‘Hunger Games’ have no place in Indigenous fundraising

Hillory Tenute was disappointed but not surprised when she opened an email inviting Indigenous organizations to compete for corporate donations this September as part of an online advertising campaign.

“That’s the part that was really disgusting, that they wanted it to be a social media campaign,” says Tenute, executive director of Indigenous Youth Roots, a national charity that collaborates on programs, grants and opportunities grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. 

She wrote about the offer in a LinkedIn post but didn’t identify the private company that made it, focusing instead on the issues the overture highlighted.

“Indigenous youth non-profits, like the one I am part of, are already pitted against each other to scrap for federal and provincial grants and resources,” she says.

The company in question intended to allow its customers to vote for one of four Indigenous-led organizations and a $100,000 donation would be divided between them based on the percentage of votes received.

“To approach any charitable organization, and especially an Indigenous one during the month where what we now call Canada will observe Truth and Reconciliation Day and OrangeShirt Day, with an idea that exacerbates this is demeaning.”

Janine Manning, an Indigenous consultant and fundraiser, says she’s seen similar funding pitches from corporate donors. A lot of work has been done in the non-profit and philanthropic sector to raise awareness of problematic granting practices, but very little of that work has filtered down to business communities, she said.

“A lot of the time, corporate folks are thinking about what’s in it for them,” Manning says. “What they’re asking these Indigenous organizations to do is free labour, unpaid labour, labour that they may not have the capacity to do.”

“The corporate capitalistic mentality is, show us you’re worthy.”

A report published last year found Indigenous charities and qualified donees only received $1 for every $138 received by non-Indigenous organizations in 2019.

About 4.9 per cent of the population in Canada is Indigenous. But, Indigenous charities received 0.7 per cent of gifted funds that year, totalling about $60 million — a minuscule fraction of the $9.6 billion Canadian charities doled out to other charities and donees that same year. 

“It needs to be a more of an equitable distribution right across the board,” Manning says. 

“This notion that we have to fight for funds is very problematic … it is part of a scarcity myth that has been deliberately created through the avenue of white supremacy, assimilation and colonization.”

Asking people to vote for a “favourite” charity among organizations that work with residential school survivors or deal with intergenerational trauma is particularly problematic, Tenute says. 

“What does it mean if one organization receives more votes than the other? Does that mean their life’s work, their life’s cause, is not as significant as the other?”

Tenute says s declined to participate in the fundraising campaign and advised the company to abandon the scheme — advice the company appears to have followed.

“The work of reconciliation is not a one-stop shop; this is about supporting the next seven generations,” Tenute says. 

“Please, don’t turn Indigenous non-profit funding into the Hunger Games more than it already is.”  

Funders wanting to donate to Indigenous-led organizations need to start by building relationships and examining their own motivations, say both Manning and Tenute.

“What is your intention behind this funding? Are you doing this to sleep better at night? Are you doing this because you genuinely want to make changes in this country for Indigenous people?” asks Tenute. 

“What is your intention and the relationship you want to build?”

A good way for a funder or business to begin working with an organization is to start by asking what the organization needs and making space for meaningful discussion, says André Pawan Vashist, director of learning and collaboration at Philanthropic Foundations Canada.

“It’s not just about how much money we give and how much media we get; it’s more about how we build relationships, how we’ve become partners partnering,” Vashist says. 

“If we do it responsibly, we do it with care. And that means we minimize creating a scarcity and competitive landscape and that we support the organizations without … having them competing against somebody else to get money because that’s not creating an equitable space.”

Empathy and trust are also crucial to the process of giving and relationship building, he says.

“We need to listen to the people we want to support,” Vashist says.

“That organization could have emailed them and said, ‘Hey, you know, we’re really interested in helping out, and maybe it is the wrong timing, but is there anything that we can do right now.’”

However, when corporate donors get things right, Tenute says their contributions have a real impact. In 2021, the Mastercard Foundation gave Indigenous Youth Roots a $3 million gift — with no strings attached.

“They just said, use the funding however you want to use it, and it was such a foreign concept to me and to everyone else around me,” she says.

In recent years, Indigenous Youth Roots has focused more on private donations and less on government funding, which often comes with rigid application guidelines, little flexibility and onerous reporting requirements.

In the end, Tenute says her decision to speak publicly about her organization’s experience has led to many conversations with Indigenous people in the non-profit sector, as well as allies. 

“I really did see it as an educational opportunity for me to say, this is not how you do it, and this is why.”