Category: The Tech Revolution: 1998–2020

One of TRREB’s proudest contributions is to the Ontario REALTORS Care® Foundation (ORCF). Each year, our TRREB Members donate $1 per member per month in support of shelter-based charities. 

We heard from the most vulnerable about the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted. Accordingly, TRREB donated an additional $278,000 in ORCF emergency grants to GTA food banks and shelter-based charities. This supplemented the $713,000 that TRREB already donated in 2019, increasing TRREB’s total charitable support in the last 12 months to almost $1 million dollars!

TRREB Members have continuously given back to the communities they live and work in. 

Over 100 TRREB Members volunteer hours of their own time at 16 schools across the GTA by cooking and serving food on behalf of Toronto Foundation for Student Success Feeding Our Future: 

Children’s Breakfast Program.

Well over 32,000 REALTOR® volunteer hours are accumulated every school year, and the quality of the programs would not be possible without the generous contribution from TRREB Members. 

What better way for Toronto REALTORS® to support the importance of affordable housing than joining the frontlines to help build a home? Since 1999, TRREB Members have donned hard hats and grabbed their hammers to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, an international organization that helps low-income families move into home ownership. Among many landmark projects, TRREB is one of the partners that supported Pinery Trail, Habitat for Humanity’s largest home build project ever in the Greater Toronto Area, and a project that has provided 50 Habitat families with a place to call home.

In 2010, when TRREB President Tom Lebour suggested that Toronto REALTORS® should join Toronto’s annual Gay Pride Parade, he was hoping for a modest banner. Instead, Members responded with a spirited show of support. TRREB built a large float to share the message “There’s no place like home” and 200 marchers helped distribute a souvenir bracelet “TREB celebrates diversity” to the crowds lining the parade route. The success of the Gay Pride Parade is part of the reason that Toronto has become known as a city that embraces diversity. When pride celebrations began in 1981, they drew a crowd of approximately 1,500 people. In 2014, Toronto was chosen as the WorldPride site. Today, attendance surpasses one million people.

One generation reaches out to the next. In 2007, TRREB created the Past President’s Scholarship Award to support young people continuing their studies at a university, college or trade school. Two $5,000 first place scholarships and two $2,500 second place scholarships are awarded each year. As part of the 2020 application, students were asked to write an essay related to housing. One topic asked students to explore the question of what the future of housing might look like and why. The second topic asked students to look at factors, such as transportation, buyer incentives and vacancy taxes, that address affordability issues across the Greater Toronto Area.