Canada’s non-profit care labour force is essential infrastructure. It is time to treat it that way, United Way/Centraide Canada’s Anita Khanna argues.
Every day, people across Canada rely on community services for care to cope, connect, and recover. The overall care economy employs more than 4.5 million people – 21% of all jobs in Canada. The community services sector of the care economy employs about 715,000 workers. They are the people delivering housing and homelessness supports, access to food, settlement services, mental-health programs, disability services, seniors’ care, early learning and childcare, responses to gender-based violence, and many other supports that help people live with dignity close to home. Access to these high-quality, local services eases the pressures of high living costs and a strained healthcare system. They also ensure that people have the care they need to stay employed and avoid paying for costly private care.
Yet, the labour of non-profit care workers is too often an afterthought: treated as temporary, secondary, or endlessly flexible. This is simply not sustainable. The care economy is not a nice-to-have; it is essential infrastructure for communities, families, and the broader economy. Given this, work in the non-profit care economy needs to be funded and compensated at a level commensurate with its social and economic value, and deliberate workforce planning needs to be undertaken to support our communities.
The care economy is not a nice-to-have; it is essential infrastructure for communities, families, and the broader economy.
This is the premise behind United Way Centraide Canada’s emerging labour-force strategy for paid workers in the community-services sector of the care economy, project work supported by the McConnell Foundation. The drive to develop a labour force strategy did not start as an abstract policy exercise. It grew from what community organizations, local United Ways and Centraides, and foundations saw directly: recruitment challenges, retention pressures, burnout among front-line staff, and workers leaving for sectors with better pay, benefits, and job stability.
These challenges are not new, but they have become sharper. Many community organizations depend on project-based funding that does not reflect the true cost of delivering care. Wages are often low relative to the education, skills, emotional labour, and occupational risks required of the workers. Benefits can be minimal and contracts short-term. As a result, the workers holding communities together through system inequities, overlapping crises, and ongoing economic uncertainty are navigating precarity themselves.
A new United Way Centraide Canada report, Making the Case for the Care Economy: A Data Roadmap for Canada’s Nonprofit Labour Force, brings forward the data to show we can’t afford to ignore these challenges any longer. Non-profit care economy workforce pressures affect whether our families and neighbours can access care and support when and where they need it. When a community agency cannot find enough workers, community members and our economy bear the burden of lost opportunity and lost productivity.
The report also challenges a familiar story. The non-profit sector is often described as having a data deficit. That is partly true: no comprehensive dataset fully captures the dynamics of the labour force that sustains charities, community services, and the broader care economy. In working to uncover data, our report finds a fragmented abundance of evidence of labour force challenges that require action.
The evidence is clear enough to support action to stabilize the workforce so it can meet community needs. Data show that while community non-profit employment rose 10% from 2019 to 2024 and expenditures rose 32%, more than 70% of charities faced demand that exceeded their capacity. This means too many community members were placed on waiting lists, turned away, or went without. Since 2015, vacancies in core community-care occupations have increased by 140% compared with a 4% increase in all other occupations, also affecting access to services. Offered wages in core care roles grew 11 percentage points more slowly than wages across the rest of the labour market, and 45% of occupations closely associated with non-profit care work are projected to face strong labour-shortage risk by 2033.
If we want stable services, we need stable working conditions.
Community non-profit workers earn about 31% less than the economy-wide average and 26% less than workers in government non-profits. These alarming numbers point to a total compensation problem, not simply a hiring problem. In social services, 26% of workers say they are likely to leave their jobs within six months. Workers report higher burnout, poorer mental health, and greater dissatisfaction than non-profit workers overall. If we want stable services, we need stable working conditions. The credible existing labour-market data, sector surveys, administrative filings, and research partnerships already show where pressures are greatest and where investment is most urgently needed. Now, we need to use these concerning findings to align partners and make policy and investment decisions.
Philanthropy has a critical role to play in moving from evidence to action.
The report clearly identifies a serious, immediate challenge that must be addressed: the lack of sector capacity to connect data sources, interpret them, and use them to make better decisions. Institutional funders, private foundations, and individual donors can invest in the shared evidence base, fund analytical capacity, support workforce planning, and bring partners together around practical solutions. This means funding the infrastructure that helps the sector understand and address its labour force challenges, not only funding programs once the pressures are already acute.
Funding reform must recognize the full cost of care.
It also means changing funding practices that perpetuate precarity. Too often, short-term project funding leaves organizations unable to offer competitive wages, benefits, professional development, or predictable employment. Funding reform must recognize the full cost of care, including fair compensation, supervision, training, administration, data capacity, and the time required to build trusting relationships in the community.
Sector partners are critical actors in strengthening the care economy’s workforce.
Non-profits, community service organizations, networks, labour, educational institutions, researchers, governments, and funders can work together to identify priority occupations, strengthen career pathways, share evidence, test solutions, and advocate for the public policy changes required to sustain this labour force. No single organization can solve this alone; the strategy must be sector-wide.
The choice before us is straightforward. We can attempt to keep relying on a labour force whose deep commitment masks structural underinvestment, or we can treat non-profit care work as the essential infrastructure it is. Communities depend on these workers every day. Now public policymakers, philanthropy, and sector leadership must come to the table to action solutions – because we all depend on this labour force, too.
