The Lawson Foundation is committed to continually learning, reflecting, and evolving its approach to support the healthy development of children and youth in Canada.
In 2024 and early 2025, the Foundation embarked on a strategic direction review to help guide our impact, funding, and approach in the years ahead. This included commissioning research, gathering data, and reflecting on our granting, investing, and role in philanthropy. The process was collaborative and iterative, shaped by our team and Board through retreats, discussions, and learning from peer foundations.
Our refreshed strategic direction reaffirms our mission and guiding purpose, while bringing refinements and innovations to our approach. Our core tools of granting, convening, and impact investing remain central to our approach and are strengthened by the addition of advocacy and public policy to our toolbox.
Three new guiding lenses have been introduced to help us focus on the factors that most influence the health and wellbeing of children and youth.
- Connection to Nature: We value opportunities for children and youth to build strong relationships with nature and the land, fostering resilience, wholistic health, and environmental stewardship.
- Reconciliation & Reciprocity: We centre Indigenous knowledges, leadership, and self-determination, ensuring that our work advances meaningful reconciliation and equitable futures for Indigenous children and youth.
- Mental Health: We value mental health as a vital part of children and youth wellbeing, shaped by the environments, relationships, and communities that surround them.
Our impact areas build on our past work and continue to evolve to reflect the changing needs of children, youth, and the broader sector.
- Early Child Development: Supporting public policy and professional learning initiatives to build and strengthen a pan-Canadian system of Early Learning and Child Care.
- Child & Youth Diabetes: Supporting Indigenous-led organizations doing wholistic community-based work in diabetes prevention and management.
- Youth Climate & Nature Leadership: Supporting key infrastructure organizations to equip and empower young people to address climate change and protect our natural world.
- Charitable and Nonprofit Sector Infrastructure: Supporting organizations that strengthen the charitable and nonprofit sector and those that contribute to building the fields in which we fund.
- Miggsie Fund: Honouring Miggsie Lawson’s legacy and deep care for the London, Elgin and Middlesex region by supporting a range of organizations and initiatives that contribute to community wellbeing.
We remain committed to trust-based philanthropy—providing general operating support, backing long-term systems and policy change, and learning alongside our partners. We also continue to ground our work in our commitments to reconciliation and climate action.
Building on the collaborative reflections that guided this process, the Lawson Foundation’s refreshed strategic direction is a commitment to meet this moment through evolving action and ongoing learning that strengthen the systems that support the well-being of children and youth across Canada.
Click the buttons below to access the Lawson Foundation’s full refreshed strategic direction or our summary one-pager.
Amanda Mayer