Collaborate

No single organization holds all the pieces. Effective action on natural, social, and human capital requires working across boundaries.

CHC is a national hub: a connector, a convener, and a translator between the international frameworks that set the terms for non-financial capital accounting and the Canadian organizations — businesses, governments, Indigenous communities, and civil society — that must work within them. That role only has meaning through genuine collaboration with the organizations that sit above, beside, and below us in the ecosystem.

Internationally, CHC holds three formal roles that define our position within the global non-financial capital landscape. The Canadian Hub designation within the Capitals Coalition makes CHC the primary access point for Canadian organizations engaging with the Natural Capital Protocol, the Social and Human Capital Protocol, and the Coalition’s broader tools and peer networks. Our role as National Focal Point for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s Global Partnership for Business and Biodiversity connects Canadian business to the international biodiversity agenda directly — including the target-setting and disclosure expectations flowing from the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Membership in Business for Nature situates CHC within the global coalition working to align policy environments with nature-positive business practice. Each of these relationships, and what they mean in practice for Canadian organizations, is described in the sub-pages below.

Within Canada, the collaboration picture is more varied and more immediately consequential for how capitals thinking takes hold in practice. We work with sector organizations, academic institutions, Indigenous-led bodies, and provincial and federal government partners to ensure that the frameworks we promote are adapted thoughtfully to the Canadian context. The stewardship knowledge and rights of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples are central to any credible account of natural and social capital in this country — reconciliation and the meaningful inclusion of Indigenous knowledge systems shape how CHC approaches this work.

We also maintain active relationships with other national hubs of the Capitals Coalition around the world, and hold a coordination role as Secretariat for the Americas regional hub network. These peer relationships are a genuine resource: other hubs have navigated challenges in community-of-practice development, sectoral engagement, and policymaker outreach that CHC is still working through, and the exchange runs both ways.

This section also describes CHC’s Community of Practice — the network of practitioners, advisors, and organizational members through which capitals thinking develops and deepens across Canada. The Community of Practice is where peer exchange happens: shared challenges, tested approaches, and the kind of institutional knowledge that does not appear in framework documentation. If you are applying non-financial capital frameworks in your work, or working out whether and how to begin, this is the network to be part of.