A New Financial Engine for Community Renewal: 30 year MORTGAGES
SPREIIT (Social Purpose Real Estate Impact Investing Trust) is a Canadian community resilience and 30-year mortgage initiative from Relèven, with support from the Raven Outcomes - currently proposed to the Government of Canada in its 2026 pre-budget consultation process.
SPREIIT responds to the urgent need to preserve and repurpose Canada’s underutilized community properties—such as youth, cultural, community and faith centres —at a time of rising urban inequality and social fragmentation. From east to west, left to right, anglophone to francophone, rural to urban and reaching also to First Peoples’ reserves and territories, the redeployment of social purpose real estate (SPRE) resonates with need to support community, housing and economic development opportunities.
Unlocking Private Capital for Public Good
SPREIIT aims to create large-scale, investment-grade debt to support the work of multiple SPRE initiatives across Canada, basing its model on the investment profile of the Bank of Canada 30-year bond, thus unlocking private capital for long-term public benefit, without relying on public operating budgets.
Primary Impacts:
5,000 non-profits stabilized; 1,000 owning land free and clear of debt by 2056.
80,000 construction jobs
$10BN in direct new tax revenue to the Government of Canada
Up to 200,000 new housing units on transit-oriented city- and town-centre sites.
Canada’s largest social infrastructure bond issuance, reaching global capital markets.
SPREIIT capital would be deployed as equity-type debt through local, regional and national placement partners whose credibility and track record with SPRE, is proven. Their ability to bring blended finance solutions together with this unified larger vehicle, helps multiply impacts and significantly reduce and diversify risk. SPREIIT is modeled on rated impact bond issuances from around the world (policy paper available upon request.)
Relèven is now actively building a national national collaboration of government, financial, philanthropic and place-based SPRE actors to develop a framework that supports housing, heritage, and community infrastructure across the country.
GOVERNMENT OF CANADA AS LENDER OF LAST RESORT
SPREIIT’s economic engine is the property valuation increase in the city- and town-centre SPRE properties it lends against. Community organizations have 30 years to pay down debt (structured as buying back equity-type debt). The Government of Canada is protected by a number of risk mitigation instruments including a minimum growth floor, capital and operating expenditure controls and active large-scale and multi-level philanthropic fundraising support. Only in the case of catastrophic property growth and sustained fundraising failure could the guarantee be called and for a sum equivalent to the difference between a discounted market rate for remaining project properties and the bond obligation. Together with its underwriting partners, SPREIIT has calculated this risk as an extremely low likelihood of real risk to the Government of Canada and only at the programme conclusion point, in the year 2056.
A Concept in Formation—With Urgent Momentum
No part of this notice may be taken as promise of performance, assurance of risk or any other type of reliance upon the concept above which remains within both model and participant formation. Please note that SPREIIT has been submitted as a proposal with the Government of Canada pre-budget consultation process and may be subject to change, as consultations and consortium formation proceed.
national letters of support
“ SPREIIT offers a promising solution. The proposed vehicle would deploy non-extractive, equity-type debt to stabilize and develop community properties, enabling charities and non-profits to remain securely located while maintaining long-term affordability. In collaboration with partners across the philanthropic and non-profit sectors, we believe there is strong demand for such an instrument, as well as significant capacity within our sector to support the conditions necessary for repayment over a 30-year horizon.”
Andrew Chunilall,
CEO, Community Foundations of Canada
“ The physical infrastructure that supports community services is gradually deteriorating, even as demand for these services continues to grow. Without intervention, communities will lose the spaces that have served them for generations, and replacing them will cost public funds several times what it would have cost to preserve them. It is precisely this gap that SPREIIT seeks to fill. Rather than acquiring or consolidating community real estate, SPREIIT invests alongside nonprofit owners by providing quasi-equity capital that strengthens their balance sheets and unlocks their ability to preserve, modernize, and develop assets essential to their mission. By channeling patient institutional capital into the sector, the Relèven Foundation’s model offers what the sector has long awaited: a structural source of long-term capital that complements—rather than replaces—philanthropy and public funding. Above all, ownership, control over the mission, and accountability to the community remain in the hands of the organizations themselves—SPREIIT strengthens nonprofits as owners, rather than replacing them.”
Pascale Audette,
President and CEO, YMCA Québec
“ Today, our physical infrastructure is under significant pressure. Aging buildings require capital we cannot raise through philanthropy and program revenue alone; properties in revitalizing neighbourhoods are subject to escalating land values and speculative pressure; and our balance sheet, while strong by charitable-sector standards, is not structured to compete in commercial real estate markets. The result is that the physical infrastructure underpinning community services is eroding precisely when demand for those services is growing.
From the YMCAs perspective, SPREIIT could support our ability to maintain and expand the facilities through which we serve our mission across Canada. More broadly, it would give the entire community sector a credible pathway to long-term real estate stability.”
Peter Dinsdale,
President and CEO, YMCA Canada
On behalf of United Way Centraide Canada, I am writing to offer our support for the Social Purpose Real Estate Impact Investment Trust (SPREIIT), advanced by The Relèven Foundation. […]
United Ways and Centraides are active investors in community infrastructure and affordable housing. Across our movement, community hubs and deliberate strategies to secure community space – including the Initiative immobilière communautaire du Grand Montréal and the Community Real Estate Initiative in Toronto – build on decades of neighbourhood-focused work to help community organizations secure stable, long-term space and expand their programming to meet local needs. This experience has taught us that strong communities need community spaces, and that access to affordable, long-term capital allows organizations to plan and develop with a long-term mindset.
It is in this spirit that we offer our support. SPREIIT is a promising means of expanding access to stable, affordable, and long-term capital the sector needs, allowing community organizations to plan, invest, innovate and serve with confidence well into the future.
Dan Clement,
President and CEO, United Way Centraide Canada
Over a thirty-year span, Canada lost more than 20% of its pre-1920 historic places, a loss driven in part by a lack of the right financial tools. That is why we support SPREIIT. Many of our sector’s renovation projects are capital-intensive, yet they become the catalysts that lift property values and renew community life across an entire neighbourhood. These projects have largely been dependent on over-stretched granting programs. The type of financing that social purpose real estate needs is not available in Canada. SPREIIT offers a new approach to addressing the chronic unmet financial needs of heritage places delivering social good.
Patricia Kell,
CEO, National Trust for Canada
