About Coralus / Our Story

The newspaper headline read:

One million women crowdfund $1B and don't expect a financial return.

She could feel the impact of something so unconventional, waking people into new possibilities.

The goal would be to deploy the capital to ideas that fostered new mindsets, new models, and new solutions for a better world with zero extraction from the founder. After all, their ideas were here to benefit all of us as a society.

She socialized the idea far and wide until people started to gather and say I'm IN.

We started in Canada, with 500 women and non-binary people supporting 5 businesses we call Ventures and have grown to a global organization with over 190 selected Ventures and thousands of community members.

We focused on creating a safe space to experiment and bring forth different ways of running a business. We focused on wisdom from the ages, building relationships with Indigenous community members, centering personal transformation practices, and practicing radical generosity with ourselves and others. We know that if we are to create a new world we need to empty our conditioned ways of being, cultivate new mindsets, and get into community so we can witness, offer and receive the abundance of resources all around us.

We started with money but knew the magic here was't about money, it was the power of community coming together with a shared purpose and commitment to practice doing things differently, so things can be different.

We saw a lot of good ideas in our community get subsumed by the power dynamics around money as they tried to grow and focus on impact while investors consistently pushed for growth and returns above all else.

At every step of the way when you are building new systems, there is pain and grief as you witness the way things are, and how resources are consistently allocated to extracting over healing. When we see behind the curtain, when we watch the system continuously prioritize money through "power over" and dominance. We find ourselves in a constance dance of noticing, letting go, orienting ourselves towards the future we want, releasing what we don't want, unwinding our stories, staying in our integrity, trusting there is another path.

This is a practice. One we prioritize at Coralus.

We acknowledge the Indigenous peoples who are traditional stewards of the land where our headquarters reside: the Wendat, the Anishinaabe Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and the Métis Nation.

Indigenous wisdom is the pathway home to a life-sustaining society. We work alongside our Indigenous siblings, elders past present + future, globally, to transform systems on behalf of a better world.

Photo provided by Adam Ziorio Photography featuring Ecko Aleck of Sacred Matriarch Creative.

Coralus collectively practices different ways of doing things for a better now and a new inheritance. Members offer and access resources at their own pace, creating a self-regenerating, pay-it-forward pool of skills, connections, funds, and support then used to advance ventures and the collective doing world changing work.

Coralus has circulated nearly $19M to 190+ women- and non-binary-led ventures by distributing capital via collective decision-making. 45% of those founders are from chronically excluded racial and ethnic groups. The payback rate on its unsecured 0% interest loans is 95%. Founded in Canada in 2015, Coralus' current footprint includes the US, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.

We were reminded..."You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing reality obsolete."- Buckminster Fuller

We were reminded...

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing reality obsolete."

- Buckminster Fuller