The RCA Trust Fund was established in 1973, with the mandate “to receive funds to assist in the encouragement and cultivation of the highest standards in the creative arts in Canada”. Today, its essential activity is to assist regional public galleries in adding to their permanent collections by providing grants for the purchase of works by living Canadian artists. However, the Trust has in the past provided other opportunities to artists, in the form of scholarships to students studying sculpture and architecture. In 2000, the Trust sponsored the Arts2000 RCA Trust Fund Jury Prize awarded to nine artists exhibiting in Arts2000, the RCA millennial celebration of Canadian visual arts. The inaugural RCA / Ernest Annau Scholarship for Architecture was provided by the Trust, in 2001.

The five-person Board of Trustees includes three Academicians and two friends of the RCA, an accountant and a lawyer. Applications from regional public galleries for RCA Trust Fund acquisition grants are received annually before September 1, at the Academy head office in Toronto.

The history of the RCA Trust is told in Passionate Spirits: A History of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, 1880-1980, written by Rebecca Sisler RCA in 1980 to commemorate the centenary of the Academy. The following is an excerpt from this book.

“ During George Arbuckle's Presidency in the early sixties, sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle had arranged to bequeath their studio to the Academy. They had hoped that it would be used for a meeting-place for artists but were generous-souled enough to realize that this might prove impractical and they left its disposal to the discretion of the Academy. They did however express the wish that proceeds from a possible sale be used "for the particular development and encouragement of, and education in, “Canadian sculpture."

Loring and Wyle both died in 1968, and eventually the studio came to the Academy as arranged. Unfortunately the timing was not good and with the building in considerable state of disrepair, there was no possibility of the Academy's restoring and maintaining it as the sculptors would have preferred. Finally in 1972 it was advantageously sold, and when later that year another small bequest was received from the estate of the late Hugh Allward, in his and his famous father's name, the two together made a very respectable sum.

Although legally the Academy was not bound to restrictions in use of the money, and at this juncture they might well have seen it as a justifiable means of escape from their difficult position, morally they were committed to respect the spirit in which it had been given. In this light it was decided to create a separate Trust which could not be tapped for administrative purposes. Under member Cleeve Horne's expert guidance, except for a small portion used to clear the books of debt, the balance was invested with the interest to be used each year for the encouragement of Canadian art. Once the interest began to accumulate on a regular basis it was immediately put to work in the form of grants to sculpture students attending the Ontario College of Art's off-campus school in Florence, Italy; as the basis for a sculpture competition; and as grants to emerging public galleries across Canada for the acquisition of works of art for their permanent collections. Exactly the kind of ongoing program that the Academy through its earlier intermittent scholarship efforts had always hoped to establish”.