While non-profit workers fulfill the needs of their communities, many are overworked and under-compensated by their employers.
Priscilla Miuccio believed in what she was doing. Volunteering with seniors at a non-profit Latin community centre every week wasn’t much work, but she loved it. She spent her days chatting and playing bingo with seniors, and even helping out in Zumba classes. But she found herself dealing with more pressure than expected as turbulence at the executive level of the non-profit began falling on her.
When she started volunteering in January 2024, she was supervised by an interim coordinator, who was supervised by an interim executive director. The non-profit had already had a troubled legacy of executive director after executive director, but as both interims were departing, they recommended Miuccio for the coordinator role. New to non-profit work, and especially fresh at this role, Miuccio was ecstatic to get more involved and to receive compensation for the work she’d be doing, but she didn’t receive much information as to what the position would entail.
Miuccio received no training for the role and became the sole person responsible, from April until November, for the seniors’ program and its 25 regular attendees as she waited for a new executive director to make things official. “All I had known was an example of what I experienced day-to-day, but I didn’t know what the rules are,” she says. “There wasn’t a mission explained to me. There [weren’t] responsibilities. There was no contract.”
As funding for the seniors’ program ran out, Miuccio was asked to take on the operating costs. First it was payments to the Zumba instructor, then making sure the fridge was stocked with milk. She found herself incurring more and more costs out of pocket to keep things afloat while receiving promises that she would be paid back once everything had been “sorted out.”
There wasn’t a mission explained to me. There [weren’t] responsibilities. There was no contract.
Priscilla Miuccio
She was running the program, she was tracking and budgeting all the expenses by herself, she was supporting the seniors. More and more piled on, and she continued to do it with a smile. She knew how important the programming was to the seniors, how vital this space was for the community, and she had an opportunity to be part of that space, something she felt she should be grateful for.
Non-profits across the country are the backbone of community support. They provide newcomers with social and networking opportunities, sustain advocacy programs for youth and children, and are frequently at the forefront of supporting our most vulnerable populations throughout Canada.
As public- and private-sector investment in community support continues to decrease, more pressure falls onto non-profit workers to pick up the work. But the high demand for community support has rocked the non-profit sector: staffing shortages and high turnover rates have led to roles like Miuccio’s being overburdened.
Eventually a new ED came, and months later Miuccio was added to the payment system. She was then given the title of program coordinator, but the official title came with larger and larger responsibilities. “There was always this air of ‘Hey, we’re not asking you to do this, but also there’s nobody else to do this. So if you don’t do this, the program next year doesn’t get funding.’”
Miuccio had never written a grant before, but now the weight of the entire program’s survival was on her. She researched as much as she could to develop the best grant application she could manage but ultimately wasn’t able to complete it before the deadline. As she was struggling to meet the December deadline, the new executive director was on vacation and sent her an email expressing disappointment at her “unprofessional” work ethic, Miuccio says.
Miuccio was crushed. The hard work she had put into the program felt unrecognized, and the pressure she was under was unaddressed – yet she continued working with the organization until the summer of 2025. Throughout her time as program coordinator, despite pouring more than 15 hours of her time every week into the program, Miuccio was being paid only minimum wage for five hours each week, she says.
The non-profit sector gives people a chance to feel like they’re really making a difference and fighting for what they believe in, but it can frequently overwork and under-compensate employees, especially young women. In a survey of charities conducted by the Charity Insights Canada Project, 53% of organizations reported that paid staff members provided overtime labour without compensation.
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From June to August of 2025, Audrey Hayd worked as a staff member at a non-profit sleepaway summer camp for children living with diabetes. Like Hayd, many of the camp’s staff team were university students and alumni from the camp who were encouraged to apply to work as staff and nurture a new generation of diabetic kids.
But recreating these experiences is much more than a trip down memory lane. Very soon, the nostalgia-based recruiting that led her back to the camp turned into leverage to stop her from leaving. “I loved my counsellors growing up. My art teacher was, like, my favourite person in the whole world,” Hayd recalls. “But then as I progressed and started to experience a lot of systemic issues within the camp, that was kind of used against me, where it was like, ‘You don’t want to let the kids down or think about how sad you would have been if your counsellor quit?’”
Hayd’s belief in the sanctity of the camp experience turned into a motivation to push through the working conditions. Among a staff team that was predominantly diabetic young adults, she found herself rushed, criticized for taking too long on breaks, and scolded by management for sharing her frustrations about the work structure with other staff, she says. Living on-site throughout the program, Hayd was working from 7:00 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., on a contract of $435 per week – barely $62 a day. But that’s perfectly legal given that under Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, students employed at children’s summer camps are not entitled to any minimum wage – unlike in B.C., where live-in camp leaders have a daily minimum wage of $138.93 for each full or partial day worked.
Non-profits frequently benefit from a lack of labour awareness in their younger workers. With such a sharp focus on the output of supporting and uplifting the communities, it can be hard for non-profit workers to prioritize improving their own working conditions.
“In my younger part of my career, I was absolutely taken with the idea that unions were about getting more money from somewhere that doesn’t have more money and that that would ultimately impact client care,” says Brooke Phillips, now community services and fund development manager at Kingston Interval House. “[That] just doing the good work that you feel good about doing because you’re doing good things should be remuneration enough.” This rhetoric led to her voting against unionizing the first time a non-profit she worked at had an organizing vote, a decision she regrets. “I didn’t look beyond myself,” she recalls. “I didn’t look at the discrepancies in treatment between the executive staff, the front-line staff, and the people that were support staff.”
You’re working with people who are experiencing deep poverty while sort of skirting the poverty line yourself.
Brooke Phillips
In her 24 years of experience in the non-profit sector, Phillips’s views on unions have changed drastically. Her journey from a no vote to a union steward later in her career is defined by the distance she felt from the leadership teams as a front-line worker and a sharper connection to those she was supporting: “You’re working with people who are experiencing deep poverty while sort of skirting the poverty line yourself.” Phillips says that for the majority of her own career, she’s had to work at least two jobs to stay above the poverty line.
The very first unionized workplace Phillips experienced was a women’s shelter; it was also the first time she went on strike. The union’s asks focused on improving the work environment rather than monetary increases. The shelter staff was having to take on more and more case work because job vacancies were not being filled. Employee burnout was at an all-time high. “We never wanted the people that we were serving to feel the pinch of the fact that we didn’t have enough staff,” Phillips says.
The non-profit refused the union’s bargaining demands, and the staff voted to strike. What Phillips thought would be a short labour action before returning to the table turned into a five-month strike throughout the winter.
The optics of striking at an organization that is not making profit are already bleak, but doing so at a domestic-violence shelter made matters even worse. For Phillips, the largest toll was the emotional one. She never could have imagined that the organization she had known for most of her life would be willing to leave them out for that long. Already struggling to adequately support the women she cared for, given the lack of staffing at the shelter, she now couldn’t support them at all. The strike forced workers to scramble to meet their mortgage payments and rely on other work to make ends meet as they stood strong for their demands.
After a difficult winter, the strike ended, and the shelter workers saw all their demands met – improved job-posting and grievance procedures, clearer discipline language on workplace injuries – but when the workers attended their post-strike “return to work” meeting, they were given termination letters. The months-long fight for improved working conditions ended bitterly, but for Phillips, it was necessary. “I would do it again,” she says. “Even though it didn’t work out how we wanted it to – how can I tell women who I support to stand up for themselves and then not stand up for myself?”
“How can I, as a staff person who’s worked in the sector for many years, not try to create a better landscape for workers that are coming up behind me?” she asks. “It felt like an obligation. It was just one that I paid for.”
According to Tyson Kelsall, a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University, community service workers in the field are being “coerced into additional layers of exploitation out of moral guilt, solidarity, and/or care for community.” Kelsall addresses the systems at play within the non-profit sector in a review titled “Situating the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.”
“We see the government seemingly actually contract out what should be public services, in my view, to these third-party non-profits, which are then shielded from public scrutiny and public accountability,” Kelsall says. “[The] government doesn’t have to face those questions. Instead, they can actually just scapegoat these non-profits that they’re funding, which we’ve seen time and time again.”
Rather than governments putting their finances toward building sustainable and adequately staffed programs for seniors in minority groups, or making sure that public summer camps have diabetes-inclusive options, non-profits are forced to use limited resources to fulfill the needs of their communities, while the workers at these organizations struggle to make ends meet themselves. “We find ourselves fighting for the continuation of these services so we don’t end up with less for the community,” Kelsall says. “Community members who are seeking to make transformative change are caught in the constant crisis of ensuring that things don’t get shut down.”
We’re an agency that works from a feminist perspective. Then we ought to be paying our staff in a way that they do not have to be dependent on a partner to be able to live.
Brooke Phillips
Phillips hopes to see that kind of transformative change render her role as a shelter coordinator unnecessary. “There’s nobody that I’ve ever worked with who isn’t absolutely working to put themselves out of a job,” she says. “I would love to be out of a job.” She believes that this reality isn’t possible now but that we can get there by investing in non-profit workers, including adequately investing in their wellness and access to care. “We sometimes sit in a place of moral superiority about how we treat people in the world. If we’re going to have moral superiority, then we have also an obligation.”
Following the mass layoffs, Phillips joined another unionized shelter – where she eventually had to leave her union’s collective bargaining unit when she moved to a management role. Even after switching sides, she’s held on to her belief in the role of unions in the sector. “The union is a huge supporter of our work,” she says. “I have an excellent relationship with the union.” She says she can call union representatives and have discussions with them, articulating the organization’s concerns while being able to understand worker perspectives.
For Phillips, unions are a key tool to helping workers in non-profit community support be heard and their labour valued. The mission she believes in for her workers is the same as what she believes in for the people she supports: “We’re an agency that works from a feminist perspective. Then we ought to be paying our staff in a way that they do not have to be dependent on a partner to be able to live.”
