Over the past six months, as the charitable sector responded to the expanding repercussions of COVID-19, The Philanthropist provided up-to-date coverage of its impact on our sector alongside our usual reporting and commentary. Now, as winter approaches and governments roll out new restrictions, the evolving challenges of the pandemic find a way into most of our…
Philanthropic Foundations in Canada Landscapes, Indigenous Perspectives and Pathways to Change, ed. Peter R. Elson, Sylvain A. Lefevre and Jean-Marc Fontan, PhiLab, Canada, 2020, 323 pp. “A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.” Mary Douglas in her forward to The Gift, Marcel Mauss[1] Philanthropic Foundations in Canada: Landscapes, Indigenous…
In this week’s News Digest: Ontario non-profit reforms still alive, rural Canada’s moment, and calls for better ESG reporting. Reforming Ontario’s non-profit laws Ontario MPPs have voted to save the Ontario Not-for-Profit Corporations Act (ONCA) from an automatic repeal, with a new expiry date of December 2021. In the session’s transcript, Lisa Thompson, Minister of…
The Corporate Social Mind: How Companies Lead Social Change from the Inside Out, by Derrick Feldmann and Michael Alberg-Seberich, Fast Company Press, Austin, Texas, 2020; 232 pp: ISBN: 978-1734324808 Are the most successful corporations those that focus primarily on the financial value they create for shareholders? Or can they be even more successful if they…
The federal Liberals have pledged to create one million jobs through “direct investments in the social sector and infrastructure,” including affordable housing, and also promised to launch an action plan for women in the economy that includes a national childcare system. The plan, delivered yesterday by Governor-General Julie Payette in a speech from the throne,…
This week: WE fallout, charities and trust issues, new or increased funding from CanadaHelps and Chagnon, and a big win against SLAPP suits. WE fallout On September 9, founders Craig and Marc Kielburger announced that WE Charity would cease operations in Canada and that they would step down from the global organization they started in 1995….
To many Canadians who tuned in to the WE saga, which seemed to culminate last week with the organization’s decision to shutter the Canadian operation, the story of its precipitous demise was mostly about what can happen when a prominent charity gets tangled in the ruthless, perception-driven world of politics. To those in the philanthropic…
As the COVID-19 pandemic raged in March, Bayan Khatib knew she had to act quickly. The executive director of the Syrian Canadian Foundation was in charge of a program that taught English to newcomers to set them on the path to integration, and another that funded and mentored refugee women who want to become entrepreneurs….
This week: UNICEF laments state of Canadian youth, McConnell Foundation pauses granting, new Canadians hold promise for giving and volunteering, and one in five Ontario charities may fold. Canada’s youth face hardship UNICEF on September 3 released Report Card 16, an annual report measuring the state of children and youth under age 18 in wealthy…
This is the final installment in our series about social innovation. The series is published as a collaboration between The Philanthropist and McConnell Foundation. As we were striving to understand how the United Way-Centraide (UWC) movement has leveraged social innovation methods and tools to achieve more impact, the outbreak of the novel coronavirus quickly became the most significant global…