Charities and non-profits are struggling with a “trilemma”: rising demand for their services, financial instability, and workforce precarity. Here are the problems and solutions, according to the data.
The non-profit sector’s “trilemma” is increasing each year: more demand for charitable services, more financial instability across organizations, and more workforce challenges. According to data experts from the Ottawa Food Bank and Volunteer Canada, these issues are interconnected. Anne Millar, Ottawa Food Bank’s officer of data and research, and Harar Hall, Volunteer Canada’s policy and research manager, are looking at how data can be harnessed for solutions across the sector.
The trilemma, according to the data
The Ottawa Food Bank has experienced a 90% increase in visits since 2019, according to Millar.
Volunteering has declined by 41% since 2018, according to Hall.
More than half of the Ontario Nonprofit Network’s survey respondents report that their organizations’ revenues are staying the same or declining, with some relying on their reserve funds to operate, according to ONN’s 2024 State of the Sector policy report.
These critical issues are compounding across organizations.
The Ottawa Food Bank provides food and collects intake data from people accessing services from a network of 98 regional food programs. According to Millar, 61% of people visiting food banks in 2024 were considered severely food insecure, compared to the 32% from 2018/2019. “Severely food insecure” includes people missing meals, having a reduced food intake, and at times going a day or some days without food. According to Statistics Canada, 10 million Canadians were considered food insecure in 2023. Despite this, the Ottawa Food Bank lacks the funding it needs to provide food for those in need. It receives 1.4% of its budget from the municipal government and no provincial or federal funding. Millar describes this as “inadequate support.”
We use data, yes, certainly to advocate. And we also use it to inform.
Anne Millar, Ottawa Food Bank
This September, in a motion moved by Councillor Marty Carr, Ottawa City Council unanimously voted to develop a strategy with provincial and federal governments, municipalities, and community partners (such as the Ottawa Food Bank network) to tackle the root causes of food insecurity in the city. This decision came one year after the city declined the Ottawa Food Bank’s request to declare Ottawa’s food insecurity an emergency or crisis, something the charity hoped could enable financial and governmental support. “We use data, yes, certainly to advocate,” Millar says. “And we also use it to inform.”
Food insecurity is caused by low household incomes, rising food prices, and limited grocery alternatives. Food Secure Canada published a blog post about Budget 2024’s missed opportunity in tackling food insecurity, despite the $1 billion the federal government committed to a five-year National School Food Program. The food alliance advocates for food security strategy and funding to address poverty, corporate profiteering, and alternative-food-provision investments.
“I think data helps us to really distill the complexity inherent in a systemic issue like food insecurity. It helps us understand demand and capacity,” Millar says.
While more Canadians are in need of food banks’ services, the organizations have less capacity to provide it. This deficit is by way of staff and volunteers.
Millar says that while finding additional funding was the top priority for 56% of food security organizations in their network in 2021, the need rose to 91% of organizations in 2024. At the same time, 48% of organizations needed additional staff in 2021, and by 2024, 87% of organizations were short-staffed. “It’s becoming overwhelming,” she says. Many organizations lost a majority of their volunteers during the pandemic, given the safety concern of having seniors on the front line. “But we haven’t seen them coming back. So the need for volunteers increased from 32% to 65% between 2021 and 2024.”
Hall explains the trilemma as a “self-fulfilling prophecy” of organizations lacking capacity through the decline of volunteers. “You have a decreased capacity to engage volunteers, which means that you then have less volunteers to be there to support programming, to support service delivery, to support ongoing engagement and connecting with communities. And then that sort of decrease in capacity to engage volunteers specifically is reinforced by a lack of sustainable funding for the sector.”
Volunteering is increasingly . . . seen as a luxury and something that [people] can’t afford, and that’s just the societal constraints of needing to put food on the table and the increased cost of living.
Harar Hall, Volunteer Canada
According to Hall, choosing volunteering over paid work and lacking time to commit are some of the barriers preventing volunteers from returning to their posts. “Volunteering is increasingly, for those people, seen as a luxury and something that they can’t afford, and that’s just the societal constraints of needing to put food on the table and the increased cost of living,” they say.
Financial constraints that stop organizations from being able to support the cost of police record checks, transportation to volunteer activities, and childcare costs continue to negatively affect volunteer sustainability.
How data can disrupt the cycle
“We have a decreased capacity internally for analyzing, collecting, rolling up, and sharing our data as a sector but an increased demand for data storytelling, advocacy advanced by data, strong and compelling numbers – and we have no money to sort of build that capacity overnight,” Hall says.
Funder reporting, an opportunity for storytelling and data analysis, demands considerable capacity for non-profit employees that not all organizations can afford. Hall says one way to increase data literacy and management is “having a really honest and upfront conversation with funders about the various ways that they ask organizations to collect data in a non-standardized way that means that organizations are spending more time trying to report to funders than actually collecting the data that they need to improve their services and improve their delivery, to improve their impact, to improve the way that they serve their communities.”
Volunteer Canada is attempting to build more capacity through the National Volunteer Action Strategy, which aims to optimize volunteering across Canada. The strategy is also an attempt to “break down some of those silos that organizations sometimes operate in,” Hall says. Though there are many organizations that operate with the same mandate and collaborate, Volunteer Canada hopes to enable best practices and guidelines among them.
“We need to be able to enable individual volunteer centres, individual organizations, to utilize data that they’re collecting every single day in really smart and really nimble and really advocacy-focused ways,” Hall says. This can include finding ways to share volunteers interested in the same causes among organizations and make volunteer safety screenings and training more agile across organizations.
“There are issues oftentimes of what appears to be duplication within the not-for-profit sector, but I think that even being able to evaluate what is duplication and what’s filling a gap is a capacity issue,” Hall says. “The ability to engage with your community and say, ‘Hey, are we filling your needs? Do we need to pivot? Do we need to think about the way we’re doing service delivery differently?’ That is a huge organizational overhaul, and increasingly, there’s less investment in terms of sector development and strengthening the infrastructure of not-for-profits. I actually think duplication, when you’re seeing less strengthening of partnerships and capacity at an organizational level, is going to happen more and more.”
This is why Volunteer Canada has made it a priority for the data they collect to be publicly available. “A thing that has been really important to us is making sure that people understand that if they’re contributing to the National Volunteer Action Strategy, either through the contribution of qualitative data insights or quantitative data insights, or survey responses – that this is not data that belongs exclusively to us,” Hall says. “It belongs to the sector.”
I think that the lack of coordination of data and the lack of coordination in the sector is more the issue [rather] than the lack of data.
Anne Millar
Volunteer Canada created a data ethics plan that draws from various data governance standards, ensuring that their work aligns with provincial and local laws around data disclosure and storage, as well as Indigenous data standards.
“Better data practices don’t just allow us to collect better data for our reporting or for advocacy,” Hall says. “They also allow us to know what we don’t know.”
Volunteer Canada shares anonymized data sets so organizations can layer them with their own data sets and insights to understand the state of the sector. November is Data and Research Month at Volunteer Canada, and they will be sharing their data from the National Volunteer Action Strategy with researchers and data practitioners. They are also interested in collaborating on data guideline development and sharing emerging insights.
“I think that the lack of coordination of data and the lack of coordination in the sector is more the issue [rather] than the lack of data,” Millar says. In the context of food insecurity, which is a “complex and systemic issue,” Millar says, “no one level of government, no one organization can solve it alone.”
This summer, Canada’s non-profit sector received its first data standard. While organizations are not mandated to adopt it, the standard is free to access and can support organizations on their data maturation journeys.
Shifting data priorities
The Ottawa Food Bank coordinated a group of people with firsthand experience of food insecurity, called equiTABLE, to share practical approaches and solutions to improve food programs. Millar says they are involved in many stages of the data life cycle, including its collection, analysis, interpretation, and use. The equiTABLE members meet monthly to work on consultations, focus groups, media appearances, and community workshops. They are compensated with $25 per hour.
“This really helps us make sure that whatever we’re doing, whether it’s at the level of collecting data or whatever we’re advocating for, meets the actual needs of people who are using food programs,” Millar says. “It’s a way of not doing any harm. It builds equity, inclusivity, and at the same time it helps us understand more about food insecurity. It helps us, I think, interpret the data better.”
Last year, when the Ottawa Food Bank first launched its “Neighbourhood Survey” to learn about people accessing food programs, equiTABLE helped improve it. Iman Al Khatib, a community outreach volunteer and equiTABLE member, says they suggested creating Arabic, Chinese, Somali, and French versions of the survey. They asked for printed copies, too, so people visiting food banks can answer the questions as they wait in line, rather than relying solely on digital access. The equiTABLE members also supported the team with the survey wording and determining which questions were mandatory so they did not collect too much data.
Millar says the Ottawa Food Bank has revised its data intake to build internal processes that support better data quality and mitigate risk among the organizations it works with. “Each of the agencies we support is autonomous, so we don’t govern them,” she says. “But we’re trying as well to educate and create a structure that facilitates effective and appropriate use of data.”
Millar’s background is in qualitative and quantitative research methods. With her team, she’s built a data governance plan with maturity models, which are meant to assess, benchmark, and improve data management.
When the Ottawa Food Bank contracted someone to offer training in data literacy, the staff found it useful but limited. Millar says the training wasn’t relevant to their food security work, so she began including literacy and numeracy support for staff alongside her job. “The goal is to progressively delve into more advanced topics,” she says.
We need to increase the collective data literacy and capacity of people that are already data collectors but don’t know it.
Harar Hall
Millar wants her colleagues to understand the types of questions they should ask to understand the limitations and strengths of the data they collect, and how to represent and interpret graphs.
“I would say that the solution is not as simple as ‘we need more data experts,’” Hall says. “We need to increase the collective data literacy and capacity of people that are already data collectors but don’t know it,” they say. These people can be receptionists, but they can also be volunteers with a range of duties. Hall says people need skill-building and professional-development opportunities to get better at collecting and reporting data.
Ultimately, Millar encompasses the lack of data, expertise, and funds fuelling the trilemma in a few words: “The limiting factor is capacity.”
The data conferences, workshops, and internal training that Millar and Hall attend and coordinate signal a desire to expand, for the good of the sector. “I’m seeing more and more data-focused summits and discussions within the non-profit sector, which is quite promising,” Millar says.
Anne Millar and Harar Hall were joined by Pamela Uppal-Sandhu to discuss their insights during a panel at the Charity Insights Canada Project Data Summit in October in Ottawa, on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation.
