When joanne dereta’s business coach encouraged her to focus on goal-setting a few years ago, Dereta took up the challenge. She decided she would ensure that every child in a Toronto shelter would receive a Christmas gift that year.

Little did Dereta — a partner at wealth-management firm Stonegate Private Counsel LP in Toronto and both a certified and registered financial planner — realize that achieving this goal would spur her on to create her own private foundation. Jo’s Snowflake Fund helps children living in homeless and emergency shelters in Toronto.

Three years ago. long-time volunteer Joe Canavan, chairman and CEO of Assante Corp. in Toronto, and his wife Laurissa, likewise turned to a foundation as a way to administer their charitable efforts.

“I wanted something that had a mission statement, a philosophy and objectives — and something that would build over time,” Canavan says.

The Canavan Family Foundation now supports the Children’s Aid Foundation, National Ballet of Canada and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. It also sponsored the toddler area at the Ontario Science Centre and a couple of Toronto Zoo exhibits.

For the Canavans, the foundation was a way of formalizing an already well-established commitment to volunteerism.

In Dereta’s case, too, her goals evolved over time. In 2001, she set her sights on helping children in Toronto shelters and so, with a friend’s help, developed contacts at various shelters across the city. “Where I grew up, there was no such thing as women’s shelters,” says Dereta, a native of Stoney Creek, Ont. “I had never heard of them until I moved to Toronto.”

Over the next few years, Dereta donated toys to several shelters across the city during the holiday season. It was a slapdash undertaking, she admits: “$1,400 to this, $6,000 to another, $3,000 to someone else.”

But discussions with friends forced her to re-evaluate whether a Christmas giving program was as useful as she would have liked. “The kids who come to shelters at Christmas get lots of stuff, and the kids who come in February get nothing,” she says.

The idea now is to provide shelters with assorted items — from pyjamas and slippers to toys and school supplies — that can be packaged as a welcome kit for kids who arrive at any time of the year. “When a child shows up, the shelter can grab a half-dozen things so the child has something of his or her very own,” Dereta says. “When children go to a shelter, they often have to leave their homes very quickly, leaving everything behind.”

Two years ago, when Dereta realized that a significant charitable donation would make sense at income tax time, she decided to formalize the process. She signed on with the Toronto Community Foundation, a charitable organization that helps philanthropic citizens establish endowment funds (www.tcf.ca), and sat for a year on the board of the organization.

For Jo’s Snowflake Fund — named to emphasize that each child is an individual — Dereta donated securities to gain the tax advantage, along with some cash. The Community Foundation invests the money and provides a certain amount each year to a registered charity of her choice. “The idea is to have a fund growing for the City of Toronto in perpetuity,” she says.

Her fund now supports Windfall, an organization that distributes new donated clothing and goods to homeless and emergency shelters across Toronto. She tells Windfall which shelters she would like to support. And she takes her efforts a step further, buying products in bulk from the Bargains Group, a wholesale clearance company, to distribute to shelters, including some that are not on the Windfall list. “I have 15 boxes of stuff at home,” she says.

The reason she supplements her fund’s donation program is simple. “I feel that if I’m not really involved, it loses meaning,” she says.

Dereta doesn’t often talk about her foundation. “I haven’t told many people about the Snowflake Fund because I think it would sound self-serving,” she says. But she does have some friends who have contributed to the fund occasionally — to thank her for treating them to dinner, for example.

And she finds the foundation work satisfying, compared with the spread-out donations she made in the past. “I think it’s better to concentrate your efforts and make a more meaningful contribution,” she says. A foundation is also useful when telemarketers call asking for donations, she says with a laugh: “You can politely say, ‘I have my own private foundation, and I make my choices through that’.”

@page_break@She involves her son, who at the age of 13 is typical of his peers in “having everything,” she says. “I often take him with me when I go to the shelters, or when I’m choosing things for kids.”

She knows he is smart enough to see through her attempts to show him how fortunate he is, but that doesn’t make the message any less resonant: “I’ve told him I need him to be involved because someday he’ll have to take over from me.”

That legacy of philanthropy also motivates the Canavan Family Foundation. Canavan hopes the couple’s three young sons — ages five, three and two months — will learn some important lessons by being involved with the foundation. In fact, he hopes that when they are older, they will research charities and, perhaps, work with the ones that they find interesting.

“It’s one of those tactile learning experiences,” he says. The fact that his children are fortunate is not something he wants them to take for granted. “I want them to wake up every single day and be grateful for who they are and what they have.”

While he has always been very involved in community giving, sitting on several charitable boards and supporting arts, culture and child-based programs, Canavan feels very strongly about helping children at risk. For more than a decade, he was on the board of Trails Youth Initiatives, an organization that mentors vulnerable inner-city kids and runs a camp outside the city.

Canavan left Trails in 2003 and joined the board of the Children’s Aid Foundation.He prefers a hands-on approach and sits on the boards of most of the charities his family’s foundation supports.

“If I’m going to commit resources, I want to commit time, as well,” he says. “I want to be involved in the workings of a charity and see if there are points of leverage.” IE