Buried at the bottom of page 207 in the latest federal budget is a promise to Canada’s social impact sector: a $400 million Community Services Recovery Fund to help and charities and non-profits “adapt and modernize” to support Canada’s post-pandemic recovery. 

Except the budget never defines ‘sector modernization.’ 

How could it? The concept sprawls across HR practices in the sector, digital strategy for non-profits, government regulations on charitable donations, and many other critical issues. Yet social impact professionals are already considering how to overcome these challenges — and the Community Services Recovery Fund, though still a work in progress, may be a major part of the solution.

Future of Good spoke with five social impact professionals and asked them to define what modernizing the sector looks like to them:

Help young social impact professionals learn about the sector

The social impact sector’s scope is vast, but Manvi Bhalla says all organizations need professionals with a few basic skills: public speaking, functioning online in a digital environment, public relations skills, and grant-writing experience. The co-founder of Shake Up The Establishment and missINFORMED says having some sort of central capacity-building initiative — potentially through a university course credit program — could improve the skills of young workers in the sector. “I think that we could all benefit from getting on the same page,” she says. 

When non-profits hire staff or recruit volunteers, Bhalla says, they’re almost always looking for a quick study. “It’s because you spend so much time training people, and then they quit because they get burned out,” she says. “But you’ve invested so much time in training individuals.” Shake Up The Establishment worked with Wilfrid Laurier University on a co-op initiative that gave close to 70 undergraduate students the chance to work at Bhalla’s organization. “They’re getting course credit so they’re incentivized to work hard on it, but they leave with these skills and then so many of them end up working in the sector or volunteering in the sector,” she says. 

During Shake Up The Establishment’s partnership with Wilfrid Laurier University, Bhalla says students learned about some of the most basic aspects of life in a non-profit, such as how non-disclosure agreements work, or the ins and outs of grant funding. “These are different things that you would have no way of learning unless you were entrenched in it,” Bhalla says. 

Invest in digital infrastructure

As Katie Gibson and Jesse Bourns wrote for Future of Good in May, the charitable sector — and the federal government — hasn’t made the adoption of digital technology a priority. “Investments from all levels of government in private and public sector digital transformation far outstrips analogous investments in the non-profit sector,” they wrote. Perhaps worse still, many charitable sector professionals simply don’t have the expertise to use new digital tools in the service of social good. 

Gibson, a non-profit executive, and Bourns, the co-founder of Powered By Data, suggest the charitable sector launch a Canadian Centre for the Digital Non-Profit to build “digital capacity”. Barring that, Gibson and Bourns propose the creation of a Task Force on Digital Transformation in the Non-Profit Sector to chart a course for the sector. (This has already been done in a number of studies, surveys, and even the Special Senate Committee on the Charitable Sector). “The hard truth is that nobody yet knows what are the highest value interventions,” the two wrote, “and flooding the sector with funds will result in waste and duplication.”

Set standards for adequate digital transformation in the sector

There is plenty of talk about digital transformation in the non-profit and charitable sectors, but Charles Buchanan, CEO of Technology Helps, says it doesn’t have any real standards for decent IT management, customer relations management, or information security. “Non-profits get terrible IT support,” Buchanan says. He believes there should be some sort of central body in the non-profit world responsible for IT standards.

“The sector is actually quite primitive in its approach to a lot of things,” Buchanan says. If the private sector’s technological capacity had the complexity and standards of a modern city, the nonprofit sector would be more akin to a village with no running water or power. “There’s some things that are just not done, like common infrastructure and common ways of doing things,” he says. 

Gibson’s and Bourns’s idea for a “Centre for the Digital Non-Profit” that would offer tried-and-true ideas for non-profits and charities looking to beef up their digital transformation could work, Buchanan says. But what matters most, Buchanan says, is that it doesn’t just produce another thick report on the need for digital transformation. “We’d want them to sit down…and just get down to work and establish some things, maybe even do a prototype,” he says. 

Level the playing field for equity-seeking groups

When it comes to sector modernization, Tim Fox, vice-president of Indigenous relations and racial equity at the Calgary Foundation, believes the social impact sector in Canada is unbalanced. Plenty of larger mainstream organizations can well afford to improve their own practices, but smaller organizations, and racialized communities, haven’t received a lot of help. “Instead of looking at the opportunity to modernize the charitable sector overall, I would hope that there would be an intentional focus on some of those equity seeking groups and trying to get them to a level where they can function on an equal playing field,” Fox says.

He says many of the tragedies Canada is grappling with right now, from the discovery of the bodies of 215 children on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School to an alleged terrorist attack that killed three generations of a Muslim family in London, Ontario, show just how many communities in Canada are left behind. “All of a sudden, we have this designation of $400 million to modernize the sector, and we’re not talking about the need to level the playing field,” he says. 

He cites Murray Sinclair, chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose views on innovation are somewhat at odds with the sector’s idea of modernization. “What Murray Sinclair argues is that innovation isn’t always about creating something new,” Fox says. “That innovation sometimes requires us to look at what was working in the past and bring it into this new contemporary time that we’re in.”

Create a fairer funding system

Samya Hasan, executive director, Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA), says the grant system as it currently exists doesn’t work in favour of small grassroots organizations like the ones CASSA represents. “There is a huge inequity in terms of how funds are distributed in the not-for-profit sector,” Hasan says. Major non-profits and charities with grant writing departments have a far easier time securing funds than grassroots organizations with, at most, a handful of paid (and likely overworked) staff.

Smoothing out the application and reporting process for grantees, especially those accessing government money, is a priority the Special Senate Committee on the Charitable Committee heard from dozens of respondents. Hasan says some major charities and non-profits will get grants to work with marginalized communities — such as South Asians — and then ask organizations like CASSA to pass over their clients — and proposed more direct funding. “Why not just give those small organizations money directly to work with the community, instead of giving it to mainstream organizations who say they are working with communities, have no connection to the community, and are asking small grassroots organizations to do the outreach for them?” Hasan says. 

Throughout the pandemic, she says, grassroots ethnic or faith-based organizations have punched well above their weight without all of the fundraising issues or regulatory restrictions seen by so many major charities. Volunteers organized hundreds of food baskets for low-income seniors through WhatsApp, while grassroots community groups — with City of Toronto funding — went door-to-door in South Asian communities to combat vaccine misinformation.“If we just recognize the small grassroots organizations and provide them the resources that they need, they can get things done,” Hasan says. 

Improve the financial self-sufficiency of charities

Funding in the social impact sector as a whole is rarely long-term. Jessica Farber, community readiness coordinator at SeeChange, would love to change that. “We need to be looking at other kinds of return on investment…to operate on a sustainable model where we are not constantly having to beg foundations for money to keep going,” Farber says. That includes opening up more funding possibilities for non-profits and charities — either from government or private foundations. 

Perhaps, Farber suggests, sustainable long-term investments in social impact could include support for organizations to create their own form of regenerative income, such as a community organization that practices social entrepreneurship to finance their work. Regardless of the specifics, Farber says the sector, especially the humanitarian sector where she works, needs longer-term funding to modernize. “Right now, I need to spend 60 to 70 percent of the time I’m supposed to be running a project on the ground trying to look for funding to keep these projects going,” Farber says. 

Another idea that is top of mind for Farber is creating a non-profit and charitable sector where social impact doesn’t have to have a financial return on investment: at least, not in the form of capital. “I think we need to take a longer view and not constantly expect humanitarian aid to have an immediate financial return,” she says. Instead, organizations and funders should prize the outcomes of good social impact work — improving human health or the environment — as inherently valuable. 

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