About Raven
"There is nothing more empowering than someone believing in the vision of your brand as much as you do. It is life changing."
Jenn Harper, CEO Cheekbone Cosmetics
Solutions Finance
Raven works with Indigenous communities and enterprises to develop innovative financial tools that address critical social, financing, and policy barriers.
Indigenous Impact
We build relationships with Indigenous entrepreneurs to drive sustainable change and address pressing social, economic, and environmental challenges.
An Indigenous Approach to Impact Investing
As an Indigenous intermediary, we honor the Seven Sacred Teachings and we operate from the perspective of the Indigenous world view. We follow traditional Indigenous protocols, we work for the well being of people and the planet, and we acknowledge our responsibility to the next seven generations.
Love - The Eagle
To know LOVE is to know peace.Respect - The Buffalo
To honor all of the Creation is to have RESPECT.Bravery - The Bear
BRAVERY is to face the foe with integrityHonesty - The Sabe
HONESTY also means “righteousness”, be honest first with yourself – in word and actionWisdom - The Beaver
To cherish knowledge is to know WISDOMHumility - The Wolf
HUMILITY is to know yourself as a sacred part of the CreationTruth - The Turtle
TRUTH is to know all of these things
Outcomes thatbuild communityempower womencreate jobsachieve social justiceare the core of our business
Sustainable Development Goals
Our approach
Revitalizing Canada's Indigenous economy by investing in Indigenous entrepreneurs
Through an Indigenous lens
Using creative solutions
To breathe life into an Indigenous economy
Investing in Economic Reconciliation
Social finance harnesses the power of private capital to achieve social and environmental outcomes while obtaining an economic return, creating mutually beneficial opportunities for organizations seeking capital and for investors seeking to benefit society. Social finance is a broad term that encapsulates a variety of financial tools, used to achieve these social, environmental, and financial returns, including impact investing, community bonds, social impact bonds, development impact bonds, success notes, pay-for-performance vehicles, and our own Community-Driven Outcomes Contracts.
Impact investing differs from traditional investment in both intention and measurement. Investors are purposeful about allocating capital to initiatives they believe will generate positive social or environmental returns in addition to financial returns. Investees are also seeking to create positive social or environmental outcomes with their work. Impact measurement ensures that these good intentions translate into tangible social or environmental benefits.
Raven and Social Finance
We blend financial innovation with Indigenous ways of knowing and being, applying the resulting tools and techniques to solve problems in the Indigenous ecosystem and simultaneously create a reconciliation economy. We believe an ecosystem approach is required to drive the change we are seeking and that solutions must operate at the individual, enterprise, community, and systems levels. This approach is shown in our social finance solutions, which include:
The Raven Indigenous Impact Fund invests in innovative, scalable, purpose-driven Indigenous-led and owned enterprises. Indigenous entrepreneurs gain access to capital allowing them to scale their impact and addressing the UN's SDGs at the enterprise level.
Indigenous Financial Instruments
The growth of social finance has required innovation in the kinds of financial instruments investors use. Raven's signature social finance instrument, the Community-Driven Outcomes Contract or CDOC, is an innovative pay-for-performance instrument. Instead of being driven by government priorities, CDOCs are guided by what communities want and need.
These are multi-stakeholder gatherings that allow for the co-creation of solutions to seemingly intractable problems, such as high diabetes rates in Indigenous communities. Our Solutions Labs are based on social innovation labs but are grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being and ceremony. They challenge the status quo and allow for systems-level change while maintaining a focus on community priorities and needs.
The Fireweed Fellowship
Fireweed is Canada's first national Indigenous accelerator program. The Fellowship supports Indigenous entrepreneurs towards investment readiness and prosperity using a decolonized approach. The impacts are seen at the entrepreneur level.
Measuring the real impact of all our initiatives is crucial to ensuring that Raven's work supports Indigenous Peoples as intended. We created the Raven Impact Measurement Framework (RIM) to ensure that our measurement process is consistent with Indigenous ways of knowing and being and to guide us in engaging communities to measure what really matters. The RIM employs both community and systems-level lenses on impact and its measurement.
Social Finance Tools
Our solutions
We build relationships that create solutions.
We work with Indigenous communities and enterprises to develop innovative financial tools that address critical social, financing, and policy barriers.
Clean 50
Leading Social Entrepreneurs
This e-book features our Managing Partner and 2019 Ashoka Fellow Jeff Cyr and the concept of community-driven outcomes purchasing.
from our Partner's desk
We do what we do because we want to lift up Indigenous Peoples. The time is ripe for meaningful change; one way to accelerate long-term solutions is to put power and resources back into the hands of Indigenous entrepreneurs and communities. In our case, this looks like direct investment in innovative, scalable enterprises; it looks like partnerships with Indigenous communities and organizations; it looks like building unique new pathways towards prosperity for Indigenous peoples.
We hope you join us on this journey.
