Canadian non-profits need an HR council (again) — here’s why, according to sector leaders

Whenever Michelle Baldwin, the executive director of Pillar Nonprofit Network, needed help coming up with professional development opportunities or figuring out a social media policy for her staff, she once had a place to turn.

Her organization doesn’t have a dedicated human resources manager. “As an executive director, I’m the person that holds the strategy, the public policy, I do HR,” she says. The same is true for many of the 610 different non-profits and social enterprises comprising the Network. She recalls receiving a lot of questions about staff pay, professional review documents, and how to attract younger executive directors to the non-profit world as a generation of older leaders retired.

Until 2012, Baldwin could rely on the HR Council for the Voluntary and Non-profit Sector. Formed in 2002, it studied human resources issues affecting non-profit workers, published aggregate labour market data on the Canadian sector, and helped Baldwin and other sector leaders figure out how to run their HR. “It was probably one of the top tools that I was connecting people to,” she says.

Roughly 2 million Canadians work in the sector as a whole. However, there hasn’t historically been a lot of national data on the workforce itself: average salaries, working conditions, or racial demographics, for instance. Pension details are fairly scant. Over the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, non-profits laid off an estimated 37,000 full-time workers according to Imagine Canada. The HR Council did its best to keep track of these details during its decade-long lifespan but, amid its absence, non-profit leaders say it has become difficult to calculate the extent of the sector’s problems and ask the government for help, especially during one of the most difficult times in modern Canadian charity: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Owen Charters, president and CEO of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada – and the board chair of the HR Council at the time it was dissolved – says conversations with elected officials about the sector’s problems end up in a catch-22. They inevitably ask for data. “Well, we’d love to,” he tells them, “but you cut off our capacity some years ago. So we don’t. And then it becomes this vicious circle.”

The concept of a sector council is fairly simple: bring together representatives from unions, industry, government, and educational institutions to tackle major problems affecting a particular industry or sector. Canada’s first government-supported sector councils were established in 1992. By 2010, about 29 councils, ranging from agriculture to aircraft maintenance, received federal funding to tackle major HR issues.

But in December of 2012, the federal government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided to pull all public funding for the sector councils, believing industries should bankroll the organizations themselves. Some of the councils survived thanks to industry funding (such as the Canadian Council for Aviation & Aerospace). The HR Council for the Voluntary and Non-profit Sector did not. Many of its training materials were moved to the Community Foundations of Canada website in 2019, and its website is now dead. 

Non-profits are under incredible financial pressure in the face of COVID-19, even as demand for mental health and other social services surges.

Data on the Canadian non-profit sector’s workforce does exist in spite of the HR Council’s demise. Charity Village and the Association of Fundraising Professionals publish rigorous annual reports. Imagine Canada also gives updates in its Sector Monitor on some major issues facing Canadian charities. And the Ontario Nonprofit Network does its own surveys. In between all of these reports, however, is a lack of comprehensive national data the HR Council once offered. The Ontario Nonprofit Network is now partnered with an online HR firm, but Baldwin says it isn’t the same. “They’re still not the labour force strategy work…or looking at the impact of leadership,” she says. In other words, there isn’t a large-scale overview of the issues affecting the entire sector, easily accessible in one location. 

Charters says the HR Council’s mission started with the Voluntary Sector Initiative, a major partnership project to build a better relationship between the non-profit sector and the federal government. It came up with six key focus areas, including HR. “Some organizations were getting themselves in trouble on the legal side, particularly when they were deciding to terminate employees,” says Lynne Toupin, the HR Council’s first executive director. “So that was an issue we felt we had to address fairly quickly.”

Toupin says the HR Council advised non-profits on how to recruit, write contracts, support and train existing employees, and handle layoffs. Many small or medium-sized non-profits simply don’t have HR personnel, but desperately need help handling this part of their operations. The Council also acted as a way to validate the importance of a sector with millions of skilled, capable workers.  “Canadians didn’t seem to understand that this was a workforce – this was an actual viable workforce,” Toupin says.

Canada’s non-profit workforce is fairly significant. On a per-capita basis, it is second only to the Netherlands.

In fact, Charters says, Canada’s non-profit workforce is fairly significant. On a per-capita basis, it is second only to the Netherlands thanks, in part, to the small armies required to staff Canada’s hospitals and universities. But Charters believes post-secondary institutions do a poor job of highlighting opportunities in this kind of charitable work. “Colleges and universities weren’t training specifically for the sector,” he says. “They were training for professions, but not thinking about the idea of going into a charity.”

Not everyone in the sector believes the HR Council’s absence leaves a gap. Peter Blakely, director of Charity Careers Canada, says there’s already plenty of data. He points to the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy, as well as AFP Canada and Charity Village, as prime examples. “They are extremely detailed,” he says. “They get into different types of positions and the full compensation packages – from salary, bonus, benefits, vacation, RRSP contributions. They cover the gamut.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to hammer Canada’s economy, sound workforce data on the non-profit sector will be worth its weight in gold. Baldwin is in favour of bringing back an HR Council for the non-profit sector but insists it must serve today’s needs. “The future of work is changing really quickly,” she says.

Since the HR Council’s demise in 2012, Canada has seen a global pandemic, an ongoing racial reckoning over police brutality and systemic racism, and the completion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report. Non-profits are under incredible financial pressure in the face of COVID-19, even as demand for mental health and other social services surges. Tens of thousands of non-profit workers are believed to have lost their jobs in the last few months.

Baldwin says a resurrected or reformed HR Council would need to consider these massive upheavals. It would need to adopt anti-racist ideas and be prepared to spread them to a sector more cash-strapped than ever. Furthermore, she says, it would need to prepare non-profit leaders to hire younger, more diverse non-profit workers. 

Toupin, the HR Council’s first executive director, believes the sector’s upheaval during COVID-19 proves the Council’s worth. “We will see that there is a need for this kind of organization,” she says.

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