When Kevin McCort joined Vancouver Foundation as its president and CEO in 2013, the grantmaker never expected it would jump-start an eight-figure emergency granting process for local charities in a matter of days. “It just wasn’t part of the foundation’s vision of itself,” says president and CEO Kevin McCort. 

McCort is a 25-year veteran of the international humanitarian sector, including a six-year stint as the president and CEO of CARE Canada. The concept of disaster philanthropy was very familiar to him. Vancouver Foundation began responding to local emergencies such as the B.C. forest fires and the opioid crisis during his tenure, yet running an emergency aid program for local charities during a global pandemic was a completely new challenge. Within 10 days of the first public health restrictions, Vancouver Foundation had launched a $2.5 million fund. After four months, it had raised $20 million. 

“One of the reasons I wanted to get off the ground so fast here was that I knew we could act faster than any government,” McCort explains. “I wanted to show charities that we as funders were listening and we were quick to respond — that we recognized their capacities.” As the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic began to settle in, other philanthropic leaders in Canada and around the world came to the same conclusion: grantmakers moving quickly could shore up support for frontline non-profits and charities.

But the COVID-19 pandemic also shone a light on cracks in Canada’s philanthropic system. Non-profits and charities have repeatedly called out philanthropic funding, application, assessment and reporting models as inflexible. Philanthropy has often ignored Indigenous and Black-led organizations; when confronted, some philanthropic leaders claimed they hadn’t seen the data to suggest these organizations had been marginalized at all. And while Canadian philanthropists speak openly about the need to empower marginalized communities, executive directors and board members in the philanthropic sector are still overwhelmingly — although not exclusively — white. 

No law stops philanthropic organizations from offering flexible funding to their grantees. Nothing prevents philanthropists from looking into what their Black and Indigenous-led grantees have known for decades: that funding is not distributed equitably in this country. Opening up the leadership of a philanthropic organization to include members of the community its donee organizations serve has always been an option. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as Canada’s social impact sector faced its hardest year in recent memory, many philanthropic traditions around accessible funds, equity, and trust went out the window. What hasn’t is the imbalance of power between grantmakers and communities.

No strings attached

Philanthropic funding has been a lifeline for non-profits, charities, and marginalized communities around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to data from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, grantmakers disbursed roughly $20 billion U.S. globally in 2020 — and that’s a lowball estimate. By comparison, the philanthropic response to the recent California wildfires, the Ebola crisis of 2014-2016, and Hurricanes Dorian, Harvey, Irma, and Maria combined was less than a billion dollars. “This is so much bigger than anything we’ve ever seen before,” says Tanya Gulliver-Garcia, director of learning and partnerships at the Center for Disaster Philanthropy. 

The number of grantmakers who offered flexible funding, or money that is not earmarked for a specific program or purpose, also shot up in 2020. In the first half of the year, the Center for Disaster Philanthropy found only 3 percent of grants were explicitly listed as flexible or unrestricted. By the end of the year, it had shot up to a whopping 39 percent. However, Gulliver-Garcia says that is because of the philanthropy of one woman — MacKenzie Scott, the former partner of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who made $4 billion U.S. in unrestricted donations. When you take her contribution out of the equation, Gulliver-Garcia says, the percentage of unrestricted grants in 2020 was closer to 9 percent. 

Unrestricted funding is designed to cover a non-profit or charity’s expenses besides specific programs or services.  While program-specific funding is important, organizations incur many other expenses — staff salaries, equity training, office rent, computers, and more. During the pandemic, many organizations had to pivot from working in offices to working from their couches — and were completely unable to use restricted grant funding to pay for the expenses incurred during this shift. 

As non-profits lost out on charity dinners, galas, and other fundraising activities, several Canadian philanthropic organizations called on their sector peers to switch over to unrestricted funding for their existing grantees. “As a philanthropic community, there are several things foundations can do right now,” read a statement from Community Foundations of Canada (CFC), Philanthropic Foundations Canada (PFC), Environment Funders Canada (EFC), and The Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. “We can help by acting quickly and collaboratively, as well as by stretching beyond our conventions and norms as organizations to adapt to the new realities imposed by COVID-19.” 

In this statement, PFC, CFC, EFC, and The Circle laid out a series of ‘guiding principles’ for supporting the non-profit and charitable sectors during the pandemic. One suggestion was converting grants with specific uses to unrestricted funds — or, at the very least, loosening restrictions on existing grants. The organizations who signed the statement also suggested philanthropic leaders offer flexibility on reporting timelines and deliverables for project grants, simplify application guidelines, and keep the grant cycle going whenever possible. Not only that, they said, grantmakers should offer whatever assistance they could — from bridge financing to core funding to support for Indigenous leadership and organizations — to weather the pandemic and recover from its aftermath. 

“We told them — you know your communities best and we trust you to use the resources where you see fit,” Aliweiwi says. 

Jehad Aliweiwi, president of the Laidlaw Foundation, says his organization relaxed restrictions on its existing grants after the pandemic began. Many of their grantees work with youth affected by the justice, education, and child welfare systems, and Aliweiwi knew the pandemic would not make their lives any easier. Black and Indigenous communities in Canada are far more likely to contract the virus thanks to a lack of access to healthcare, high infection risks at work, and higher rates of vaccine hesitancy due to medical racism. “We told them — you know your communities best and we trust you to use the resources where you see fit,” Aliweiwi says. 

When the Molson, Jarislowsky, Trottier, and Saputo Foundations formed the Consortium philanthropique Quebec COVID (the Quebec COVID Philanthropic Consortium) last March, they began distributing funds to local community organizations trying to halt the spread of COVID-19 within Montreal’s boroughs. But instead of making each organization handle their own share of the reporting requirements for the funds they used, Félix-Antoine Véronneau, COVID-19 coordinator at Philanthropic Foundations Canada, says the consortium centralized their donations to one key organization per borough — usually the head of the neighbourhood Round Table, a council comprising leaders from a variety of municipal, social impact, and even business organizations. That organization would then be responsible for sharing out funding to all other organizations in their area. “The burden was a lot lower for all the organizations involved,” Véronneau says. 

One of the lessons Aliweiwi has learned from the pandemic so far is that philanthropy isn’t always great at handling urgent demands for funds in a crisis. “Philanthropy is not very agile or responsive,” he says. It leans on familiar strategies such as rigorous reporting requirements, grant cycles, and lengthy wait times for responses. Still, unrestricted grants are seen by many in Canada’s philanthropic sector as a new norm. Sadia Zaman, CEO of the Inspirit Foundation, says they’re exploring the idea, as well as how to give more power to the organizations they serve. “We’re moving to more and more unrestricted funding and moving very much towards trust-based philanthropy,” she says. So, too, is Vancouver Foundation and the Laidlaw Foundation. “We have governance that allows us and asks us to do that,” Aliweiwi says. Their board includes representatives from the very communities their foundation wants to support. “We don’t fund what we like — we fund what communities need,” he says. 

Who’s in control?

There is a fundamental tension between wealthy grantmakers, non-profits, and communities in need. The question of whether or not granting restrictions should be loosened in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic only scratches the surface. Underneath the bureaucracy and reporting requirements of a typical program grant is the question of voice and control — who holds the power in the donor/donee relationship? Leanne Burton, director of partnership development at MakeWay, says this is still a concern in spite of the conversation around funding restrictions. “There are a lot of institutions out there that are very much continuing to centre donor interest over community needs,” she says. 

Philanthropists are in the business of supporting non-profits and other organizations to do good. But they can also pick and choose which causes, leaders, or communities to support — or ignore. The question of how philanthropists can adequately balance their own goals with the needs of communities is still unanswered. ‘Trust-based philanthropy’ is a recurring buzzword within Canada’s philanthropic sector, but so far, it seems many funders are simply working more closely with communities rather than empowering communities to act on their own terms. 

Over the past year, MakeWay team members liaised with communities across Canada — in B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest region, as well as others in northern Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and the Northwest Territories. Early on in the pandemic, one of the biggest priorities for these communities was protecting elders from COVID-19. Meanwhile, MakeWay’s donor-advised funds holders were also asking what they could do that would actually help communities, rather than simply appease their own interests as donors. MakeWay rolled two rapid-response funds in April: one has distributed $301,000 to remote communities, while the other allocated $169,000 to community-led initiatives responding to the virus. “This is the first time that I really saw communities letting funders know what they needed and funders responding by giving unrestricted funding that did not require any application or reporting measures,” Burton says.

“This is the first time that I really saw communities letting funders know what they needed and funders responding by giving unrestricted funding that did not require any application or reporting measures.”

That’s because a lot of MakeWay DAF holders, according to Burton, already buy into the grantmaker’s approach to community-led environmental justice. “We’re not necessarily a retail DAF provider,” she says. “We’re more of a like-minded community of funders and community partners that tends to engage in the work in more of an immersive way.” Pre-existing consensus is also what greases the wheels between Montreal’s grantmaker consortium and the collections of public health officials, borough representatives, and Neighbourhood Round Tables known as crisis cells. Véronneau says the consortium made it clear that groups would be guaranteed funding so long as they worked on creating action plans to respond to the pandemic. “Unless they refused to engage on the prevention side…then they were sure to get a grant,” he says. 

The consortium did allow some leeway for groups on how exactly they’d accomplish those action plans. Véronneau says one community organization that worked with elderly residents might bring in workers capable of doing phone-based outreach, while another based in a very diverse neighbourhood might make a point of bringing interpreters into their plan. “We adjusted and worked with them to customize the action plans,” Véronneau says. After those consultations were done, the various organizations funded by the consortium could use their resources however they wished. 

Other grantmakers are trying to understand who they’ve left out of their funding process in the first place. Vancouver Foundation is asking grantees what they find difficult about accessing grants in the first place. “A lot of organizations that are affected by the pandemic often weren’t in our circle,” McCort says. “Maybe they applied, but didn’t get through, or they didn’t apply because they didn’t think they would get through.” Vancouver Foundation is running a series of focus groups with charities who’ve been denied funding or who haven’t been funded by them at all as a way to improve their processes. 

These measures are ways to improve access to grantmakers, but they still don’t quite address the inherent imbalance of power between foundations and the non-profits and communities they serve. McCort acknowledges the fact grantmakers can simply refuse to fund organizations, but believes there is more to the relationship than money. “That narrative tends to go ‘the donor has the power because they have the money’, but that money is useless without ideas,” he says. “It is inert. It has no power — it is just money.” Except in a relationship between non-profits or communities in need of resources to fund their programming and grantmakers with those resources, money is, in fact, power. 

This is a tough problem for the entire philanthropic sector, but Zaman believes it is possible to be more accountable. “I think we have to fight the narrative that this is hard,” she says. “It’s not. I think you just have to have some understanding of equity and you have to have some understanding of power.” The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that grantmakers can give to communities with little to no restrictions without any serious issues. “You just have to trust that the people on the ground doing the work actually know exactly what they’re doing,” she says.

Bridging the gaps in philanthropy

Philanthropy’s history in Canada traces its roots back to the British practice of raising funds for charitable purposes and public buildings. The foundations of 17th and 18th century England upheld paternalistic, classist and white supremacist values even as they funded orphanages, schools, and hospitals across the British Empire. In some cases, the patrons of these foundations directly benefited from colonialism and slavery. Just last summer, Black Lives Matter supporters in the U.K. city of Bristol pulled down a statue of a prominent 17th century British philanthropist — merchant Edward Colston, a man who gave the equivalent of nearly $10 million Canadian, much of which he made through the slave trade, to charity during his lifetime. 

As COVID-19 swept across the world last year, the centuries-long epidemics of systemic racism and police violence rose to the fore once again. The killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer last May sparked protests around the world. In Canada, the deaths of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Chantel Moore, Ejaz Choudry, and Rodney Levi in 2020 — either during encounters with police or at the hands of officers themselves — also prompted outrage about the impact of racism on marginalized communities north of the border. 

It also prompted reflection among Canada’s philanthropic leaders, many of whom had not noticed how their organizations systemically underfund Black-led or primarily Black-serving organizations. “Unfunded”, a research report prepared by the Network for the Advancement of Black Communities and Carleton University’s Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership program, found that only six of the 40 public and private foundations it reviewed funded Black-led organizations during the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years. Despite accounting for 3.5 percent of Canada’s population, Black-led groups received only 0.03 percent of funds in the 2017-2018 fiscal years, while primarily Black-serving organizations received 0.15 percent of funds. 

Interviewees for the report believed a Black-led philanthropic foundation was needed to focus on Black communities in Canada that had long been neglected by grantmakers. “It’s really important to recognize that the exclusion of Black communities is happening also in the philanthropic and charitable sectors, despite having a reputation for doing good work and having good intentions,” Rebecca Darwent, a co-founder of the Foundation for Black Communities, told Future of Good last December. “The lack of representation ultimately affects decision making.” In March 2021, the Foundation secured $3.85 million in funds and capital transfers from the Inspirit and Laidlaw Foundations. 

Another major development during the COVID-19 pandemic has been the creation of the Indigenous Peoples Resilience Fund (IPRF), an initiative run by and for Indigenous communities. Victoria Grant, one of the IPRF’s founders, says conversations around creating an Indigenous-run foundation were in the works before the pandemic, but their first meeting didn’t happen until last April. “There were people who felt we wanted to move too fast and that we should slow down. But of course, COVID wasn’t slowing down,” Grant says. 

By June 8,, 2020, the IPRF had put out their first call for applications. Any Indigenous-led or Indigenous-serving organization looking to improve resilience in Indigenous communities across Canada was eligible for $5,000 to $30,000 as unrestricted funding. Grant recalls receiving calls from prospective applications asking for specifics — what could they use this funding for? The answer was simple: anything your community needed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, so long as you didn’t take more than necessary. “If you’re out hunting, you don’t take more than you need,” Grant explained to them. “You take what you need and you leave the rest for future generations.”

Undoing centuries of exclusion will take time. One of the major recommendations made by the Center for Disaster Philanthropy in its 2020 report is to bolster funding for racialized communities and non-profits around the world. “As with all disasters, people who were vulnerable before COVID-19 have become increasingly vulnerable during the pandemic,” its report reads. While the IPRF has raised close to $11 million so far (and distributed $3 million to Indigenous communities), the Foundation for Black Communities is still working on their base. Only the MLSE Foundation, the grantmaking arm of the Toronto Raptors, Maple Leafs, and Toronto FC, have followed in the footsteps of the Inspirit and Laidlaw Foundations so far. 

Committing to a sea change

The COVID-19 pandemic is the disaster of a generation. Economic stagnation, climate catastrophe, and COVID’s aftereffects on ‘long-haulers’ will carry on for years, if not decades to come. Much of the weight of these issues will fall on governments — the $20.6 billion contributed by the global philanthropic sector in 2020 pales in comparison to the trillions of dollars offered by Western governments. But philanthropic leaders also have a role to play in COVID-19 recovery. They can offer flexible funding targeted to non-profits, charities, and communities in need, with a focus on racialized populations. Better still, philanthropic leaders can actually share the immense power and wealth they hold with the communities they serve through trust-based philanthropy.  

Whether these equitable approaches to philanthropy survive the pandemic remains to be seen. Grantmaking leaders have committed to doing so. Who will hold them to those promises? Having a diverse board of directors is important to Aliweiwi’s efforts to relax granting restrictions at the Laidlaw Foundation, but diverse boards are still a rarity among Canada’s philanthropic organizations. Listening to community is also important, but ultimately, grantmakers are under no obligation to do so. Committing to equity is critical for grantmakers keen on serious change, but equity for whom, and on what terms? 

Improving philanthropy all comes down to power. Paternalism, white saviorism, and colonialism are the very bones of the philanthropic model used in Canada. During the COVID-19 pandemic, years of advocacy against its constraining and disempowering nature suddenly bore fruit. Change became a necessity. As was the case with healthcare discrepancies, racism, and pandemic prevention measures, COVID-19 added to the injustices already borne by those who were most disadvantaged by philanthropy. More crucially, however, it shone a spotlight on the cracks. 

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