We imported American philanthropy. It’s time for a Canadian solution 

By Jeff Goldby

Four years ago, I sent an angry email to a foundation after burning the midnight oil on yet another grant application, only to get their prompt rejection.

We weren’t a fit, and I should have known it. But instead of admitting that, I blamed them for the work I’d endured. We had an awkward call where I shared about the ‘grantpocalypse,’ and they shared their challenges of giving money away well.

That call became a friendship and a key reason I now build software for the people who move charitable money in Canada.

I see now how the system was designed to pit us against each other, but the view hasn’t made me calmer.

Almost everything about how Canadians practise philanthropy was learned from Americans. From the modern foundation to Giving Tuesday, Americans gave us Carnegie libraries and the Rockefeller-funded science that ended diseases, and there are good reasons why we copied them. They also gave us the disbursement quota, the grant application form, and the donor-advised fund. 

The Canadian charitable sector, though, faces different demands, donors included. It holds up most of the social safety net this country depends on when times get hard. It’s 8.3 per cent of GDP, $182 billion in economic activity and 2.8 million jobs, bigger than construction – and much of it is running on reserves that never rebuilt after 2020.

And times are about to get really hard. The effects of the trade war will fall on communities first. Ottawa is spending to soften it, but federal money is often slow and broad by design. Charities don’t get to be slow. They’re first in, at every crisis, every time.

Canadian charities will absorb much of the burden of this trade war. But the best way the sector can help them isn’t to do more of the same. It’s to redesign the system around a made-in-Canada approach to how we fund, buy and invest our charitable assets.

The funding system

The grant application was refined by American foundations to protect the funder from a bad outcome, then copied wholesale by ours. Together we built a system where a charity can spend three months asking for money that costs more to request than it’s worth. 

I know because I did it.

While the fix isn’t complicated, it is hard.

Start with a Canadian Common Grant Standard. There are 11,000 foundations in Canada, and it seems each with their own version of the same application. Our company’s version of a common charity profile is now used by foundations managing more than $2 billion in charitable dollars, and whether it’s us or someone else, there’s real room to do this better.

Then, on funding, we need to break our addiction to the disbursement quota (DQ) as the only lever. It’s a U.S. tax code import that needs a rethink. 

Fewer than half of Canadian foundations even file the disclosure that shows whether they met it. More than 6,000 foundations are a total blind spot; nobody, including the CRA, knows if they’re complying. 

This isn’t new. Among Canada’s 72 largest private foundations, 1 in 5 spent less than the 3.5 percent quota even during COVID, Charity Intelligence reported. 

And even where we can see the numbers, combined foundation assets grew $32.5 billion in 2024 alone, more than eleven times the $2.9 billion increase in what they actually gave out. 

It’s time to reimagine how publicly subsidized, tax-receipted money sitting in foundations actually moves, not just argue over one number.

COVID-19, however, did prove the system can flex. Many foundations doubled their granting rates, gave unrestricted multi-year gifts, and some emptied the bank. But flexing under pressure isn’t the same as redesigning the process. Canadian foundations grant about $10.7 billion a year. They can make early, outsized bets in a way Ottawa never will. Right now, getting money to the frontlines is the fastest lever we have.

The buying system

Charities and non-profits generate about 8 percent of Canada’s GDP, more than mining, oil and gas, or retail. Every RFP inside that sector is a decision about where ownership sits, where donor data lives, and where the money ultimately flows. 

Most of the software that moves Canadian charitable money today is American-owned. It arrived first, it worked, and nobody thought much about it. That was reasonable in 2015. 

TechSoup Canada already proves the model works on a smaller scale: charities buy as a group and get real discounts, usually on American products. Canadians are applying a buy-Canadian lens to groceries. It’s time our sector did the same.

The work we’re doing in philanthropy is too important for everyone to be purchasing and building alone. Buying together, and buying Canadian, is low-hanging fruit for our sector. 

The investing system

This is the biggest lever, and the least discussed.

Canadian foundations hold more than $160 billion in endowed assets. Twenty years ago, foreign stocks were about a quarter of the average Canadian foundation portfolio. Today they’re about 40 percent, while Canadian equities sit at 31 per cent. Canadians subsidize the tax break while the investment goes abroad. It’s time the mission applied to the portfolio, too.

One policy fix: redirect net gains on foreign-held capital back into the DQ, so taxpayer-subsidized money invested outside the country is required to flow back into Canadian communities faster than money invested at home. \

Moneris is the warning shot. The Canadian banking sector just sold it, and all the transaction data that comes with it, to a US private equity firm. Capitalism in its purest sense allowed this, but a blended model could have prevented it. Europe is already moving off Visa and Mastercard because it wants sovereignty over its own financial data.

While Canadian foundations can’t stop a bank from selling infrastructure, they can decide where their own money goes and the strategic bets they want the nation to make.

This is the core point: A foundation can invest for market return in Canadian equity, the same as anyone else. But it can also put capital into infrastructure and capacity plays that build sovereignty, the kind of long, patient, mission-aligned bet a pure capitalist entity, bound by its charter to maximize return, simply can’t make. 

Moving even a few points of that $160 billion toward Canadian companies, funds and projects would dwarf every grant and every purchase order combined.

In my work now, I see a new wave of philanthropists doing exactly this. They give millions without an application, buy Canadian, and line their assets up with their values. It gives me real hope.

Charity so often champions change one person at a time. The trade war is our chance to do it at the system level too, and to build something made in Canada while we’re at it.

Strong charities make a stronger Canada.

Jeff Golby is CEO and co-founder of WellFunded, a Canadian philanthropy software company supporting major giving.