Foundations have seen a dramatic increase in funding requests for the same granting dollars. Is there an opportunity for philanthropy to work more collaboratively in the face of these pressures?
Elsipogtog First Nation is located in eastern New Brunswick, less than 100 kilometres north of Moncton. It is a small community of only about 3,600 people, but it is home to an innovative initiative aimed at local young people, the Nogemag Youth Program.
The program is designed to help Mi'kmaq youth reconnect with culture, community, and self through cultural teachings, ceremony, and mentorship. The Nogemag Youth Program was recently announced as one of 28 recipients of a Catapult Canada grant from the Rideau Hall Foundation (RHF) to expand its trauma-informed, land-based work to more youth in the community. When asked what this new funding would mean for Nogemag, program director Frederick Soucy said, “In our case, it’s keeping us alive. Realistically, we wouldn’t be here without it right now.”
Nogemag is not the only program struggling to stay afloat. Last year, RHF launched its fourth open call for grants from our Catapult Canada program. These grants are designed to help youth-serving organizations across Canada build capacity, evaluate impact, and scale up innovative initiatives that address barriers to learning and foster community-based solutions.
By the time the deadline arrived, we had received more than 700 applications for Catapult grants, with requests totalling more than $88 million. With an envelope of $4 million, only 28 projects could be funded. It was a reality check for us – particularly because the high level of demand was so unexpected, and beyond anything we had seen before. In the 2024 open call, for example, Catapult received 134 applications, totalling just over $16 million. Of those, 32 organizations shared a total of $4.3 million in funding. That means about one in four projects that applied received funding, whereas in the most recent call in 2025, only one in 25 projects could receive funding. And even among the unsuccessful applications, there were many strong projects with committed and experienced staff running successful programs that just needed a little extra support.
We had a similar experience with our Indigenous Teacher Education initiative last year. We received 74 applications, with $55 million in funding requested, and funded 12 projects at $8.5 million, or one in six applications. “This may not seem like a lot, but it is in the Indigenous teacher education space,” says Randa Abader, manager of ITE partnerships and granting for RHF. “We received applications from nearly all of the Indigenous teacher education post-secondary programs in the country.” In many parts of the country, these programs are still in early stages and are not yet benefiting from diverse funding streams.
This volume of demand is not limited to RHF’s learning initiatives. We witnessed something similar when we helped launch the Covering Canada: Election 2025 fund last March. The fund sought to enhance journalistic coverage by rapidly providing financial resources to small- and medium-sized media outlets. The non-partisan initiative’s goal was to ensure that high-quality information was produced for Canadians during the unexpected election campaign.
Created and led by the Public Policy Forum, and delivered in partnership with RHF and the Michener Awards Foundation, the Covering Canada fund awarded $525,000 in grants to 40 local media outlets during the campaign. But the demand far outstripped the fund’s capacity: 79 applications from across the country were received in the first three days. Grants ranged in size from $2,500 to $35,000 and resulted in ambitious and impactful journalism for many underserved communities. But how much more could have been accomplished had there been a larger pool of funding to draw from?
The demand we’re seeing is undeniable, accelerated by overlapping crises and an increasingly uncertain political context.
Ana Sofía Hibon, Inspirit Foundation
We know that many in the Canadian philanthropic sphere are experiencing similar demands: the Journalism Futures Fund, co-funded by the Euphrosine, Inspirit, McConnell, and Sonor foundations, was created to support independent journalism and to strengthen civic life and democracy in Canada. The fund received 130 applications for three to five available grants, ranging from $150,000 to $600,000.
“The demand we’re seeing is undeniable, accelerated by overlapping crises and an increasingly uncertain political context,” says Ana Sofía Hibon, senior program manager with Inspirit Foundation. “In this environment, greater coordination among funders isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity.”
There are doubtless other examples of this new rise in need in communities and sectors across the country. What’s driving this dramatic increase in funding requests?
The first and maybe least intriguing answer is the sharp increase in the use of artificial intelligence. Grant writing used to be a very specific and specialized skill, but with AI tools and the right prompts, it has become much easier to draft answers for granting applications. And so the volume of applications goes up. In reviewing this high volume of applications, we also noticed that quite a few were so similar in their wording that they were virtually identical.
The philanthropic sector has worked hard to be clearer in our language, yet granting guidelines and application language can still be quite jargon-heavy and filled with inaccessible language. This is a barrier for applicants who may not be seasoned grant writers, or who are working in their second or third languages. For these applicants, AI tools can be a powerful way to level the playing field. While we recognize that AI can be a capacity-building tool to help non-profits tell their stories, the risk is that the writing can sound generic, and the voice of the community each non-profit is representing is lost.
The second answer is reduced spending at all levels of government. The recent federal budget revealed a plan to cut program spending in favour of large projects and military spending. While specific programs have not been named, all government departments are expected to cut spending by 15%, and many will do this by allowing existing programs to sunset. Indigenous-based programs, for example, are expected to see an estimated $2.3 billion less spending by 2030. Also likely to be hard hit by these cuts are programs for women and veterans, and programs addressing climate change.
The last answer is simply the current state of the world (gestures broadly). Food insecurity in Canada is at record levels. Food banks recorded nearly 2.2 million visits in March 2025, the highest ever. Housing pressure remains elevated, and average rents are 12% higher than three years ago.
Canada’s population surged by more than 744,000 people in 2024, and communities welcomed large numbers of newcomers. Program demand rose in parallel, and services are still catching up on waiting lists and backlogs, despite more moderate population growth in 2025. Data released by Statistics Canada in 2024 noted that demand for services increased significantly for 21.4% of non-profits, but capacity has increased significantly for only 6.1% of non-profits.
What can Canada’s philanthropic sector do in the face of these pressures? For RHF, we recognize that future funding opportunities we release may need to have more defined parameters, while maintaining our desire to not be prescriptive as to the strategies. However we evolve our funding mechanisms, we want to keep listening to and supporting community-driven solutions and ideas. We think there is also an opportunity for the sector to step up and provide alternative, flexible funding options that give organizations the freedom to innovate in their programming, and to cover core operating costs that many grants don’t include. Is there also an opportunity for philanthropy to come together more collaboratively, to reduce some of the inefficiencies and, frankly, time wasted, by charities and non-profits churning out the same unsuccessful proposals?
And we would love to know: What are you seeing in your circles? How have funding demands shifted? And how can the philanthropic sector best continue to support equity-based programs in communities across Canada, especially when there is every reason to believe these needs will continue to grow?
