A new report offers insight into the people who work for Canadian foundations – which for many is no one at all – and the tension surrounding increasingly formalized workplaces.
To many Canadians, even the word “philanthropy” can seem like a walled-off part of the world. “Philanthropy is a closed club in many ways,” says Jehad Aliweiwi, executive director of the Laidlaw Foundation. And despite the sector’s work in recent years to invest more in relationships in communities and trust-based relationships with charities, foundations might seem like exclusive clubs of the wealthy and privileged. Funding decisions might seem arbitrary. Governance might seem opaque or ambiguous.
But that lacks the true nuance, and foundations don’t run without people. And until recently, very little data has been available about those people, their working conditions, or their feelings about their work. That’s changing, and new research published this month by Philanthropic Foundations Canada (PFC) seeks to further lift the veil on philanthropic workforces.
The report reveals a sector in flux. The workforce is growing – and more formalized. Twenty years ago, the authors find, policies for staff at foundations were far less standardized than they are now. Disability insurance was “sporadic.” Employer contributions to registered retirement savings plans were “variable.” Written human resources policies were “absent.” The list goes on, but the needle is moving – although not without some discussion. “The growing professionalization of foundation work has also generated ongoing debate,” the report says. “While professionalization can strengthen expertise and consistency, it may also introduce bureaucracy or distance from communities.”
That raises a finer but crucial point, according to Mike Prosserman, board chair at the Acorn Seed Foundation and founder of Unity Charity. Sometimes, he notes, foundations can fall into the trap of “hiring more people to make evaluations more complicated and reporting more complicated – and it’s not really useful.” More bureaucracy, he says, can too often turn into more roadblocks for charities and non-profits trying to get funding for crucial work. “They sometimes just become gatekeepers instead of quarterbacks trying to help,” he says. It’s important, he emphasizes, to always bring conversations back to a key point: how can the sector best serve the communities it’s set up to help?
Aliweiwi points to the importance of ensuring representation and diversity in staffing – and decision-making roles. That means, he says, “connecting philanthropy to the field by ensuring that there are people working, making decisions at the governance level, at the staffing level, at the advisory level that are reflective of and representative of communities we want to work with.”
How big are foundation workforces?
Philanthropy in Canada is crucial to the work of tens of thousands of charities and non-profits. Canadian foundations collectively steward more than $160 billion in assets and donate $10.7 billion annually across Canada, according to PFC.
So who is doing the work of deciding where philanthropic funds should go? According to the report, the foundation workforce in Canada is growing: since the turn of this century, the total number of reported staff positions rose from 11,481 to 23,526 (roughly the same as that of the Canadian National Railway alone).
“It’s a sector with lots of resources and lots of money, but it is very small,” Aliweiwi says.
“Staffing varies considerably across Canadian foundations by size, activity, and geography,” according to the report, which notes it’s “a sector in which human capacity is unevenly distributed.”
The report examines the historical rule of thumb that suggested foundations employ one staff member per $1 million in annual grantmaking, though it says that benchmark is “largely anecdotal and lacks empirical grounding.” Instead, it found that smaller staffed foundations were more likely to exceed that benchmark and larger ones to operate at or below it.
That historical rule of thumb is non-sensical, according to Aliweiwi. Laidlaw works with non-qualified donees, and Aliweiwi points out that different foundations – and different grantees – may need different resources. “We work with communities [for whom] probably the $10,000 we give is the only grant they ever received, and it takes maybe one full-time employee for hand-holding with that $10,000.” Assuming every grant can be dealt with the same way is based on the “notion of charity that you send these large cheques to large charities that can manage them.” And that, he says, misses some of the nuance.
You can’t be a responsive, agile grantmaking organization without the proper resources in place.
Jehad Aliweiwi, Laidlaw Foundation
As for the average size of foundations’ teams, the report cites research from PFC’s 2025 salary and benefits report that found that Canadian foundations with staff employ an average of about seven people. But there’s a caveat: that’s foundations with staff. “Even considering all registered foundations in Canada, including many small private foundations, the majority have no staff at all,” the report notes. “Many Canadian foundations have traditionally operated with minimal or no paid staff,” it says. “Often, a family foundation may rely on volunteer trustees or borrow capacity from a family’s business office for functions such as accounting or legal, rather than maintaining dedicated foundation personnel.”
That’s not necessarily an issue, according to Prosserman, who questions whether foundations having more staff is necessarily a net benefit. “I just don’t think adding more people to the mix makes the outcome better,” he says. He points to the Morris and Rosalind Goodman Family Foundation, which manages more than $360 million in total assets, as an example of a lean staff managing large sums of money. In its 2025 annual report, the foundation said in the year prior it “allocated over $20 million through grants to diverse partners.” According to data from the Canada Revenue Agency, the foundation has two staff.
Aliweiwi offers another perspective on what the ideal size of a foundation’s team might be. “You can’t be a responsive, agile grantmaking organization without the proper resources in place,” he says. “It’s very easy to give away money, but it’s not easy to give away money well and strategically. And in order to do that, you need the capacity and you need the resources.”
‘Growing professionalization’ of the sector with more formal policies
The report documents the formalization of policies across Canadian foundations – everything from compensation and benefits to paid time off to equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts. “It’s a necessity,” says Eric Saarvala, the executive director of the Raymond James Canada Foundation and head of corporate sustainability for Raymond James Ltd., of these policies. “It’s a must have, not a nice to have.”
Karine Parvin agrees. She joined the Donner Canadian Foundation, as well as its sister organization, the William H. Donner Foundation, three and a half years ago. “It was right when they had started to formalize their HR processes,” she says, adding that she’s grateful for the changes that were made around benefits and salaries.
It’s a necessity. It’s a must have, not a nice to have.
Eric Saarvala, Raymond James Canada Foundation
There’s also long been a difference in the sector between public and private foundations, Saarvala says. But that, too, is changing. “You have well-meaning intentions of the folks who are starting a private foundation, but they may not have had a lot of exposure to governance and best practices,” he says. Bringing in an employee with “knowledge in and around that governance piece is really key because that really drives everything, whether it’s from the board governance side, the CRA side, the legal side, the grants management side. It’s critical that those are all aligned and up to date in terms of your operating activities.”
According to the report’s authors, adding more structure is important – but comes with considerations. “The field often moves toward greater professionalization without fully considering its unintended consequences or what may be lost in the process,” they write. “The task is to add lightweight scaffolding, enough structure to reduce friction and bias without overprofessionalizing in ways that further narrow entry pathways.”
‘I feel more like I belong’
Parvin has also seen the shift in the sector when it comes to equity, diversity, and inclusion policies. “The rooms are getting more diverse,” she says. “I feel more like I belong . . . It’s been a real pleasure to see that. And quite frankly, it’s also a surprise,” she adds. “Before joining the sector, I was on the other side fundraising from it, and you don’t necessarily picture staff or foundations as being the diverse group that it actually is.”
Saarvala agrees. “In the early days of my career, I didn’t see as much of a focus on [EDI]. It’s part of doing business now.” But EDI work is not done yet. “There’s such a big opportunity,” he says. “It’s up to organizations to make sure they create the environments where people feel that they don’t just fit in but that they belong.” That means “bringing who they are, and their lived experience, into the organization and celebrating differences as strengths and not trying to have them fit into a mould.”
The rooms are getting more diverse . . . It’s been a real pleasure to see that. And quite frankly, it’s also a surprise.
Karine Parvin, Donner Canadian Foundation
Saarvala, whose mother is from Guyana and whose father is from Finland, says organizations have work to do around prioritizing visible diversity and missing other opportunities to expand understandings. “Because I don’t visibly present as X, then I could potentially be left out, and that’s really the opportunity. And especially here in Canada, where we have this Canadian mosaic, where you don’t know who’s who in the room, and nobody is asking,” he says. “A lot more work can be done around that.”
The report’s findings show progress, but also that there’s more work to be done. Almost a third of foundation staff surveyed for the report were “unable to identify concrete day-to-day examples of EDI within their organizations or described working alone, making it difficult to assess organizational practices.” The report also revealed what its authors dub a “meaningful minority” who don’t see themselves represented by foundation leadership.
The report cites 2025 findings from Carleton University’s Charity Insights Canada Project that found that senior staff and board members are perceived as less representative of the communities they serve than other people involved in the organization, such as volunteers. “The meaningful minority who do not see themselves reflected in decision‑making structures point to a wider sector‑level issue,” the report says. “Leadership across Canadian foundations do not fully mirror the diversity, identities, and lived experiences present among staff and the communities they aim to serve.”
Recruitment
PFC also seeks to put numbers to a long-held assumption about foundation work: that getting a job in philanthropy is about who you know. Nearly half of those surveyed for the report got their jobs through what the authors describe as personal networks. This, they found, shows “the continued importance of relational pathways into the sector.” But while “traditional network-based entry persists,” there is, crucially, an emergence of “recruitment approaches that may broaden access through an equity, diversity, and inclusion lens.”
“I don’t in principle have any issue with tapping into your own networks – if that network is already representative,” already “diversified in experiences and demographics and geography,” Aliweiwi says. “That’s actually healthy. But not if we are tapping into a network that is fairly consistently similar, and comfortable and familiar.”
Recruitment from the charitable and non-profit sectors is key, Prosserman says: it’s “1,000%” useful to have people working in foundations who understand the day-to-day realities of fundraising, he says. Otherwise, “we’re not talking the same language.” And being on the same page is crucial, he adds. Especially because of mismatched power dynamics. Indeed, the report notes that foundation work in Canada is “heavily dependent on individual discretion.” It says that “most foundations operate with very small teams, which places significant weight on individual judgment, discretion, and interpersonal skills.”
Parvin has seen how individual discretion plays out from both sides of the equation. “When I was on the other side, fundraising from foundations, I was always wondering what their strategy is and how to make a proposal stick, and how to convert a proposal into a grant,” she says. “But now that I’m on this side and I’m privy to board conversations around strategy, I realized that it really doesn’t matter what your proposal is. Really, it’s a question of timing,” she says, “and whether it meets the board members’ interests.”
“You can be an amazing fundraiser, but if the project that you’re pitching us for isn’t a good match at this time of the foundation’s history, it’s just not going to convert into a grant,” she says, saying that it’s often “a question of luck.” (The Donner Canadian Foundation doesn’t have open calls for proposals and operates by invitation only.)
Prosserman wants more foundations to be clear about whether it’s worth the time of fundraisers to apply for grants. He says he sees too many foundations accepting 1,000 applications only to fund 20. “Okay, yeah, it’s going to take you a lot of time to go through 1,000 applications,” he says. “But why did you design the process that way?”
Stress is real for foundation staff
Foundation staff surveyed for the report pointed to a number of issues: too much work, outdated systems, difficult dynamics with boards or families, the stress of saying no to worthwhile causes and charities and non-profits doing excellent work. They were asked to rate their stress levels on a scale of one to five (not stressed to very stressed): the median score was 3.1, but one-third rated themselves at four, which was described as “frequent but not universally high stress.”
“I don’t want to underplay the stress of any workplace, but compared to others, we’re in an extremely privileged space,” says Aliweiwi, who before joining the Laidlaw Foundation worked for nine years as executive director of a front-line social services charity. “We’re the ones who have power and resources. I think the hardest thing to do in this job is to say no to so many worthy applications to communities that you know are in need.”
Parvin agrees that the stress of her foundation role is not comparable to what she felt on the “other side,” in the charitable and non-profit sector. “The stress that I may have felt in the past having to fundraise for my position and the role that I had, I don’t have that anymore.”
“It’s been replaced by the sense of responsibility to manage assets in the most responsible way possible, in the most impactful way possible, while also representing the family’s interests,” she says. “But I welcome the stress that comes from it, because I feel honoured to have the chance.”
