Overview:
This is the third and final article in a series exploring shifting trends in charitable giving in Canada.
When Bruce MacDonald, president and CEO of Imagine Canada, speaks about generosity, he often asks for a show of hands from those in the audience who have benefitted from a charity.
When he starts, only a few hands go up. Then he lists all the charities that people could have used in their lives — things like attending arts events, visiting museums, sending a child to university, being part of a place of worship, or receiving medical care funded by hospital foundations or made possible by donor-supported research.
“Halfway through the list, every hand in the room is up,” he said.
Helping Canadians become more aware of the scope and impact of the charitable sector is one way the sector can promote giving, MacDonald believes.
“The range of the breadth of the sector is so huge,” he said. “There’s a disconnect there,” he added, noting most people do not realize how their lives are impacted by charities.
“We need to try to close that gap.”
For MacDonald, this means not only engaging Canadians when charities need money or volunteers.
“It’s about making the unseen visible, so that as people think about the kind of communities that they both want and expect, to help them understand that having a strong charitable component is important,” MacDonald said.
This work needs to happen now, he says.
“As a sector, we have work to do, and we need to get started now so we can create broader participation.”
Consolidation needed
Chris Bosch, founder and principal of Chisel Consulting, says there are other strategies the charitable sector should consider as well.
This includes the possibility of mergers to make the sector more efficient.
“There are so many of them competing for the same dollars,” Bosch said of the estimated 84,000 registered charities in Canada. “It might be time for some consolidation.”
Bosch also wonders if charities might consider new ways of enabling Canadians to support their work, such as impact investing.
The idea came to him when he was visiting Uganda in 2011 on behalf of World Vision Canada.
While there, Bosch met a woman who was trying to help 6,000 farmers improve and grow their farms. Her efforts were stymied by a lack of affordable loans; local banks were charging up to 27 per cent interest.
“It became very clear to me that I needed to find a way for people like her to get the capital they needed to improve their businesses and lives — a way that went beyond charity,” he said.
That experience led him to create Flourish Financial, which invites people to put $1,000 into a pool that is then loaned to entrepreneurs in the Global South at competitive interest rates.
Today, Flourish Financial has over 50 members who have contributed at least $1,000 each to an annual lending pool to support entrepreneurs in the Global South.
“It’s like an investment club,” said Bosch, noting that members do not get a charitable tax receipt. They also do not take interest payments, but instead invest their returns into more loans.
“If we are going to eliminate the scourge of poverty, we need other tools, like investment,” he said.
For Bosch, investment is another tool that can be used to promote generosity and get good results. “There’s a new story to be told, a story about investing in people and their dreams,” he said.
The other two articles in this series can be found here and here.
