Get to Know Us
The Calgary Affordable Housing Foundation (CAHF) is essentially a ‘start-up’ but, knowing about CAHF’s origins is an important part of understanding the mission going forward.
CAHF was established as the legacy of the Calgary Collaborative Capital Campaign (the Campaign), formerly known as Resolve. The Campaign became the first-of-its-kind collaboration in Canada, with nine non-profit housing agencies partnering with community builders to raise capital to increase access to affordable housing for Calgarians in need. Between 2012 and 2018 more than $75M was raised to house 1800 Calgarians in 21 new buildings.
Following the conclusion of the Campaign, the participating agencies incorporated and registered CAHF to serve as a permanent autonomous organization to continue in the spirit of collaboration to attract ongoing investments (funding, land, in-kind, etc.) across a diversity of funders to accelerate the number of accessible, appropriate, and dignified below market units.
Today, the CAHF team is diligently building the relationships and trust, as well as raising operational funding, that will be required to serve as a dedicated resource to work with, and on behalf of, the non-profit affordable housing providers.
Our purpose: To make housing accessible to all Calgarians.
Our vision: Everyone in Calgary has a place to call home.
Our mission: Innovating through partnership to redefine how investments are made in affordable housing to collectively address the scale of Calgary's affordable housing challenge.
CAHF’s model has been supported by CMHC in 2020 as one of 11 initiatives in Canada to receive funding as a National Housing Strategy Demonstration Initiative. Through this investment, CAHF is providing CMHC with a scalable model for other communities. The CAHF team continues to act as a resources to share the model through webinars, conferences and with other interested communities. Every step of our journey has been documented and can be accessed through the NHS Demonstrations Initiative Housing Knowledge Centre.
We are grateful to our ‘angel investors’ who have more than matched CMHC’s contributions to date and provided us with a runway to get CAHF started. Thank you to a very generous anonymous donor, the Alberta Government’s Community Initiatives Program, Horizon Housing, Silvera for Seniors, Accessible Housing, Trinity Place Foundation of Alberta, Forward Housing, and The Calgary Foundation’s Strategic Opportunity Grant.