2024 Annual Report
Learning through bold and thoughtful action. Grounded in community, justice and integrity.
Our Strategy & Priorities.
Anchored by our values of community, justice, and integrity, the Definity Foundation seeks to address historic and ongoing inequities. We believe that relevant and lasting change is driven by cooperative and collective action.
Through this collective work, we aim to dismantle the structural barriers that disproportionately affect communities most impacted by systemic inequities and contribute to building a more just and equitable society.
Evolving with Purpose: Our Path to 2027
Since our launch in 2022, the Definity Foundation has been committed to learning—about how we fund, what we fund, and how to meaningfully support systems change. From the start, we made a promise: to listen deeply, stay open, and evolve with intention. Over the past three years, that’s exactly what we’ve done.
Through multi-year, trust-based partnerships, we’ve supported a wide range of community-led initiatives. We began with broad goals—curious about where philanthropy could show up differently—and have since refined our approach, deepened our understanding of systems change, and remained grounded in the leadership and knowledge of communities.
Now, we’re entering a new phase. We’re sharpening and deepening our focus on our community investment framework—one designed to address structural barriers to equity, built on relationships, and rooted in systems change. We’ll continue to learn with and from our partners while shaping a new strategic direction for launch in 2027.
This is a thoughtful evolution. We will continue to work with our existing partners and engage in relationship-based learning and dialogue. This period of refinement will ensure our next chapter is even more responsive, focused, and impactful. By becoming more strategically aligned—without losing the flexibility, trust, and humility that define us—we hope to deepen our support for community-led change and contribute to a more just and equitable future.
The Foundation advances our mission by directing capital, strengthening the field, and leveraging networks and expertise, to support community-led solutions tackling deep-rooted challenges that disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities.
We build partnerships grounded in trust and relationship, collaborating closely with intermediaries, funder collaboratives and community-led collectives. Because of this intentional approach, we do not accept unsolicited applications.
To learn more about our approach to partnership, read How We Partner
Focus Areas
Healthy People
We aim to increase the health and well-being of equity-deserving and Indigenous peoples and their communities. We are driving toward solutions that consider the broad range of personal, social, economic, and environmental factors that determine individual and population health, in order to achieve more equitable health outcomes.
Thriving Communities
We aim to reduce the effects of social and economic inequality by advancing greater civic and social inclusion and more inclusive economic opportunities, especially for equity-deserving and Indigenous peoples and their communities.
Liveable Planet
We aim to build community resilience to the negative impacts of climate change. We are looking to support solutions that contribute to slowing the speed of climate change while supporting community-led adaptation, thereby leading the way to a more just and equitable future for everyone.
Since 2022, the Definity Foundation has grown our impact investment portfolio to $5.5M across 7 investments. We have committed to investing 10% of our portfolio into impact investments to intentionally generate positive social and environmental impact aligned with our priority areas.
We have invested across the impact spectrum: from experienced to first-time fund managers from underrepresented communities, across assets classes like impact venture capital to community bonds to outcomes financing, and across financial return profiles from 0% to above market-rate.
To further advance the Foundation’s mission, we revised our Investment Policy Statement to consider critical Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors across our entire investment portfolio. In the coming years, we will align our portfolio to purposefully 1) Avoid harm; 2) Benefit stakeholders of the investments; and 3) Contribute to solutions in our priority areas.