$50 million gift: Jennifer Brennan leads a decade-long commitment to support First Nations communities
More than 40 years ago, a small education authority on the shores of Rainy Lake received a gift with no strings attached.
In the words the institute still uses to tell its own story, the gift was given in Anishinaabe tradition, “with hope, trust, and good intent.”
What mattered most was the trust that came with it. Along with the backing of community leaders, families, and Elders, that gift helped the Rainy Lake Ojibway Education Authority grow into Seven Generations Education Institute, a name that echoes the Anishinaabe teaching that today’s choices should serve the next seven generations.
Four decades later, a second gift has arrived in that same spirit, and it is far larger.
Most recently, Seven Generations Education Institute, known throughout Treaty 3 simply as SGEI, announced a $50 million, ten-year partnership with the Mastercard Foundation.
For a network of First Nations communities spread across the lakes, forests, and long highways of northwestern Ontario, it is the kind of commitment that changes what a young person can imagine for themselves.
No single billionaire wrote this check.
The Mastercard Foundation was born in 2006, when Mastercard went public and gave about 13.5 million of its own shares to create an independent charity. That stock, worth roughly half a billion dollars at the start, has grown into an endowment of more than US$53 billion, making it one of the largest foundations in the world. The company does not choose its causes.
The Foundation’s board and leaders do. So, to find the human being behind a gift like this, you look inside the Foundation, and the trail leads to a woman in Ottawa named Jennifer Brennan.
Brennan is the Foundation’s Senior Director of Canada Programs.
Her voice is the Foundation’s voice in SGEI’s announcement. But her connection to this work began long before she joined a philanthropy.
For nearly twenty years she worked inside the national organization that represents First Nations across Canada, ending as Chief of Staff at the Assembly of First Nations after serving as its Director of Strategic Policy.
She sat at negotiating tables on behalf of Indigenous Nations, pressing on education and on the recognition of land title. It is patient work, and it points to a conviction she has voiced again and again since: the people closest to a problem usually understand it best.
When she joined the Mastercard Foundation, she was not handed a ready-made plan. Her assignment, as she has described it, was “to listen, engage, and co-create.” That meant sitting down with Indigenous Elders and young people and asking what they wanted. The plan grew out of those conversations.
A year later the Foundation’s board approved EleV, a national strategy with a bold goal: helping 100,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit young people finish post-secondary education and move into meaningful work by the end of this decade.
The vision at its heart was set by Indigenous youth themselves. They called it Mino Bimaadiziwin, an Anishinaabe phrase meaning “a good life.”
Those same words appear in SGEI’s announcement of the new partnership, a small echo that says a great deal about how closely the two sides have come to share one vision.
Brennan is candid about why she works this way.
She has written that Indigenous families lived through more than a century of government policies designed by others and imposed from above. Those policies broke apart families, wore down languages and cultures, and left deep harm in their wake.
“Reconciliation and progress require ending this top-down approach,” she wrote, “and recognizing that Indigenous people know better the barriers they face and the path forward to solutions.” It is a striking thing for someone who directs large sums of money to say.
In practice, it means every partner in her program is either Indigenous-led or working hand in hand with Indigenous youth and communities.
The Foundation does not tell SGEI what to build. It trusts SGEI to know.
“When Indigenous youth have access to education that reflects their identities, cultures, and ambitions, the impact extends far beyond individual learners,” Brennan said of the new partnership. “SGEI provides Indigenous young people with opportunities that position them to shape their futures, drive economic development, and lead decision-making that contributes to wellbeing today and into the future.”
Away from her work, Brennan lives in Ottawa with her husband, Patrick, and their three sons, whom her biography describes as a source of “endless wonder, grounding, and adventure.”
Perhaps that is part of why she speaks about young people with such conviction. “We believe that young people are driving transformative change and can achieve their full potential,” she has said. For her, that belief is where the work begins.
She has had strong allies at the top.
Reeta Roy, who led the Foundation for 18 years and was named by Time as one of the most influential people shaping the future of giving, responded to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action by sending her team out to listen to Indigenous Elders and youth. EleV grew from that listening.
Roy stepped down at the end of 2025 and handed the Foundation to Sewit Ahderom, a technology entrepreneur and investor who co-founded the data company Gro Intelligence and had served on the Foundation’s board for two years.
Ahderom has made clear that the Canadian work will continue. Just days before the SGEI announcement, she launched a $130 million national fellowship for more than 1,000 Indigenous youth leaders.
“Indigenous youth are already leading in their communities,” she said, “and they understand what their communities need.” It is almost exactly the belief Brennan has held since her first day.
The bond between the Foundation and SGEI did not start with this gift.
It has been growing, one program at a time, for years. In 2017, SGEI joined the local school board and the language nonprofit SayITFirst to launch Anishinaabemodaa, a movement to bring the Anishinaabe language back into kitchens and living rooms across the territory, where many families had lost it over generations.
In 2020, the Mastercard Foundation came alongside with a five-year commitment. Its support helped adults return to the language their grandparents spoke and helped sustain Azhemiinigoziwin, a program in which Anishinaabe women rebuild their strength through culture, language, and education.
When the pandemic isolated remote communities, the Foundation’s help with technology let SGEI keep teaching students who could no longer reach campus. Last September, the Foundation honored SGEI with a $10 million recognition gift as one of ten Indigenous institutes it singled out for excellence. The new commitment is five times that amount and stretches across a full decade.
What will it build? Over the next ten years, SGEI plans to open new programs and expand existing ones, with special focus on the trades and healthcare, fields where northern communities badly need skilled people of their own.
There will be more support for learners, more pathways into real careers, and more Anishinaabemowin and cultural teaching in every part of the institute. The hope is simple, even if achieving it is not. A young person from a First Nation on Rainy Lake or near Kenora should be able to earn a credential, find good work, and grow into a leader without having to leave home, family, and language behind.
The man charged with turning that hope into classrooms has lived nearly his whole working life inside this story.
Brent Tookenay, a member of Couchiching First Nation, began at SGEI as a young high school teacher in the institute’s early years, learning the work beside its founder, Delbert Horton.
He later spent eight years as superintendent of Indigenous education for the Rainy River District School Board, then came home to SGEI to succeed Horton as chief executive in 2015.
Since then, he has opened the new Rainy Lake Campus, launched a campus in Sioux Lookout, and received the Meritorious Service Medal from the Governor General.
This June, SGEI and Confederation College marked a new partnership the Anishinaabe way, with drumming, singing, Elders’ teachings, an exchange of gifts, and a shared feast. Through that accord, SGEI will now deliver accredited college programs in Fort Frances, Kenora, Dryden, Red Lake, and Sioux Lookout.
Tookenay describes SGEI less like an institution and more like a home. Learners come, he has said, to earn a driver’s licence, try a workshop, finish high school, or begin a college program, “and return to SGEI again and again.”
“With the support from our communities, we lift our learners up and encourage them with love, food, culture, and the ability to go home at the end of the day to their families,” he said. Of the new partnership, he said simply: “Our communities have always been clear about what they want: language revitalization, and education that reflects who we are and prepares our people for the future.”
Beside him stands Naomi Field, who has given 26 years to SGEI’s board and 16 as its chair. The board is made up of representatives from ten local First Nations, and Field helped shape the mission it follows today: degrees, diplomas, and certificates rooted in Anishinaabe knowledge, and a chance for anyone to learn Anishinaabemowin.
When the gift was announced, she did not talk about money.
She talked about children. “Our First Nation’s children have a right to their culture, their traditions and songs,” she said. “With this funding commitment, our responsibility is to steward this funding in ways that strengthen learners and respect our accountability to the community. We look forward and are ready for the work ahead.”
The best way to understand what this money means is to look at the people SGEI has already reached.
One woman came to Azhemiinigoziwin at 35, struggling with addiction, mental illness, and the loss of two people she loved. The institute now describes her as a strong, empowered Anishinaabekwe, an Anishinaabe woman who has found her footing again. One graduate of SGEI’s adult language program taught Anishinaabemowin to local fifth and tenth graders while still a student herself, and she now teaches the language on the institute’s team.
That is how a language comes back, one teacher and one classroom at a time. At a summer paramedicine camp in Kenora, young people practiced the skills that might one day save a neighbour’s life. “Kids can do hard things,” their program coordinator said, “when they’re given the opportunity to learn.”
For the Mastercard Foundation, $50 million is a small fraction of its fortune.
For the families of Treaty 3, it may shape a generation. Four decades ago, someone believed in a small education authority on Rainy Lake enough to give without conditions.
Today Jennifer Brennan, who built her career on the conviction that communities know their own way forward, has helped make sure that belief is repaid many times over.
The money is new, but the idea behind it is old, and it is the one SGEI was named for: what is planted with care today will be there for the next seven generations.