This new campaign asking foundations to increase donations could unlock $700 million for charities

The COVID-19 pandemic has already had a profound impact on Canada: there have already been over 56,000 cases of the virus across the country, and by early May, job losses are expected to hit 5.5 million. The economic repercussions of the pandemic have already exacerbated the challenges charities face, and Imagine Canada has predicted a drop in donations of between $4.2 billion and $6.3 billion this year.

According to the organizers of a new campaign, this is the time for Canada’s philanthropic community to step up.

The GIVE5 campaign, launched by a collective of foundations across the country, is asking public, family, corporate, and community foundations to publicly pledge to donate at least 5 percent of their assets to charity this year. The group is hoping to have 100 foundations sign their pledge by today, May 5 — the date recently dubbed Giving Tuesday Now to encourage emergency donations to organizations impacted by COVID-19, though they won’t close the door on pledges after Giving Tuesday is over.

By law, foundations must disburse 3.5 percent of their assets annually. But if all foundations increased that amount to 5 percent, according to Charity Intelligence Canada, they could add at least $700 million more into the charitable sector this year alone. If foundations already disbursing over 5 percent of their assets yearly increased that to 6.5 percent, that total would increase to $1-2 billion.

On a webinar hosted by GIVE5 and moderated by Future of Good on Monday, several social impact leaders weighed in with advice for foundations interested in the GIVE5 pledge. 

Here are three ways Canadian foundations can begin to mobilize their assets this year.

Assess risks and get creative

When foundations decide to increase their annual disbursement by 1.5 percent, there is naturally going to be some risk involved — but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t make the change.

“Risk is always present in whatever decision a foundation makes,” says Hilary Pearson, philanthropy consultant and former president of Philanthropic Foundations Canada. She suggests having philanthropic boards carefully think through questions around the target, timing, and type of giving that they do.

Questions foundations should ask include: Where should they direct their assets? Are those funds best disbursed to a collective fund? To underfunded advocacy groups? To global efforts? Should that money be deployed immediately, or should it be spread out over the coming year? And how exactly should those assets be donated — in the form of a grant, as unrestricted cash, as general operating support?

“This is a time when we need a lot of creativity in foundation thinking,” Pearson says. “Creativity often means more risk. But I don’t think we can afford not to be creative.”

Listen to affected communities

Most charitable organizations and government entities don’t have the ability to be as nimble or take on as much risk as foundations do, which means foundations can step in more easily where they’re needed.

“We need to remember that, as foundations and philanthropists, we’re allowed to take a lot of risk,” says Éric St-Pierre, executive director of Montreal’s Trottier Family Foundation. “We don’t have the same accountability to corporate shareholders or the public as governments may have, so we’re able to take more risks and we can act more quickly. We can show solidarity by listening to our grant partners and groups that are more affected.”

“Communities know what they need,” says Kris Archie, CEO of The Circle, an organization that bridges the gap between Indigenous Peoples and philanthropic organizations. “Funding locally is incredibly important. National funding, from my perspective, becomes very difficult [during a crisis like this]. Given the beauty and the bounty of diversity in this country, it’s not actually possible to have a national panel know the audience of folks in all the myriad of communities that exist. So fund local and fund as direct as possible.”

For the Sitka Foundation of Vancouver, pledging to disburse 5 percent of their funds this year was an easier decision. However, the path forward from there still isn’t entirely clear to them, and will be shaped by tuning into to community needs. “To be totally honest, we don’t have the plan for getting to 5 percent in 2020,” says Carolynn Beaty, director of the Sitka Foundation. “We’re still trying to get our heads around what’s happening day-to-day — but we’re trying to be open and listen to the communities we work with and what the constituents that are important to us need.”

Build the future we want

While foundations signing the GIVE5 pledge are responding to an immediate need, they’re also taking part in an opportunity to build a new future for the social sector — and that’s an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed.

Senator Ratna Omidvar, who served as Deputy Chair of the Special Senate Committee on the Charitable Sector, is using the current crisis to push the government to open up rules around charitable giving. 

At the moment, “charitable organizations and foundations are not able to grant money to any organization that is not a charity,” Senator Omidvar says. “I have written to the Minister of Finance asking him to suspend this rule during the crisis because it prevents us from getting money into the hands of those organizations and those communities where the need is greatest, as opposed to those organizations that have charitable status.”

Archie says philanthropic organizations can start to bend similar rules themselves. “It becomes very simple, during a moment like this, for philanthropic organizations to recognize that they write their own rules,” says Archie. “You write the rules about who you give to and how you can give better, so you can adapt the rules. Pay attention to the rules that you’re breaking … around your grantmaking, around timelines or reporting, around the application process, and see whether or not you can actually bake that into your practice as we move out of this particular moment in time.”

That’s a sentiment echoed by Joanna Kerr, president and CEO of Tides Canada. “We need many, many more conversations to really shift the power and to be driving long-term systems change — because this is a once-in-a-lifetime moment,” Kerr says. “This moment could help us actually build a new nation.”

Every pledged foundation that took part in the GIVE5 webinar is already thinking of increasing their disbursements past 2020.

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