The State of Practice - Q1 2026

Canada’s impact investing ecosystem is entering a new phase. Across housing, community finance, food systems, and nature-based assets, practitioners report strong demand and growing capacity to deploy capital. Yet capital continues to move more slowly and unevenly than the moment requires.

This is the central tension the Q1 2026 State of Practice brief sets out to explain.

Drawing on real-time intelligence from TIIP’s Knowledge Exchange — a community of practice engaging 28 funds and 38 fund managers with $1B AUM and an additional $700M being raised — this brief surfaces the patterns and dynamics shaping how impact investing actually works in Canada right now.

Three core findings drive the analysis:

1. The problem is not scarcity alone. Capital is available, but the systems required to move it efficiently are underdeveloped. Fragmented pathways, mismatched institutional expectations, and missing shared infrastructure are slowing deployment across the ecosystem.
2. Practitioners have built more than the system recognizes. Fund managers are constructing pipelines, structuring deals where conventional models don’t apply, and absorbing significant market-building work that is rarely funded. The capabilities are there. The shared infrastructure to support them at scale is not.
3. Alignment is building — and it matters now. Federal domestic investment priorities, growing institutional interest, and practitioner readiness are converging. The remaining gap is between alignment and execution.

The brief also examines what this means for specific actors: government and public-sector partners, foundations, institutional investors, wholesalers, and ecosystem builders. For each, the signal is consistent — the next stage requires investing in the functions that allow capital to move, not only in the capital itself.

A companion thematic brief, Shared Infrastructure for Canada’s Impact Investing Ecosystem: What Practitioners Prioritized First, identifies the concrete shared infrastructure priorities that practitioners said should come first.

What This Report Does

This publication is designed to support shared understanding, not to advance prescriptions or recommendations.

It examines how:

• fund structure and capital fit shape viability

• liquidity and timing pressures are managed rather than eliminated

• governance capacity influences capital deployment

• coordination and learning infrastructure remain in early stages

Taken together, these signals point to a field still building the norms, reference points, and infrastructure required for more coordinated growth.

What This Report Is — and Is Not

This report is:

• a synthesis of recurring patterns observed across practice

• grounded in practitioner experience across geographies, asset classes, and stages

• intended for practitioners, funders, policymakers, and ecosystem actors

This report is not:

• an evaluation of individual funds

• a set of recommendations or policy proposals

• a claim about what should scale

Action-oriented, practitioner-led problem solving takes place through TIIP’s knowledge exchange. This publication serves a different function: clarifying what practice is revealing at the system level.

How We Know What We Know

The analysis reflects insights surfaced through TIIP’s practitioner-facing knowledge exchange and research activities, involving participation from impact investment funds and fund managers across Canada. All insights are anonymized to protect individual credibility and to allow candid discussion of system-level dynamics.

This approach enables TIIP to surface early signals and stabilized patterns without attributing challenges or outcomes to specific actors.

Who This Is For

• Impact investment practitioners and fund managers

• Foundations and institutional capital providers

• Policymakers and public-sector actors

• Ecosystem builders, researchers, and field leaders

Anyone seeking to understand how the system is functioning in practice, rather than how it is described in theory.

About TIIP

Table of Impact Investment Practitioners (TIIP) is a pan-Canadian community of practice for impact investment fund managers and intermediaries. TIIP supports the field by convening practitioners, synthesizing lived experience, and translating practice into shared understanding to inform coordination, policy, and system development.