The NHL Foundation Canada has awarded grants to five organizations for fiscal 2025 to help strengthen communities and improve lives through the game of hockey.
The grants center on five core pillars at the heart of the foundation, the NHL's primary strategic philanthropic vehicle in the Canada: equal opportunity; Operation Line Shift (military and veteran support); youth development; health and well-being; and Pathways to Hockey.
"This inaugural slate of NHL Foundation Canada grantees is a powerful reflection of how hockey can unite communities and change lives," said former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an NHL Foundation Canada board member. "From supporting military families to expanding access for underserved youth, these organizations embody the values that make our game so special -- resilience and opportunity. I'm proud to be part of a Foundation that's advancing this kind of meaningful impact across the country."
NHL Deputy Commissioner and NHL Foundation Canada Chairman Bill Daly said, "with this first group of grantees, we're proudly investing in organizations that are driving lasting change, and we're just getting started."
Kim Davis, NHL senior executive vice president and NHL Foundation Canada president, said the grant recipients "reflect the heart of our mission: expanding opportunity, promoting equity, and investing in organizations that meet young people where they are.
"These partners are leading with innovation, authenticity and impact, and we're honored to stand alongside them."
The grant recipients are:
BGC Canada (Youth development)
Formerly Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada, BGC Canada is the country's largest child- and youth-serving organization, offering after-school programs, meals, leadership opportunities, and wellness support in every province and territory. NHL Foundation Canada is supporting BGC's Mental Health Fund, which empowers local Clubs to: Hire trained mental health outreach staff; Launch tailored mental wellness programming for young people; and deliver trauma-informed care and mental health first aid training to frontline youth workers.
Impact Society (Health and well-being)
Impact Society's Heroes program is a nationally recognized character development initiative delivered directly in school classrooms. Aimed at students in grades 7–10, "Heroes" blends narrative-based learning, guided reflection, and small group dialogue to teach, emotional regulation, purpose-driven leadership, character and identity development, and resistance to negative influences. Integrated into provincial school health curricula, Heroes is especially effective in reaching at-risk youth and has been adapted for Indigenous, remote, and rural communities. The program's social-emotional learning outcomes have been validated through multiple school board partnerships.
"The grant is going to help us to impact a rural indigenous community in northern Alberta with the entire Heroes program and bring them together as a community to celebrate that and, more importantly, it's about investing in the next generation," Impact Society chief executive officer Chris Primeau said. "Our programs are not just evidence based, they're research-backed to provide long term resilience and strength based identity for you to take the program in schools and after school at home. And what this means for them is a better understanding of what makes them strong, who they are deep down inside, what their values are, who their key supports are, how they can be great support to others. And most important, I think, once you wrap it all together in terms of where they're going with it, how are they going to use this to use this to build themselves and build the world around them in the future."
Black Girl Hockey Club Canada (Equal opportunity)
Black Girl Hockey Club Canada (BGHC Canada) is a women-led nonprofit creating opportunities in hockey for girls, women, and nonbinary athletes ages 8–21. Their programming directly addresses both cultural exclusion and financial barriers, and includes free hockey development camps, with full gear provided; mentorship and career exposure programs, featuring Black women in sports leadership; community roundtables and youth-led advocacy projects.
"We'll figure out how we put it to use, but we've got a lot of good programming that we ran this past winter that definitely need support," BGHC Canada co-founder and executive director Saroya Tinker said of the grant. "It definitely eases the pressure of those events and stuff. We had multiple events this past winter like road trips that we went on with our mentorship girls and stuff like that, so we definitely needed the support."
