PURPOSE
The OSFund is a vehicle that enables a multitude of donors — individuals, families, corporations, and governments — to support projects in the community that educate and inspire citizens and organizations to act to make the City of Ottawa more sustainable.  

WHY COMMUNITY?  

We are all local citizens; we are all global citizens.  

The late John Walsh of Ottawa put it this way: I believe that community-type action is the key to making progress on sustainability issues. It is a way around the ‘tragedy of the commons’ that sets in when things are done at too a large scale.

According to Bill McKibben, access to cheap energy made us rich, wrecked our climate, and made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbours. Jane Jacobs insisted that cities are the fundamental building blocks of our economic lives. 

The OSFund provides a simple, practical way for neighbours in Ottawa to join forces to strengthen our collective ability to address whatever linked ecological, economic, and social stresses we and our successors may face. 

We can’t just sit around waiting for the global solution. There is a lot that can be done at a household level, at a community level, at a regional level.