(January 24, 2023) Created in 2020 to be a course of independent reporting on the charity sector, The Charity Report announced today that it was ceasing publication, as of January 30, 2023, two months shy of its third birthday.  The Charity Report will carry on hosting the website, so articles will be available on the website for at least the next six months. The long-format Intelligence Reports produced will be pulled from behind the subscribers’ paywall, and are available on the site’s Home Page.   “I’ve been working in the charity sector my entire professional ..read more

(January 23, 2023) On May 20, 2020, The Charity Report released its first subscriber-only intelligence report The Cost of Conflict: How we measure the global failure in Syria.  The Cost of Conflict looks at how the involvement of three iNGOs deepened in Syria between 2009 to 2018 grew to such an intensity that it ended up costing them billions of dollars and scores of their staffs’ lives.  “In 2009, prior to the Arab Spring, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) had two staff people in Syria. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had 13 staff there,” said ..read more

(January 23, 2023) With its release of Community Giving: The Growth and Giving Priorities of Community Foundations, The Charity Report looks at their history and giving practices.  Community foundations have existed in Canada for more than 100 years, with The Winnipeg Foundation being established in 1912. They are organized with the local need of the community in mind and, in modern times, are a vehicle for prospective philanthropists to establish donor advised funds. As reported in The Charity Report on August 18, 2020, “a donor advised fund (DAF) is an account established when a d ..read more

(January 23, 2023) Arts charities in Canada have been among the hardest hit groups during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Those dependent on live audiences have seen those audiences disappear.  In its Fall 2020 economic statement, the Government of Canada acknowledged the impact of the pandemic by investing $181.5 million in the Supporting Arts and Live Events Workers in Response to COVID-19 Initiative to stimulate employment, support ongoing operations during the pandemic, and prepare for the sustainable recovery of the sector. Canadian Heritage distributed $65 mil ..read more

(January 23, 2023) Pennies on the Dollar: Private Foundation Giving in Canada, outlines just how much Canada’s 20 largest private foundations increased their gross asset value over the 15 years from 2006 to 2019 and compares it to their giving.  The 20 largest foundations make up 63% ($44.5 billion) of the entire gross asset value of 5,800 private foundations, $74.5 billion in 2019. Studying the behaviour of the 20 largest foundations gives us a clearer picture of how most private foundation funds are spent, how much they earn compared to what they give away, how they are using ..read more

(January 23, 2023) In Public Foundations and their Priorities, we look at the he behaviour of public foundations—where they get their revenue and where they spend it?   And, as the pandemic has upended the lives of so many Canadians, it has also created an opportunity to look at the previously opaque practice of the Canadian charitable foundation practices.   For our study, we looked at two groupings of public foundations:  The performance of ALL public foundations (about 4,900) was reviewing for 2019.  The performance of the top 20 public foundations by ..read more

(January 23, 2023) To narrow the information gap about comparative compensation in the charity sector, the Charity Report compiled intelligence report Charity Sector Employees: Employee Stats, Industry Compensation and Salary Averages for 2018. For those working in the charity sector, the questions come fast and furious.  How many people are employed in the arts sector in Canada? How much are they paid in comparison to those who work in the education sector? Will I be paid a similar wage if I work at an environmental charity in Saskatchewan as I will in New Brunswick?  How do ..read more

By Katherine Verhagen Rodis, June 20, 2022 The Smart NonProfit : Staying Human in an Automated World, Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2022. 216 pp., $34.00 In The Smart NonProfit , Beth Kanter and Allison Fine offer a smart tech solution for freeing up staff time for more meaningful tasks and restoring their often off-kilter sense of work-life balance. Canadian charities face increased demand for services and decreased support from donations, as CanadaHelps shares in The Giving Report 2022. We’re being asked as nonprofit workers, “how can we do more with ..read more

Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937 (May 24, 2022) There is perhaps no more famous painting depicting the art of war than Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. And perhaps the most famous piece of poetry in the canon of the art of war is In Flanders Field by John McCrae, a ghostly three-verse chorus of warning for the living to keep faith with the dead, as it memorializes the April 1915 battle in Belgium’s Ypres. Twenty five years later, W.H. Auden wrote his nine-verse, ninety-nine-line poem September 1, 1939 to mark the beginning of World War II. It paints the atmosphere of a world that hears a ..read more

Photos by Jon Tyson (left and centre), and Malu Laker (right) (April 22, 2022) Community-centric fundraising (CCF) is a growing movement that challenges existing philanthropic practices as being colonial in their nature, and exclusionary in their practice. What started in Seattle, Washington has now gone global. A global council to guide the future of Community Centric Fundraising is being created. In part two of this two-part series, contributing editor Liz LeClair, CFRE, explores the equity movement in Canadian fundraising and how fundraisers have embraced the CCF principles ..read more