Raven Outcomes and the Future of Indigenous-Led Finance
September 3, 2026
New Power Labs' Allison Gibson sat down with Jeff Cyr, founder and managing partner of Raven Outcomes Fund, for a candid conversation about the capital gap for Indigenous-designed and led solutions, and the model that Raven built to close it.
Jeff is Métis from White Horse Plains, Manitoba, and trained as a negotiator and political economist. He began his career building venture capital funds for Indigenous entrepreneurs before shifting toward outcomes-based finance after Fisher River and Peguis First Nations approached him about financing Indigenous energy sovereignty on terms venture capital could not accommodate. That shift led Jeff to build Canada's first community-driven outcomes contract and eventually to Raven Outcomes Fund, which is raising $50 million to finance Indigenous-led projects.
1. Traditional guarantees arrive after the decisions that matter have already been made. Raven Outcomes arrives before.
Loan guarantees and similar instruments reduce the cost and risk of Indigenous participation in major projects, but they typically activate only once a project has been designed and deemed commercially viable. By then, the decisions about what gets built and whose priorities shape it are largely settled.
Raven Outcomes positions its capital earlier in the process, what Jeff termed “first-mile capital,” so a nation can reach the point where a project can attract mainstream financing. In one recent deal worth $2.6 million, a nation had run other businesses competently and had every element of a project in place except the equity that two financial institutions required before releasing funding. Raven Outcomes filled that gap and unlocked the rest of the capital stack.
Raven's first completed community-driven outcomes contract delivered 124 home upgrades for Fisher River and Peguis First Nations, creating $7.6 million in verified social, economic, and environmental outcomes value, of which the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and Efficiency Manitoba purchased $5.1 million.
2. Community defines the outcome before Raven brings in government and private capital.
Raven Outcomes does not approach communities with proposals. Communities bring the problem, often through what Raven Outcomes calls a solutions lab, a process that can run from a few days to more than a year, depending on the complexity of the project. The lab brings in the other actors a project will require, and works with the community to define what a project is meant to achieve beyond its immediate output.
Once that groundwork exists, Raven Outcomes returns to its investment committee to build the financing structure, serving as an intermediary between a government outcomes purchaser that may be constrained by its own funding criteria, and private investors focused on risk and return. Jeff described this intermediation as central to Raven's approach: it gives community priorities room to shape a project even when a funder's own criteria were not built with those priorities in mind, while helping private investors understand the outcomes model over time.
3. Raising capital as an emerging Indigenous fund manager remains harder than it should be.
Jeff shared that structural bias and investors' unfamiliarity with outcomes finance both slow capital formation for funds like his, even as he noted that his own experience of these barriers has likely been milder than that of other diverse, emerging fund managers. Mainstream capital defaults to what it already understands and to the highest available return, and Raven Outcomes' fund promised a return of 4% to 7% with measurable community outcomes, against a mainstream expectation closer to 10%. Jeff said that return is now tracking at 7% to 8%, citing this as evidence he uses to make the case to investors seeking both purpose and performance.
4. Outcomes shift over the life of a project, and Raven Outcomes treats that as information rather than failure.
Jeff described several projects where an early plan changed. A one-in-a-hundred-year flood damaged neighbouring homes fitted with older geothermal systems, and Raven Outcomes redirected pre-purchased equipment from its own project to make emergency repairs, adding time and cost to its original timeline. A plan for 100 ground-source heat pump installations was partly shifted to air-source systems once the geology in part of the community proved unsuitable.
In each case, Jeff said investors accepted the change because the relationship, built through the solutions lab process, had already given them confidence in Raven Outcomes' judgment. That same trust has led communities to approach Raven about projects outside a pure outcomes contract, for example, an emerging investment in a biochar facility that converts organic waste into a stable carbon product for use in soil, cement, or steelmaking.
5. The end goal is sovereignty, not only access to capital.
Jeff distinguished self-determination, where communities decide what to build and how, from sovereignty, where communities have measurable control over the economic drivers that affect them. A nation that completes a project with Raven Outcomes builds the track record and financial history needed to access mainstream capital directly in the future, reducing its reliance on specialized capital.
Raven Outcomes is preparing a second, larger fund, and Jeff pointed to preventive healthcare as the next priority. Raven has spent more than a year developing an outcomes contract on type 2 diabetes and is waiting on government alignment to secure the outcomes financing needed to launch it.
Raven Outcomes’ work connects directly to Fund Canada, New Power Labs’ initiative to direct $500 million in grants and investments to underfunded and overlooked leaders by 2030. Its first-mile financing model demonstrates a practical way to move capital earlier and more effectively to communities that traditional funding often misses, while showing how collaboration between government, private funders, and community partners can create durable outcomes and help shift the broader system that delivers long-lasting outcomes and catalyze systemic change.
Join us on November 5 in Toronto, where conversations on collective action and collaborations to build a stronger Canada continue in person at the Capital Unlocked 2026 Summit.
