Canada Cultural Investment Fund - Endowment Incentives

• The application must be submitted jointly by a not-for-profit professional arts organization and an associated publicly registered charitable foundation.
• The foundation must be a public charitable foundation mandated to accumulate, administer and invest capital assets to provide annual income to the beneficiary arts organization.
• The arts organization must be incorporated under federal, provincial or territorial legislation and be a registered charity designated as a charitable organization by the Canada Revenue Agency.
• The arts organization’s principal mission must be the creation/production or presentation of professional artistic works, or the training of professional artists, and it must have been operating for at least three years.
• The arts organization must demonstrate financial health, including diversified operating revenues and a net assets ratio that is not more negative than -15% of its total operating revenues, based on its most recent financial statements.

Who is eligible?

• Not-for-profit professional arts organizations whose core mission is the creation or production of professional artistic works
• Not-for-profit professional arts organizations whose core mission is the presentation of professional artistic works
• Not-for-profit professional arts organizations whose core mission is the training of professional artists
• Publicly registered charitable foundations that accumulate, administer and invest capital assets to provide income to an associated arts organization

Who is not eligible

• Heritage organizations such as museums, art galleries with permanent collections, archives, aquariums, zoos, botanical gardens, science and interpretation centres, and similar institutions whose main mandate is preservation and exhibition of collections.
• Competitions and organizations whose primary activity is organizing contests or events where participants are evaluated or judged.
• Arts service organizations that mainly provide services to artists or arts organizations (for example, advocacy, sector services, collective projects) rather than creating, presenting or training in professional artistic works.
• Cultural industries and their associations, including businesses producing film and video, broadcasting, television, music, publishing, games and digital media.
• Public sector bodies and their agencies, including federal agencies, Crown corporations, provinces, territories, municipalities and any of their organizations.

Eligible expenses

• Capital contributions from private donors and from the arts organization itself that are deposited into the associated foundation’s endowment fund and permanently capitalized.
• Reasonable and standard administration and investment management charges directly applied to the endowment fund, up to a maximum of 2% of the total grant amount received from the program.

Eligible geographic areas

• Organizations incorporated and operating under federal, provincial or territorial legislation within Canada.

• Compliance with all program conditions for previously funded projects; failure to respect past funding conditions can result in rejection of a new application.
• Total eligible amount requested for matching compared to the overall funds available in the program year, which determines the final matching ratio applied to each eligible applicant.

• The program operates on an annual intake with a fixed deadline of December 1; if this date falls on a weekend or statutory holiday, it is automatically moved to the next working day.
• Annual funding is distributed among all eligible applicants using a common matching ratio, which is calculated each year based on total available funds and total eligible matching requests.
• Foundations and arts organizations receiving support must report on results for statistical and trend analysis, and keep relevant records for at least five years for possible audits or program evaluations.
• The program applies anti-racism, workplace well-being, official languages, and public acknowledgement requirements that funded organizations must respect throughout the funding period.