Does the non-profit sector need thousands of students and recent grads? We have no idea — and that’s a big problem.
One of the first real-world projects I worked on out of grad school was a series of public consultations on Canada’s labour market. It was the year 2008. I thought it would be one of the most boring endeavours of my life, but I reluctantly said yes. Looking back, the eight months I worked on these consultations were some of the most rewarding of the early part of my career. I learned so much about the hidden human resources needs across a number of industry sectors, organizational hurdles to having reliable data, what skills are missing, and where talent is needed to keep Canada’s industry sectors growing. It wasn’t the hottest topic or the most flashy of projects but it drew me into the behind-the-scenes but critical work of skills shortage data analysis and labour market information that drives industries.
Those were the days when we had an HR Council for the Voluntary & Non-profit Sector. In 2008, the same year as my first project out of grad school, the HR Council published a three-part report titled ‘Towards a Labour Force Strategy for Canada’s Voluntary & Non-profit Sector’ which followed an extensive pan-Canadian labour force study. The report was a comprehensive look at paid employment in the sector, leading to a first-ever labour force strategy for the sector. The goal? To make sure that the sector had access to the people and skills it needed — and to inform strategies to attract, develop, and retain qualified people to work in the sector.
Fast forward to today.
The next few weeks will continue to see an intense round of reveals of WE Charity and inside what was its $912-million Canada Student Service Grant (CSSG) program deal. A program that aims to pay grants of $1,000 to $5,000 to postsecondary students in return for supervised volunteer hours at an NGO. According to the CBC, around 35,000 students and recent graduates have applied for the CSSG to date.
35,000 sounds nice when you hear it — but how close is that to what the sector needs in terms of skills and workforce? Is 35,000 too little or is it too much? What types of skills are actually required? In which regions? To tackle what issues?
The answer: We don’t know.
Why? Because there’s no reliable national data on labour market demand for the sector.
And why is that? Because the sector no longer has a dedicated HR Council. It shut down as an independent organization in 2013.
So when Campbell Clark in The Globe and Mail recently wrote, “The [CSSG program] appears to line up incentives to build a big grant machine, rather than fill a charitable sector demand,” he had a point. One has to wonder, where is there reliable data on what jobs are and will be in demand? Which social challenges will need more talent in two years? Which skills? Which regions?
Any idea, anyone?
If there’s one gem of hard truth every social impact professional and entrepreneur should take away from the controversial $912-million CSSG program, it’s this: Canada will come nowhere near addressing our most pressing social challenges without timely, reliable, and accessible labour market data.
The construction sector has it. The agriculture sector has it. The mining sector has it. Most sectors have it. But not us — not anymore.
The HR Council for the Voluntary & Non-profit Sector opened its doors in 2005 to bring employers and employees together to provide leadership, build knowledge, and develop strategies on issues related to employment. The creation of the HR Council followed a feasibility study that ran from 2003 until 2005 that confirmed pan-Canadian interest in collaborative action to address issues related to the sector’s workforce. It was part of thirty other councils conducting skills and workforce forecasts, many of which still exist today.
We often point to the fact that the social impact sector creates jobs and is an economic driver. According to Imagine Canada, in 2018 the non-profit sector alone employed 2 million people and contributed 8 percent to Canada’s GDP. The social impact sector needs to be taken seriously as a growth sector — but any serious sector would also know how many people it actually needs to employ, what kinds of skills shortages it has, which social issues require what types of talent today, and where will be the demand two years from now.
There is however, a glimmer of hope.
The absence of a clear picture on skills shortages, emerging skills demands, talent availability forecasts, and labour market data was one of the biggest under-the-radar structural issues before COVID-19. So much so that recommendation 7 of the Senate report Catalyst for Change: A Roadmap to a Stronger Charitable Sector is: “That the Government of Canada, in consultation with the charitable and non-profit sector, reinstate the Human Resources Council for the Voluntary Sector, or a similar body by which the sector can collaborate with government to fulfill aspects of the human resources renewal plan.”
At a time when communities look to build back better, a range of issues from mental health to food insecurity have been exposed and amplified due to the pandemic. The work of social impact organizations across the country is critical to post-pandemic recovery, but in order to actually tackle these challenges well, the sector needs to act on recommendation 7 of the senate report now.
Many have said that the CSSG program is poorly designed, but a poorly designed program using poor labour data, too, is even more disastrous for addressing the causes we all care about.
Vinod Rajasekaran
Publisher & CEO
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