same. To yield long-term results, a focus on the relational and reciprocity, building two-way partnerships, is key, he says. “We’ve learned a great deal from a growing number of Indigenous-led philanthropic actors and foundations.”
The Right Relations Collaborative’s 2025 Reciprocity Report notes a growing cohort of funding partners who “are trusting that interdependence is how we thrive.” Relational philanthropy is a two-way street and, rather than something new, a return to “what is natural, generative, and whole.”
When a foundation reaches the end of its life, by whatever means, when the sector loses one of its leaders, for whatever reason, when all is said and done, “what I’m interested in is that culture of giving,” Mangin says, “that you want to give back and make Canada a better place,” especially now when the pressure to make our economy and society more resilient is more critical than ever.
Artist’s note (translated from French): “In the illustration, we see the subtle human skull representing death, the end of a stage, the permanence of the body . . . the crows, who are messengers and accompany us in our mourning.” —Eruoma Awashish
