Our Story

LEAP | Pecaut Centre for Social Impact (LEAP) was created in 2012 to address complex social issues. Our work is inspired by the late David Pecaut, a corporate strategist and civic entrepreneur who spearheaded many social initiatives across Toronto.

In our early days, LEAP recognized that innovative approaches were needed to solve complex social problems. While leaders and organizations were individually leading impactful work; they often lacked access and support to create the impact that would transform communities through  systemic-level change. 

LEAP’s mandate is to scale what works. By focusing on the highest-value interventions with exceptional leadership, we catalyze large-scale social impact with each social venture and across a portfolio of organizations. 

This unique approach has helped LEAP become Canada’s leading social impact innovator.

We launched our work with a single social venture. Over the course of our partnership, they expanded their reach by 10x, demonstrating the tremendous potential of our approach.

We continued to refine our model until 2016, partnering with individual social ventures focused on the issues of education, employment and health. Our portfolio grew to three organizations serving nearly 5000 Canadians.

In 2017, we partnered with Google.org to launch the Google Impact Challenge, which enabled 10 social innovators to leverage technology to tackle the world’s most pressing social challenges. 

In 2019, we mapped out a new strategy to broaden our impact by adopting an issue-focused cohort model which could support multiple social ventures at once. We also held our first Impact Gathering, bringing together top leaders across public, private and social sectors to push forward the thinking about collectively solving the most complex issues facing Canadians. 

In 2020, we applied our cohort model to the issue of  chronic disease prevention. After intensive scoping of the issue and the most impactful interventions, we launched the Healthy Futures initiative. We more than doubled the size of our portfolio and expanded our reach into every province and territory. 

In 2022, we launched our most recent initiative, The Equity Opportunity: Advancing Women’s Economic Well-Being, which seeks to build an equitable and resilient future for women in Canada.

Since our inception in 2012, LEAP has partnered with 30 high-impact social ventures, reaching 6.4M Canadians across every province and territory and scaling their reach by an average of 6x to date. This is just the beginning of what is possible for our model to achieve.