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About Us

Building systems that serve everyone

We are a nonprofit foundation working at the intersection of systems thinking, community development, and responsible innovation. Based in Toronto, Canada with a global perspective.

Our Story

Why we exist

Sustainable Impact Foundation emerged from a simple observation: too often, innovation happens to communities rather than with them. Technology, policy, and investment decisions that profoundly shape people's lives are made in boardrooms and institutions far removed from those who bear the consequences.

We believe this isn't just unjust - it's ineffective. Solutions designed without community input fail to address real needs. They create dependencies rather than capabilities.

Our Role: Many of the best ideas for social and ecological progress already exist, but they are scattered across fragmented silos of practice, policy, capital, and lived experience. We exist to act as connective tissue and translator: helping people, communities and organizations see the system they are in, share what they know, and coordinate action across boundaries so good work travels, adapts, and scales with integrity.

What We Believe

Our convictions

  • Community knowledge is essential. The people closest to challenges understand them best. Any effective solution must be built on this foundation.
  • Systems shape outcomes. Individual interventions rarely succeed in isolation. Understanding and working with whole systems is essential for lasting change.
  • Process determines results. How we work matters as much as what we produce. Extractive processes lead to extractive outcomes.
  • Change takes time. Quick fixes create quick failures. We invest in relationships and capacity that enable sustained transformation.
  • Learning is continuous. We don't have all the answers. We commit to honest reflection, sharing what we learn, and adapting our approach.

How We Work

Our practice

We work as thinking partners, not consultants with pre-packaged solutions. Our engagements are collaborative explorations where we bring systems expertise and facilitation capacity, while our partners bring deep contextual knowledge and relationships.

Holding Space: We work with reciprocity and humility, holding braided knowledge, including Two-Eyed Seeing, as a practice of relationship, responsibility, and ongoing learning. We follow the leadership of Indigenous partners and rightsholders, and we commit to consent-based collaboration, cultural protocol, and data sovereignty, supporting with resources, platforms, and sustained partnership rather than extracting knowledge.

We're small by design. Rather than scaling our organization, we focus on scaling our impact by sharing methods, building networks, and supporting others in this work.

Want to learn more about our approach?

Explore how we think about systemic change and the methods we use to support communities in shaping their own futures.

Our Approach