We Charity Ltd. sells downtown Toronto offices, parcels to fund its future

We Charity Ltd., the charity founded by philanthropist Galen Weston, who emigrated from Australia with his family in 1941, said this week that it had sold the downtown Toronto properties that the charity has used for fundraising for almost 80 years. It is expected to realize a capital loss of $11.5 million after selling six condos and a handful of shops and parking spaces.

Mr. Weston, who was most recently a knight of the United Kingdom and the honorary consul general of Great Britain and Ireland in Canada, said the sale had nothing to do with the recession; prices had soared so high in the past few years that the market was no longer able to support a charity that spent two to three million dollars a year on offices, event space and fundraising.

“We were really an organization that had outgrown its capacity,” Mr. Weston said in an interview with The New York Times.

To spur interest in the properties, We Charity had held a pop-up auction during Toronto Fashion Week, auctioned off custom-made trophies, and the sale was streamed online.

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