Two people who saw the same gap from different sides — and decided to close it.
Intention to Impact was built on a simple belief: the organizations doing the most important work shouldn’t have to fight the hardest for funding to do it.
Vanessa Wideski
Ten years ago, Vanessa started a nonprofit to fill a gap she saw in her own community: with no roadmap, no funding background, and no guarantee it would work. Today, that organization, Low Entropy, is self-sustaining, bringing in over $1M in annual revenue, and is currently in the process of becoming a funder itself.
Along the way, she worked closely with Indigenous leaders to help launch new organizations built to meet needs the first one couldn’t reach alone — including the Tri-Cities Friendship Centre and the Whonnock Cultural Reclamation Society.
What she kept seeing, over and over, was the same pattern: incredible community work, starved of the funding it deserved — not because the work wasn’t good enough, but because no one had taught these organizations how to access what was already available to them.
As her own organization shifted from seeking funding to providing it, the next step became obvious: take everything learned building one nonprofit from nothing, and put it to work helping others do the same — nationally, and at scale.
Maverick Han
Maverick built Iskotêw Training from the ground up: a program training Indigenous youth on and off reserve for careers in firefighting and emergency services, rooted in cultural knowledge and centered on mental wellness.
A few years in, he founded The Iskotêw Foundation, the charitable arm of that mission: delivering culturally relevant safety training and emergency preparedness programs to First Nations communities across Alberta and Saskatchewan. In its first year, the Foundation brought in over $1M in annual revenue through grants alone — built on partnerships with organizations like Lakeland College, Shell Canada, the Peter Gilgan Foundation, and TC Energy.
Leading active firefighters through a hands-on, practical program for Indigenous youth taught him everything about what it takes to change outcomes for a community. It also taught him a harder lesson: the work only goes as far as the funding behind it.
Watching communities fight for every dollar of program funding, Maverick saw the need for a dedicated partner who understood both the on-the-ground reality of community programs and the funding systems standing in their way. After that success with the Foundation, he took everything he’d learned navigating grants firsthand and built it into our AI grant-finder tool — so other communities could put that same knowledge to work without having to learn it the hard way.
We've both watched good work go unfunded. We built this so it stops happening.
Vanessa spent a decade learning how to build an organization that funders trust: the hard way, through trial and error, until it became sustainable enough to start funding others. Maverick spent years on the ground watching Indigenous youth change their futures through a program that almost didn’t have the funding to exist.
Put those two experiences together, and the mission writes itself: take what works, hand it to the next organization standing at the same starting line we both once stood at.
Not because we finally had enough willpower. Because we finally had enough self-worth, and enough of the right people in the room, to build something that lasts.
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