OTTAWA -- Shopify founder Tobi Lutke and his wife Fiona McKean are joining the fight against COVID-19.
Over the weekend, the Ottawa couple committed $1 million through their charitable foundation “the Thistledown Foundation” to the grassroots incubator “Conquer COVID-19.”
“Conquer COVID-19” is working to get personal protective equipment to health care workers during the pandemic.
Speaking on CTV Morning Live, McKean said the couple was looking for a strong team to partner with when they found “Conquer COVID-19.”
“In Ottawa, we’ve been working for a couple of weeks on what we could be doing and we’ve been doing small things here and there. But we were really looking for a strong team to partner with so we could just, all hands on deck, really start hitting the ground running,” McKean said Monday morning.
“We found them and then it was a pretty quick judgement call after that. They were absolutely the right people to team up with.”
Lutke and McKean quietly launched “the Thistledown Foundation” last year, with the goal of investing in long-term decarbonization efforts and reducing the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. The foundation was seeded with an initial $150 million endowment.
But Lutke says the couple decided to shift the organization's focus to COVID-19 right now, adding the pandemic is an “all hands on deck time. Everyone’s being called on to do what they can.”
In a letter on the Thistledown Foundation's website, McKean and Lutke say the decarbonization of the world is the foundation’s stated long-term goal, “however, in light of the global pandemic, we knew we needed to help with Canada’s response to the virus.”
The Thistledown Foundation will aim to help improve the domestic supply chain for personal protective equipment and accelerate academic research projects.
