Access to high-quality strategic planning in Canada’s non-profit sector is not evenly distributed, and that gap compounds everything else.
Somewhere in Canada this May, an executive director is sitting down to start a strategic plan. Her federal funding was cut last month. Her team is down two staff members she has not been able to replace. She booked a two-day strategy retreat in January and cancelled it last week because a community safety issue needed the whole management team on it instead. She has a funder deadline in three weeks, no consultant budget, and a volunteer team that has already absorbed more than it should.
She knows what a rigorous planning process should look like. She has read the guides. She has attended the workshops. She knows the difference between what the sector expects her to produce and what she actually has the conditions to build right now.
She is not alone.
Canada’s charitable sector feeds families, resettles refugees, preserves cultural memory, and holds communities together through pressures that do not pause for planning season. Across the country, strategy sessions are being cancelled because crises took over the calendar. Planning work is landing on volunteer teams already at capacity. Documents are being submitted to funders not because they reflect what good planning looks like, but because they reflect what the organization had left to give.
Access to high-quality strategic planning in Canada’s non-profit sector is not evenly distributed, and that gap compounds everything else.
The gap between organizations that plan well and those that do not is not a gap in ambition or leadership; it is a reflection of unequal access. It follows a pattern the sector’s own data has made impossible to ignore.
Despite accounting for 3.5% of Canada’s population, Black communities receive less than 0.1% of philanthropic funding from Canadian foundations. Sixty-three percent of Black-led organizations are at risk of depleting their funds within six months. Indigenous-led organizations navigate chronic underfunding across most service areas. Women-led organizations serving gender-based violence, housing, and reproductive rights face the same pattern: high community need, chronically constrained operating budgets, and planning expectations built for organizations with far more infrastructure than they have ever been funded to build. Organizations serving newcomer and immigrant communities are absorbing rising community needs as federal funding contracts are cut.
The workforce data tell the same story from a different angle. Racialized non-profit workers earn on average 21% less than Canadian workers overall, a gap driven largely by the structural underfunding of community non-profits. The organizations these workers sustain are among the most likely to be navigating strategic planning without the infrastructure to support it.
For teams inside those organizations, the lack of infrastructure shows up in a cancelled strategy session, a grant application that takes three weekends to prepare, a volunteer team carrying work that a larger organization would assign to a dedicated staff member.
What this produces is a sector that asks the same question of every organization, regardless of what that organization is carrying. Do you have a strategic plan? Is it current? Does it reflect multi-year goals, evaluation frameworks, and measurable outcomes? For organizations with dedicated strategy staff and unrestricted funding, these are reasonable questions. For organizations with three months’ or less cash on hand, where 85% expect service demand to increase in the year ahead, they are something closer to a test the sector has not yet admitted is uneven.
Ask a non-profit leader what strategic planning costs and the first answer is rarely a dollar figure. It is a description of time borrowed from somewhere else.
At Black History Manitoba, a Black-led community organization in Winnipeg, strategic planning is not a dedicated process with dedicated resources. It is something a small, largely volunteer team carries alongside program delivery and urgent community requests. “Without dedicated strategy staff or external consultants, planning falls to a small team already managing programs, partnerships, and urgent community requests in a volunteer capacity,” says Nadia Thompson, program director and committee chair. “This has meant extended hours, competing priorities, and, at times, burnout.”
Without the ability to fully map multi-year growth strategies, it becomes harder to compete with larger organizations for major grants.
Nadia Thompson, Black History Manitoba
The deeper cost is not the hours; instead, it’s what the hours cannot produce. Without the capacity to develop a strategic plan, Black History Manitoba cannot compete for the major grants that would make those frameworks possible. “Without the ability to fully map multi-year growth strategies, it becomes harder to compete with larger organizations for major grants,” Thompson says. “In order to do that we would require the funds, which we don’t have, and in the end it becomes a cycle of need.”
A cycle of need. It is one of the most precise descriptions of the planning gap in the sector: organizations that most need investment to build planning capacity cannot access that investment without demonstrating planning capacity they do not yet have.
Céleste Thériault, executive director of the National Indigenous Diabetes Association, describes what that cycle does inside an organization over time: “Every gap in infrastructure creates another layer of labour. If systems are not built in a good way, leadership absorbs that burden. If there is no dedicated planning support, leadership carries it. If evaluation models do not reflect Indigenous realities, leadership has to reinterpret impact. Over time, that is not just inefficient; it is unsustainable.”
Every gap in infrastructure creates another layer of labour.
Céleste Thériault, National Indigenous Diabetes Association
At another Manitoba organization serving community members new to Canada, the executive director shares that they could not secure grant funding for strategic planning despite strong grant-writing capacity and multiple applications. The pre-consultation work fell entirely to the executive director. When the same person facilitating organizational strategy is also the one synthesizing every stakeholder response, the risk of bias is real. She flagged it herself. In an adequately resourced process, those roles would not overlap.
And even when a plan gets built, the gap does not close. For most under-resourced organizations, the planning cycle ends when the document is produced. There is no implementation support, no mechanism to keep the plan connected to the daily decisions the team is actually making. It becomes what the sector has quietly accepted as normal: a document produced for funders, filed after submission, and rarely returned to until the next funding cycle demands a new one. The cost is measured not only in hours, but in organizational momentum that never builds.
A proper strategic planning process, the ED notes, now costs between $30,000 and $40,000. There are almost no grants of that size available for this purpose. “We need more sources of organizational development and capacity-building funding with higher caps,” she says. “Many funders are not keeping up with increasing costs that non-profits face.”
Another women-led Manitoba organization describes receiving a letter from a federal funder. The agreement they were signing required an anti-racism action plan, a “GBA Plus” (gender-based analysis plus) lens, and a truth and reconciliation commitment, all confirmed within six months. The funding attached to that agreement had been reduced, but the expectations had not.
The tools organizations are asked to use to demonstrate readiness were not designed with all of them equally in mind. Strategic plans. Evaluation frameworks. Anti-racism action plans. These are not unreasonable expectations. But they assume an organizational infrastructure that many community-led organizations have never been funded to build.
Strategic plans are often heavily biased toward those who have the privilege of being in the room during the planning workshop process.
Céleste Thériault
They also assume something else the sector rarely names. “Strategic planning has to answer to the needs of the people it represents, and those needs are never neutral,” Thériault says. “Furthermore, strategic plans are often heavily biased toward those who have the privilege of being in the room during the planning workshop process.”
A plan produced under those conditions and a plan produced with a dedicated team and a $30,000 budget are not the same document. Treating them as equivalent measures of organizational health is a choice the sector keeps making quietly.
Canadian philanthropy is in a period of active reckoning about where resources go and who gets to shape how they are used. Participatory grantmaking and trust-based philanthropy have gained traction, but those conversations have largely centred on who receives funding and how much. The planning infrastructure gap sits one step removed, and it rarely gets named directly. Equity in outcomes cannot be achieved by changing who gets funded while leaving unchanged the conditions under which funded organizations are expected to perform.
The organizations navigating this gap are not waiting for the sector to catch up. They are already clear about what adequate support would make possible.
At Black History Manitoba, it is concrete. With planning support, the organization could develop the multi-year evaluation frameworks that would make them competitive for major grants. Not because those frameworks would tell funders something the organization does not already know about its own impact, but because without them, a decade of volunteer-driven community programming does not translate into the language funding systems recognize. “When funders recognize that smaller organizations are often doing high-impact work with limited infrastructure, and invest accordingly,” Thompson says, “they are not lowering the bar. They are enabling sustainability, equity, and long-term community impact.”
At the Manitoba organization serving new Canadians, adequate support would have looked like something more immediate: a second pair of hands on the consultation data, and a process where the person responsible for organizational strategy was not also the person compiling every stakeholder response for the board. The consultations, the ED says, were among the most valuable things her organization did that year. Hearing directly from staff, community members, and Indigenous partners was irreplaceable. What was not sustainable was absorbing the full cost of that process without external support.
Parts of the sector are beginning to name this honestly. The Black Opportunity Fund built a capacity-building program with exactly that logic at its centre, designed to give Black-led and Black-focused non-profits development support that positions them to lead and deliver on their own terms. Some grantmakers are shifting away from project-by-project funding toward what organizations actually need to sustain themselves between grants. These movements signal something the sector has not always been willing to say directly: the planning gap is a funder problem as much as it is an organizational one. It can be solvable if funders decide it is.
It is still May. Non-profits are doing what they have always done: moving their communities forward with whatever the fiscal year has given them. One is preparing programming that will reach thousands of people who have never seen their history reflected back to them with care and intention. The other is rescheduling a strategy session that operational demands displaced, preparing for a planning process that has been years in the making. The communities that non-profit organizations serve will not wait for ideal conditions. Neither will the people leading them.
What these organizations describe is not a sector in crisis. It is a sector doing extraordinary work inside structural constraints that have not yet changed. The ask is not complicated. Fund the planning capacity. Invest in the tools and collaborative infrastructure that let organizations meet rising expectations without eroding the ones communities depend on most. The solutions exist; what remains is making them reachable. That work belongs to all of us.
