Attend events by visionary speakers, practitioners and thought leaders who have the knowledge, lived experience and passion to leave you with actionable insights that fuel your organization’s social finance and impact investing journey.
Engage in some serious networking and learning with your peers. Deepen and broaden your professional networks in order to boost knowledge, collaborate and improve your capacity to advance social finance and impact investing.
Start the conversation and participate in discussing innovative ideas that have the potential to change your organization, your community and the world. SFF 2023 gives you the unique opportunity to do just that.
Narinder is an award-winning innovator, Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 and a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader. Her work spans across sectors and silos, she brings depth and rigour to drive social impact in North America and the Global South.
She is the President of the Sonor Foundation, Executive Lead and Co-Founder of New Power Lab, and a gender lens investor. Over the last decade, she built, designed and scaled social ventures including: in partnership with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) she led a venture philanthropy fund, LEAP | Pecaut Centre for Social Impact, and alongside Sandra and Joseph Rotman at the University of Toronto, Narinder was the founding Executive Director of Rise, a microfund for entrepreneurs with mental health and addiction challenges. In the Global South, she worked in microfinance across Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali at La Première Agence de Microfinance (PAMF) and in impact investing in Ghana & Nigeria with Acumen. She is a lecturer at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto. Narinder serves on multiple boards including the Community Foundations of Canada, Venture for Canada, The Circle, and CAFIID and is an investor in social ventures across Canada.
Andrea Armeni is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Transform Finance, a research, education, and implementation partner that supports investors and social change actors to challenge legacy investment approaches, seed transformative investment models, and build movement power.
A corporate lawyer by training, Andrea has spent the last decade exploring how capital can be made more just and equitable and helping activists and grassroots groups reclaim power over it. His current explorations focus on distributed governance mechanisms at the enterprise level as a fairer alternative to shareholder primacy.
He is an adjunct associate professor at New York University, where he teaches in the masters’ program; his course on finance and social justice received the 2021 Award of Excellence from the Financial Times and the Impact Finance Faculty Consortium. He is the co-author, most recently, of “Grassroots Community Engaged Investment: Redistributing power over investment processes as the key to fostering equitable outcomes” and “Addressing Capital's Effects on Racial Justice: How investments drive injustice and what investors can do about it.”
Andrea served as an Investment Advisor to the Secretariat of the United Nations’ Joint SDG Fund, is a steering committee member of the Racial Equity Economics Finance Sustainability initiative (REEFS), and is a board member of CARE Enterprises, the impact investing arm of CARE International.
Andrea holds a B.A. in analytic philosophy from Columbia University and a Juris Doctor from the Yale Law School.
Paluck works as a communications, engagement and impact coordinator at Social Innovation Canada. She is supporting the Adopting Common Measures program and her work is focused on helping social purpose organizations align with United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and measure their impact using Common Approach's framework.
She, along with her team, is empowering SPOs to build a sustainable impact measurement practice by making Impact Dashboard accessible to social entrepreneurs and entities. She completed her Master of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship from Smith School of Business at Queen's University. Her superpowers are building meaningful collaborations and creating synergies through impact tracking. She comes from a diverse background ranging from business consulting to Food and Beverage industries but found her purpose in social innovation.
Nejeed Kassam is the proud father of a rambunctious boy and husband to an amazing wife. He serves as the CEO of Keela - an impact technology company, dedicated to empowering nonprofits with powerful, data-driven software. Nejeed is also the co-founder of Fundraising KIT, a world leading AI-powered predictive analytics tool, built exclusively for nonprofit fundraisers. Nejeed was educated at McGill University (B.A.) and Osgoode Hall Law School (JD).
Called to the Bar in Ontario in 2015 and in British Columbia in 2017, Nejeed focuses his legal work on charitable and nonprofit law. Nejeed is also the founder of the Better Canada Institute, a public policy organization. He has spent decades working in-and-around the nonprofit sector and is the former executive director of both End Poverty Now and Conversations for Change.
Nejeed is a global innovator with experience working for the United Nations and the Senate of Canada. He is the author of the book ‘High on Life’ (foreword written by former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien) and the co-producer of the documentary, ‘Conversations for Change’. Today, Nejeed sits on a number of corporate, Crown corporation, education, and non-profit boards, speaks at conferences around the world, and is an alumnus of the Global Shapers Community (World Economic Forum) and a former fellow at the Royal Society of the Arts in the UK. In 2012, Nejeed received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal for his contribution and service to Canada. In 2022, Nejeed was named 40 under 40 by BIV.
Jonah Chininga is the co-founder and CEO of Woveo, a financial technology company that provides a community wallet for rotating savings and credit building.
He's passionate about entrepreneurship and sits on the board of the Startup Zone. Jonah is accredited by the World Bank on Alternative Financing.
Kiran Toor is an Advisor at the Impact and Innovation Unit in the Privy Council Office (PCO). She has experience applying novel methods to measure the impact of programs, including Impact Canada’s Challenge program.
Prior to joining the PCO, Kiran worked as an Economist at Statistics Canada conducting research on business performance, supply chain analyses and housing analysis. Kiran holds a Master’s of Arts in Economics from Queen’s University and a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Economics from Dalhousie University. Kiran is located in Ottawa, ON, Canada.
Jory is the Director of Finance and Impact Investment at the Inspirit Foundation. Since graduating from the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western University as the Valedictorian of his class, Jory quickly garnered a reputation as a next-generation leader in the impact investing field.
Before joining Inspirit, Jory was the Managing Director of Youth Social Innovation Capital Fund (YSI), an impact investing fund. He also co-founded an impact venture in East Africa. Most recently, Jory played an integral role in launching Inspirit’s 100% impact portfolio and continues to lead the rollout of that strategy while managing all aspects of the finance department.
Jory is often called upon to share his expertise within the sector and academic institutions. He also co-authored a children’s book.
Kat (she/her) is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Environmental Stewardship (FES). Kat’s main focus is building The Youth Harbour, a youth-for-youth climate support system focussed on supporting youth climate leaders with financial, technical, and networking support to amplify and scale their work, so far raising $1.5M dollars for the project.
Kat is a Future of Good Young Impact 2022 Leader, Clean50 nominee, and Corporate Knights Top Sustainability Leader 30 under 30. Kat is passionate about activating in the local community, whether that be organizing grassroots campaigns and clothing swaps, volunteering at the University of Calgary as an Advisory member or the local foundation. She has worked on a diversity of projects from volunteering at Calgary Legal Guidance, presenting systems research on the national pharmacare, or co-founding literacy campaigns.
Kat is passionate about empowering youth to take impactful action on sustainable development, strengthening and amplifying the youth *force* in the Canadian climate movement.
State of Social Finance in Canada: What have been note-worthy developments since Social Finance Forum 2019?
This plenary session will look back at significant advances, developments as well as friction and tension points in Canada’s social finance landscape since the last convening in 2019.
A debate-style plenary session will energize participants by diving into core arguments around whether social finance has genuinely shifted power in the last decade and whether it's capable of shifting power in the next ten.
Supported by: Genus Capital Management
The climate finance track will host two practical sessions that explore how investors are financing climate adaptation and mitigation. It will offer a deeper understanding of products, services and bottlenecks as well as highlight what to expect in the next five years, and how to get involved in the climate finance landscape.
Supported by Tapestry Capital
There is a huge need and opportunity for impact investors and asset owners to shift their attention and capital towards affordable housing. But does commodification of housing stand in the way? In addition to a basic need and human right, having safe, stable, and affordable housing is also inextricably linked to a range of social determinants of health such as employment, mental health and wellbeing, and social inclusion. This track dives into major developments and opportunities as well as highlight what to expect in the next five years, and how to get involved in the housing finance landscape.
How has access to social finance shifted in the past five years? Who has better access to financing and who doesn’t? What are factors that contribute to more equitable access? In this plenary, learn from changemakers with insights from the ground who made promising strides in equitable access to financing.
Supported by: Definity Insurance Foundation and Raven Indigenous Capital Partners
The Indigenous finance track will host two in-depth sessions that dive into recent developments, tensions, challenges and inspiring solutions. It will also highlight what to expect in the next five years and how to get involved in the Indigenous finance landscape.
The gender-lens investing track will host two in-depth sessions that dive into recent developments, tensions, challenges and inspiring solutions. It will also offer a sense of the recent and anticipated growth in GLI, highlight what to expect in the next five years, and how to get involved in the gender-lens investing landscape.
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