Ottawa Senators Foundation
Where the Senate meets the skates: Ottawa's community hockey heart.
The Ottawa Senators Foundation is a registered charitable organization rooted in the community of Ottawa, Ontario, and closely aligned with the Ottawa Senators of the National Hockey League. Its mission centres on growing the game of ice hockey among young people across the capital region and beyond, while also supporting broader community well-being initiatives that reflect the values of the Senators organization. Rather than operating as a corporate arm of the franchise, the Foundation functions as a community-facing vehicle through which the team's identity—red, white, and black—translates into rinks, programs, and neighbourhood events.
In an unofficial fan history, the Foundation occupies a place of quiet pride: it is the mechanism by which 'Sens Nation' extends beyond the boards of the arena and into school gyms, community centres, and backyard rinks across Ottawa and the surrounding outlying towns. It embodies the idea that the Senators belong to the city of Parliament, not just to a front-office spreadsheet.
Quick Facts
- Affiliation
- Ottawa Senators NHL franchise
- Ottawa
- Ontario
- Canada
- Primary focus
- Youth ice hockey development and community support in the Ottawa region
- Team colours
- Red
- white
- and black
- Modern franchise era
- NHL expansion team, 1992
- Original senators club
- Founded 1883; original NHL franchise ceased operations in 1934, with later amateur teams continuing the name
- Home city
- Ottawa, capital of Canada
Lore & Background
Ottawa carries a hockey lineage that stretches back to the 1880s, when the original Senators took the ice as one of the sport's earliest organized clubs. That original NHL franchise ceased operations in 1934, leaving behind a cultural scar in the city's identity—though amateur teams bearing the Senators name continued for decades. When the NHL returned the Senators name to Ottawa in 1992 as an expansion franchise, the community's hunger for a team was immediate and almost reverent. The Foundation grew out of that same hunger—not just for wins, but for a hockey culture that belonged to every neighbourhood, every school, every kid who could afford a pair of skates or couldn't.
In the years since, the Foundation has become a quiet institution in Ottawa's civic life. It is the organization that shows up at a suburban school to hand out a puck and a stick, that opens a community rink on a Saturday morning when the Canadian Tire Centre is dark, that pairs a young player with a mentor from the team's alumni. Fans who follow the Senators through the long, sometimes painful stretches of the 1990s and 2000s often speak of the Foundation as the reason they stayed: the team might not have made the playoffs, but the Foundation was still putting a kid on ice in a small-town arena forty minutes south of the city.
The name itself carries weight in the capital. The Senate of Canada sits on Parliament Hill, about 20 kilometres from the arena in Kanata, and the Senators moniker has always been a point of local affection and mild, playful rivalry with the city's political establishment. The Foundation channels that civic pride into something tangible: a child learning to skate, a community centre hosting a charity game, a neighbourhood that feels the team is theirs in a way that transcends a jersey on a shelf.
Reader's Guide
The Canadian Tire Centre, the Senators' home since the late 1990s, is a mid-size NHL arena nestled in the south end of Ottawa, a short drive from the Rideau Canal and the Parliament buildings. The building carries the familiar NHL layout: a 200-level bowl, a premium club level, and a concourse that smells faintly of maple syrup and cold air. The ice surface is standard 200-by-85 feet, and the boards still carry the red-and-black Senators branding that has been a fixture since the franchise's return in 1992.
Fan rituals here are understated compared to some markets. The "O-TTA-WA" chant rises in unison during key moments, and the crowd swells on power plays with a collective exhale that fans describe as almost parliamentary in its deliberateness. After the final buzzer, whether the result is a win or a loss, the tradition is to stay, to sit in the cold air of the stands, and to let the team skate a few laps. It is a small, unscripted moment of solidarity.
The Foundation weaves itself into this culture through Saturday-morning learn-to-skate sessions, school visits, and community rink days in outlying towns like Kanata, Orleans, and the rural municipalities south of the city. Local culture integration is natural: Ottawa is a city of institutions, of civic duty, and the Senators—named for the Senate, the capital's defining symbol—fit that identity seamlessly. The Foundation is the civic duty made visible: a stick in a kid's hands, a puck on the ice, a community that shows up.
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