The surveyed approximately 1,000 registered charities in Canada on March 11, 2026, and found that more than half received DAF grants or gifts in the past year. Their report, titled , explores charities’ relationships with DAFs and how these funds are shaping parts of the philanthropic landscape. The report contains six graphs of data and two pages of anonymous, DAF-related quotes from charities.

(2025), a paper by for the Pemsel Case Foundation, examines DAFs and proposes ways to address transparency, oversight and governance issues while preserving DAFs’ philanthropic benefits. The Pemsel Case Foundation is mandated to undertake research, education and litigation interventions to help clarify and develop the law related to Canadian charities.

(2025), byĚýDr. Sharilyn Hale and Keith Sjogren at Watermark Philanthropic Counsel, for TwinRiver Capital, answers the question: If given the opportunity, is there a desire from philanthropic actors to generate social/environmental returns now while making decisions about future giving in Canada? A is available, as is the .

(2025) is from a working group of the Canadian Association of Gift Planners co-chaired by and , with Keith SjĂśgren, the lead author. The report offers a comprehensive overview of current practices and common issues that are often experienced by foundation and charity executives, fundraisers, donors and professional advisors. The CAGP Foundation offers a suite of five practical resources, including a comprehensive guide.

, by the US-based Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative (DAFRC), draws on data from Internal Revenue Service Form 990, Schedule D, for fiscal year 2024, and provides aggregate data on the number of DAF accounts, contributions to DAFs, grants from DAFs, DAF assets, payout rate and average account size in the US.

is one of many reports from the US-based Donor Advised Fund Research Collaborative (DAFRC). The report draws on interviews with 46 professional fundraisers, and offers practical strategies for identifying, cultivating, soliciting and stewarding DAF donors. focuses on Macro Trends, Donor Behavior and Management & Policy.

Influence, Affluence & Opportunity: Donor-Advised Funds in Canada (2023), a report from KCI and the CAGP Foundation, examines the relationships between charities and DAF donors and the foundations that act as intermediaries between them. It suggests strategies for charities and financial advisors to ensure they maximize engagement of DAF donors, and it identifies key areas for improvement in how DAF foundations can support donors and charities. It also quantifies the increasing contribution of DAF donors to the charitable sector in Canada and examines the challenges, criticisms and misconceptions around DAFs.

Donor-Advised Funds: 2023 Outlook, an essay for PANL Perspectives by Keith Sjogren, discusses what’s influencing DAF increases, changes in share within the DAF community, grants from DAFs and which charities benefit from DAFs.

Authors Cathy Barr and Susanna Kislenko.

(Senior Advisor of Research & Data at Imagine Canada) and (Director of The Founder Leadership Research Lab at the University of Oxford, and Adjunct Professor at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University) have published a guide, . The report () offers guidance for building effective boards, managing founder transitions and avoiding Founder’s Syndrome, which occurs when founders retain too much control over their organization. They interviewed 34 founders and board members of founder-led organizations, but both researchers have decades of experience working with many more founders around the world – and Susanna wrote her PhD dissertation about Founder’s Syndrome in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. The two spoke to PANL Perspectives about why the sector needs this guide now and what they hope to accomplish, given how difficult it is to discuss issues with many founders and boards of directors in Canada.

What inspired both of you to write now?

Susanna Kislenko: I was inspired to study how boards of directors could have a stronger effect on some of the negative consequences of Founder’s Syndrome. But if you really want to know how Cathy and I first started, it was right after the WE Charity scandal happened – and there were larger questions being asked. Cathy, what do you think?

Cathy Barr: Yes, totally. We didn’t even know each other before we came together to work on this project. We were connected by a mutual acquaintance on Imagine Canada’s board. With this guide, we want to look at how board members — in particular board chairs — can mitigate the impact of Founder’s Syndrome. Susanna is the expert on that. My background is more about governance and Imagine Canada’s . We got talking about how if everybody just followed the standards, then Founder’s Syndrome and possibly bigger scandals shouldn’t happen.

What do you hope people will get out of ?

Cathy Barr: We wrote the guide for both founders and board members to understand what good governance and leadership look like.

The guide isn’t in your face about Founder’s Syndrome. That’s on purpose, because a lot of people who have Founder’s Syndrome don’t know it, or wouldn’t necessarily seek out a guide for how to deal with it, so we focused on good governance, succession planning and things that, if you do them well, will mitigate the impact of Founder’s Syndrome. –Cathy Barr

Susanna Kislenko:   The biggest finding from our study was that board members don’t know what their responsibilities actually are and what their role is supposed to be, or what they’re supposed to be doing in their role. But at the same time, founders without Founder’s Syndrome — so the founders who do want to set up good succession practices — also don’t know often. This might be their first organization they started, but even if it isn’t, there aren’t many places you can go to really understand how do you set it up? How do you set up your organization for long-term success from the governance perspective? There’s not that many places you can go. So, we’re, first of all, hoping people will feel less alone.

Second, we’re hoping that people will start conversations, will ask questions, about governance and succession policies that need to be put in place within their organizations.

Third, we want to empower board members. Many board members come into an organization because they’re passionate about the mission, or the founder, or both. But, at the end of the day, they might become disillusioned because they’re not supported in their roles. This guide tries to empower them. –Susanna Kislenko

Cathy Barr: ‘Empower’ is an important word. Sometimes, founders purposely try to make sure that board members don’t know what the board should be doing. The guide fills a knowledge gap about the real duties and responsibilities of board members, and also hopefully, gives them confidence to speak up, to challenge the founder, or to rein in a founder who’s behaving inappropriately – and ultimately to empower board members to do the right thing. For example, why didn’t the board exercise their power before the WE Charity scandal? More broadly, why are board chairs at some organizations afraid to discuss succession planning with 80-year-old founders? It’s ridiculous, but it’s common.

After the Hockey Canada fiasco and WE Charity scandal a few years ago, did you see major changes in leadership or governance in the nonprofit sector?

Read “The Hockey Canada Fiasco,” by Yves Savoie, for a review of the serious lessons learned about nonprofit governance and boards of directors, issues that are still relevant today: /panl/2022/the-hockey-canada-fiasco-governance-lessons-for-nonprofits-in-canada.

Cathy Barr: I don’t think much changed on a grand scale. There were specific organizations that made changes. Well, I know of at least one, and my guess is there have been others. Imagine Canada saw a bit of an upsurge in interest in the . I think, though, that part of the challenge was those events happened at a very challenging time in the sector, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The scandals did create a lot of ripples in the short run, but I think those ripples dissipated fairly quickly.

My interpretation is that it’s the pressure of the urgent over the important. However, if leaders actually got their houses in order, they’d maybe be in a better position to deal with short-term challenges.

It takes a special leader to pull back and say, “No, we need to do this, because this is important.” Sometimes it’s a CEO. Sometimes it’s a board chair. There has to be a champion who believes in that sort of thing, who sees the value. –Cathy Barr

Susanna Kislenko: These sorts of questions should be weaved through all levels of education that’s about leadership in this sector. The whole reason we did this study, the whole reason we did this guide, was to say, you’re not powerless. Both as a founder and as a board member, you’re not powerless, and there’s a lot that can be done, but it has to be intentional, and it has to be consistent.

Cathy Barr: And it’s not easy.  I mean, most board members are volunteers, and they didn’t join the board to get into a drag-it-out fight with the founder. A leader really has to believe in this stuff.

and are on LinkedIn. Read their article, “,” in The Philanthropist Journal, in which they summarize their research and list common indicators of founder’s syndrome.

Watch or listen to PhilanthroThink episodes on , or .

Thank you to IG Private Wealth Management for a grant to make the PhilanthroThink Podcast series possible.

Christopher Dougherty

This year, completed a about the extent to which the Canadian charitable sector is a politically expressive sector, based on data from Ontario and Alberta from 2003 to 2017. The data doesn’t include cross-provincial data, such as a political contribution from an individual foundation trustee in Alberta to a provincial political party in Saskatchewan. The dissertation focuses on private family foundations and their granting decisions within Ontario and Alberta. There were 5,606 private foundations in Canada in 2017, and collectively, they held about $92 billion in assets. Dougherty spoke to PANL Perspectives about his findings, including some of the eye-opening discoveries along the way.

Question: How do private family foundations engage in subtle political activities through their granting or through the personal actions of individual trustees?

Christopher Dougherty: Individual private family foundation trustees aren’t particularly subtle, and they’re directly contributing to political candidates and parties at high rates. Approximately 25% of them made at least one political contribution in 2003 to 2017, about 40% were repeat donors with a consistent political preference, about 20% were repeat donors who gave to more than one type of party, and the rest made a single gift.

That 25% political-contribution figure is about 10 times higher than the 2.6% of Canadians in general who are estimated to make political contributions, according to a 2022 study by Tolley, Besco and Sevi.

Read Christopher Dougherty’s other Q&A with PANL Perspectives: “To What Extent Do Politicians Use Canada’s Nonprofit Sector to Access Constituencies and Political Power?”

But not all private family foundations have trustees who make political contributions. In Ontario, somewhere between 20% and 50% of foundations have a trustee who makes a political gift in any given year. In Alberta, it’s as low as a single trustee at one foundation in one year and goes as high as 30%.

And it’s mostly one or two trustees out of the whole private family foundation board who are making political contributions.

What this all means is that the differences in granting between private family foundations with trustees who make political contributions and those foundations without any trustees making political contributions might be caused by just those one or two trustees. Also, what we don’t know is how granting decisions are being made or what influence individual trustees have on granting decisions; we only know that there are differences in granting when boards have politically active trustees.

Q: You write, “Politically aligned family foundations are much more likely to give to religious missionary charities, while non-political foundations are much more likely to give to mainstream Christian congregations.” Can you explain the difference?

Canadian charities that register with Canada Revenue Agency as “Missionary” are more likely to receive grants from foundations where trustees make political gifts.

Dougherty: This difference comes down to how the recipient charities classified themselves when they registered for charitable status with the Canada Revenue Agency.

In my study, there are five religious subsectors that are combined from denominational or sectarian choices: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Other (which includes Baha’i, Buddhist Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and others), and Missionary. As each charity chooses how to classify themselves when they register, these subsectors include congregations, religiously affiliated service-delivery charities (such as food banks, homeless shelters, pastoral counselling organizations) and congregations with an integrated service delivery.

So, what I see in the results is that charities who choose to register under a specific Christian denomination (like Catholic, Anglican, United or Lutheran) are more likely to receive grants from foundations whose trustees don’t make political gifts. In contrast, charities that register as Missionary are more likely to receive grants from foundations where trustees do make political gifts.

Q: Do specific political connections influence which charities a foundation gives to?

Alberta Legislature

Dougherty: Because I looked at political alignment (left, centre and right) rather than specific politicians or parties, I can’t say anything about specific political connections. What I can say is that political ties between foundation trustees and federal parties tends to be a bit more fluid and the differences are more about whether a trustee is making political gifts or not. At the provincial level, in Alberta and Ontario, political ties tend to be with right-of-centre parties, and foundation granting when trustees are making gifts to provincial parties reflects right-of-centre politics (less for arts and culture charities, Muslim charities, and environmental charities, for example).

I’m aware of a few charities that have current or former politicians on their boards or that were founded by politicians or their relatives. In future research, I hope to look at how recipient charity’s political connections affect granting from foundations with similar political connections.

Q: Do Canadian foundations direct grants to supporting public policies for the benefit of themselves and their wealthy peers?

Dougherty: No, there’s no evidence that private family foundations are granting more often or more dollars to charities that are involved in developing or building support for policies within Ontario and Alberta. My future research will look at grants across provincial boundaries to analyze granting to national think-tanks or advocacy organizations that were missed because of the geographic limits in this study.

Q: What did you find eye-opening about your research related to private foundations?

Dougherty: When I started this study, I expected trustees to be more consistent in their support of parties or political goals. However, the number of trustees giving to both centre and right-of-centre parties in the same year meant that I had to change my thinking about political giving to include non-political goals, like helping a friend get elected or accessing a decision-maker at a political fundraiser.

On the granting side, I was surprised by the importance of giving to religious charities in the results and how political ties correlate with types of religious charities; I mean, foundations without politically aligned trustees are more likely to give to mainstream Christian charities, while foundations with politically aligned trustees are more likely to give to missionary religious charities

A lot of the conversation around foundations seems focused on service delivery and achieving impact, and religious organizations aren’t always part of that conversation. There needs to be a broader conversation about the different things that private family foundations do with their granting, and not just service- and impact-focused granting.

Christopher Dougherty is based at the , University of St. Andrews, in the UK, and is researching “The political expressiveness of charitable sectors in comparative perspective: Canada and its provinces and the UK and its countries.” He’s on .

Keith SjĂśgren

By Keith SjĂśgren.

At the end of 2022, Canadian foundations held a total of — almost two thirds of charitable sector investment assets. These assets are vital to the work and sustainability of foundations although there are some questions as to how well those assets are being managed.

One of the findings of the recent (PFC) deals with the role of investment managers in furthering the mission of a foundation (or charity), and ensuring that either personal (in the case of private foundations) or institutional values are not at odds with investments made by external asset managers engaged by the foundation.

Two Sides of the Coin

“On the flip side, it would seem reasonable to expect various foundations to include certain types of investments in their portfolios.” (Photo is courtesy of Pina Messina.)

On the surface, or obverse side of the coin, it would seem straightforward that values not be at odds with investments. MADD should not invest in companies that either manufacture or distribute alcohol; CAMH Foundation should avoid holding shares of a cannabis grower or retailer; and The Canadian Council of Churches (the home of Project Ploughshares) should avoid having any exposure through their investment portfolio to shares of weapons manufacturers.

On the flip side, or reverse side of the investment coin, it would seem reasonable to expect various foundations to include certain types of investments in their portfolios. For example, foundations aligned with the LGBTQ community should only invest in businesses that have progressive benefit programs and strong DEI policies. Similarly, foundations whose mandate is focused on the rights of children should invest in companies that manufacture in countries with protections for child labour.

Reality Bites

“Portfolio managers and relationship managers at most asset management firms are more familiar with pension management, and bring little expertise and fresh thinking to foundations.” (Photo is courtesy of Jason Leung.)

But, in reality, this is generally not happening. Foundation assets are primarily managed by firms that do not specialize in foundations and endowments but, rather, in pension fund assets or portfolios of wealthy individuals and families. Of the approximately , pension assets represented almost 20%. High net worth assets managed on a discretionary basis made up 14%, and foundations and endowments made up just 1.5% of the managed asset pie in Canada. At the end of 2023, the largest Canadian pension manager had pension assets under management of $125 billion. That same manager, ranked second in the foundations and endowments league tables, was .

The outcome of this client bias is that portfolio managers/relationship managers at most asset management firms are more familiar with pension management and bring little expertise and fresh thinking to foundations. The task is complicated by the fact that objectives of defined benefit pension funds are universal, whereas the goals of charitable foundations are customized by their purpose. To be fair, a number of major public foundations have asset management executives as directors or members of an investment committee that has led to some improvement in bridging the knowledge gap.

In terms of small public or private foundations, many engage the services of a full-service brokerage advisor who, in many cases, has no fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interests of the client and whose experience in managing charitable assets may be limited to a few accounts and a handful of donor-advised funds.

An associated concern is the near absence of professional investment guidance and management for foundations with less than $1 million in assets. Currently, based on the database , of the 11,163 foundations in Canada, 61% have less than $1 million in assets with the majority of those being private foundations. (It is worth noting that over the past decade there has been a net increase of 1,335 in the number of private foundations in Canada and a decrease of 394 in the number of public foundations.) A brief survey of investment managers suggests that most do not accept investment accounts with less than $1 million in total, irrespective of the nature of the asset owner.

Those Darn Fees

“As managers encourage foundations to shift assets into private market securities to enhance returns (albeit at the expense of liquidity), fees have risen with seemingly only limited pushback from the foundations.”

A lack of specialization is one of the challenges, another is cost. The core objective of most foundations is to protect donor capital, to preserve the gifting power of the assets (as opposed to purchasing power), to have sufficient liquidity to meet both pre-determined and spontaneous granting, and to keep fees paid to external managers and advisors to a minimum in order to provide the maximum capital for charitable purposes.

Asset managers claim that fees charged to charities and nonprofits are based on fees applied to institutional investors (or private clients, if the amounts are below, say, $5 million) to which a modest discount – in the range of 10-15 basis points – is applied. While fees always reflect the size of the account and the nature of the assets being managed, through comparing sector average fees charged to pension funds and large foundations of similar size that the discount may not be as meaningful as some managers suggest.

As managers encourage foundations to shift assets into private market securities to enhance returns (albeit at the expense of liquidity), fees have risen with seemingly only limited pushback from the foundations. This trend of rising fees is the reverse of the wishes of the foundations. In a recent , 28% of respondents “strongly agree” with the statement that fees should be lower and 62% put a check mark against “somewhat agree”. To add to the sense of dissatisfaction, only 10% of the foundations surveyed were satisfied with their ability to benchmark the fees that they were being charged.

In order to offer fees that more closely meet the needs of foundations, asset managers have moved away from providing customized, segregated portfolios made up of individual securities. Instead, foundations are now offered pooled solutions for various asset classes or, in some cases, mutual or exchange traded funds. This approach seems eminently reasonable as the solutions meets the economic goals of both parties.

Influences

A nonprofit organization’s portfolio may hold investments that conflict with their mission.

What is lost, however, is the ability of the charity to directly influence what specific investments the manager holds in the pool. As a result, foundations can discover that they are holding an interest in shares issued by a business that fails to reflect the purpose of the foundation and may, in fact, have a corporate mission that is almost diametrically opposed to that of the charity. For example, Doctors Without Borders deals with the victims of war and conflict yet, within their portfolios may be an equity pool that holds a position in General Dynamics Corp, a manufacturer of advanced military vehicles.

In order to be socially responsible or to align mission and investments, foundations are asked to pay a Ěýprice. Segregated portfolios carry far higher fees than pooled, exchange traded or mutual funds. Segregated portfolios that veer away from the normal models employed by asset managers to accommodate exclusions or inclusions become even more expensive. The reason is that charitable assets, although nice to have, do not represent the bread and butter for asset managers. The absence of clout and the lack of concentration of charitable assets leads to a quiet sometimes inaudible voice at the asset management table.

Options

Read Keith SjĂśgren’s past analysis of financial issues related to philanthropy: /panl/2023/drivers-of-philanthropy-in-2023-by-keith-sjogren

There are a range of options open to foundations, both public and private. They can accept the status quo and negotiate with asset managers for either lower fees or more tailored solutions. Secondly, the sector can identify a select group of Canadian asset managers and work with them to develop a unique offering for the charitable sector. Alternatively, they can individually (if large enough), or collectively, follow the lead of the Mastercard Foundation and the University of Toronto and establish their own asset management company and/or an OCIO (Outsourced Chief Invest Officer), such as Commonfund in the United States.

As indicated at the beginning of this article, at the end of 2022, total long-term investments of both types of foundations in Canada totalled $107 billion. Removing the $39.3 billion reported by the Mastercard Foundation and the $3.8 billion of endowed assets at the University of Toronto, leaves a total of $62.5 billion. While this may be a modest amount in both relative and absolute terms, it is an amount big enough to attract attention, whichever option is selected. The importance of the charitable sector to Canadian society cannot be measured by the size of investment assets.

The key to improving the manner in which charities are perceived and managed by asset managers is to work together to force change and not to try and address the shortcomings on an individual basis.

Investing for Impact

The also highlighted the interest of many foundations – most likely private foundations – in moving a larger share of their investment portfolio into social or impact investments. This laudable strategy is not hard to establish but far from simple to implement.

One reason why there seems to be foot dragging on this matter, despite evidence that some major foundations are taking bold steps, is the unpreparedness of, or lack of interest by, conventional asset managers to provide opportunities and access to impact investments. As a result, a new breed of impact investment managers and advisors is emerging.

However, despite the heightened public awareness of social finance – of which impact investing is one element – following the creation by the federal government of the $755 million , and notwithstanding a growing body of research, there remain some high hurdles to jump before a robust impact investing infrastructure is put in place.

High Hurdles

“The task of the community of Canadian foundations is to determine ways to deal with these hurdles not to stop entering the steeplechase.” (Photo is courtesy of Darren Wilkinson.)

These hurdles include attracting nationally focused foundations, such as those that offer donor-advised funds, to consider what are generally local and small opportunities that, for one reason or another, may not be supported by their donors. Secondly, the very nature of impact investments, often, but inaccurately, compared to venture capital, may generate an annual rate of return that is well south of market rates of return, not to mention the disbursement quota (5%) which has become the focus of many foundation boards and investment committees. Thirdly, along with a sub-market rate of return, impact investors must accept high transaction costs, a lack of liquidity, greater risk, transactional complexity, and a lower level of regulatory involvement, all of which may have a negative impact on the ability of the foundation to deliver against its primary mandate.

The task of the community of Canadian foundations is to determine ways to deal with these hurdles not to stop entering the steeplechase. The funding developments that have taken in place in the charitable sector and the creativeness of leaders lead to the conclusion that bold steps can be taken to unlock what many observers still categorize as idle capital. This is capital that was originally accumulated for social good and but needs to be freed from the bounds of low risk, conventionally managed investments that are mainly held in non-Canadian businesses focused on returns to shareholders and not benefits to Canadians.

Keith SjĂśgren is Chair of the Advisory Board for the Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership program and a member of the Donor-advised Fund Working Group of the Canadian Association of Gift Planners. Keith is also a member and former Chair of the Investment Committee of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Foundation.

Question: What is “family business philanthropy”?

Neamat Sidani: It’s a family firm’s voluntary pursuit of social objectives through cash and in-kind donations — to pay back to its local community — allowing the family business to strengthen kinships and family ties within and across generations, and to maintain family legacies. It’s driven by diverse motives and values that are unique to each family business, or business family, and that are worth exploring. There are three underlying elements: the family, the business and the philanthropy.

There’s literature about individual philanthropy and corporate philanthropy, but not much about family business philanthropy, although the phenomenon is popular in some countries, such as Lebanon. Because of the family element, you have “socioemotional wealth” along with economic wealth – you always have nonprofit goals in a for-profit company. In contrast, corporations have financial goals mostly, satisfying shareholders, creating economic benefits and so on, and philanthropy or nonprofit goals are rarely primary.

Q: What are you researching regarding family business philanthropy, and how does it compare to types of philanthropy in Canada?

“After the Beirut port explosion, in 2020, there were initiatives to rebuild the damaged area and to support entrepreneurial initiatives and philanthropic activities.” –Neamat Sidani. Photo is courtesy of Mahdi Shojaeian.

Sidani: I’m looking at philanthropic practices in family businesses, and I’m focusing on the rising phenomenon of family business philanthropy in crises. My research is about the crisis in Lebanon, as an empirical setting, but, of course, there are other parts of the world facing crises and disasters where you see family businesses stepping in to help in the crisis relief efforts through their philanthropy. For example, in Germany family firms helped the government in integrating refugees within their local communities. My research on family business philanthropy touched on a wider research about place-based philanthropy, something that Prof. Susan Phillips and colleagues have analyzed.

In Canada, there are many formal or registered foundations that do philanthropy, rather than philanthropy being practised within family businesses. From the literature I’ve read and from the MPNL sessions I attended (as part of my research stay at the Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership program at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University), I found out more about the differences in philanthropic approaches in different countries and contexts. In Canada, compared to Lebanon, people rely more on nonprofits, and the Canadian nonprofit sector is large and is a key player in crisis relief. Also, a Canadian businessperson or family will jump into philanthropy, but they usually start a foundation or nonprofit organization, with a board of directors, hired staff, legal processes and other infrastructure, and then they get out of way mostly.

Family business philanthropy isn’t usually formalized like that.

Family business philanthropy involves one business or several family firms that leverage their business channels or operations to reach beneficiaries, and they maintain a philanthropic legacy over many years and even generations – and the family firm is known within communities as one that helps people during crises and that contributes to society. The family name and reputation are key in this aspect.

Also, large family businesses in Canada are publicly listed, with national surveys or databases, so that you can study what businesses are doing in terms of social responsibility or philanthropy. In Lebanon, family businesses aren’t listed, although they comprise maybe 90% of the private sector. In China, to take another example, you have a mixture of listed and non-listed family businesses, with state ownership in the mix. In Italy and Germany, family businesses are privately owned or family owned, and as far as I know, they’re not state owned. There are many differences in the structure and ownership across countries and geographies

Q: Are there examples in the Middle East or anywhere that demonstrate a well-run family business philanthropic initiative?

Sidani: Yes, in Lebanon, where there are several cases, some of which are in my chapter, For example, I studied a case in which the family owners are in the fifth generation of running the business, and they have a philanthropic legacy that supports their community and national initiatives, especially during crises. This kind of philanthropy isn’t sudden; it’s established over the years, because of the family’s values, religion or moral obligation, as well as entrepreneurial traits.

After the , there were initiatives to rebuild the damaged area and to support entrepreneurial initiatives and philanthropic activities. For example, one family business that runs a car-tire company offered free tires after the blast, because many cars had been damaged. In normal times, this kind of philanthropy doesn’t happen — it’s business as usual for a core-business operation. However, in a crisis, they saw the need and, instead of donating money, they repaired car tires as soon as possible, because people needed cars to move around, to help victims, and so on.

Another example, as I previously mentioned, is in Germany, where family businesses collaborated with the public sector to accommodate and employ Syrian refugees in 2015. There’s a study by about this philanthropic intervention of the private sector: “Corporate sector engagement in contemporary ‘crises’: The case of refugee integration in Germany.” The German family businesses were very well embedded in communities. They knew their community’s needs, including job vacancies, and they helped during the refugee crisis.

As I mentioned in “Four Trends in the Creation & Shutdown of Registered Charities in Canada in 2023,” the number of private foundations in Canada continues to grow, while the number of public foundations continues to fall. As of early 2024, there were 6,770 private foundations registered as charities, compared to 6,102 in 2021. Meanwhile, the number of public foundations decreased to 4,780, as of early 2024, down from 4,944 in 2021. In fact, as shown on Tables C and F (below), the decline in public foundations and increase in private foundations have been occurring for some time. To find out more, I took a closer look at 10 years of data about registrations and revocations of public and private foundations, data from the Canada Gazette and T3010 tax forms. (See our “Charity Trends and Revocations” series for other articles and insights.)

Ten Years of Public Foundations Closing Down

Click photo for Don McRae’s “Four Trends in the Creation & Shutdown of Registered Charities in Canada in 2023.”

Public Foundations are falling out of favour as a method of helping Canadians build our society. The numbers show it, and they demonstrate that this has been happening for some time. And there were surprises in what I found. While I expected most foundations to be under the Community Benefit heading (hereafter referred to as Community), I didn’t expect the percentage to be so high: 86.7% of public foundations are registered under Community (see Table A).

Also, you’ll notice in Table A (below) that the number of public foundations (registered as charities) took a dip at the start of the pandemic. Registrations started to increase in 2021 and 2022, but they took a real dip, to 38, in 2023. (Note, I actually looked at additional data, back to 2007, and the 38 registrations in 2023 is still the lowest number of registrations in the past 17 years.)

Table A: Registrations of Public Foundations from 2014 to 2023

Correspondingly, 78.5% of revoked public foundations are under Community (see Table B, below); the major charitable category revoked was “Community benefit – foundations,” with 94 charities in 2023 and 84 charities in 2022. And 13.5% of revocations were for Education charities.

Table B: Revocations of Public Foundations from 2014 to 2023

And as shown on Table C (below), there have been 711 registrations and 1,105 revocations for a net loss of 394 public foundations in the last ten years. In fact, 2012 is the last time that there were more public foundation registrations than revocations. So, the decline has been occurring for some time.

Table C: Public Foundation Revocations Over Registrations from 2014 to 2023

It’s unclear why public foundations have fallen out of favour. It could be that it takes more organization and collaboration to create a public foundation. Maybe Canadians aren’t supporting these groups to the level they were before. (United Ways have certainly found that out in terms of revenue.) It could be that governments and other funders have changed their priorities.

The Past 10 Years of Private Foundations Growing

New private foundations (65.9% of them) are registered mainly under the heading of Community, with Religion taking second place, at 16.8% (see Table D, below). There was a small dip in the number of registrations in 2020, probably due to the pandemic, but new registrations more than recovered in 2021 and onward.

Table D: Registrations of Private Foundations from 2014 to 2023Ěý

In Table E (below), you can see that Community private foundations make up 68.3% of revocations, with Education coming in second, at 17.6%.

Table E: Revocations of Private Foundations from 2014 to 2023

As seen in Table F, below, registrations outnumber revocations of private foundations. There were 2,519 private foundations registered in the ten years from 2023 to 2014. Conversely, there were 1,184 revocations. That’s a net gain of 1,335 private foundations in the past decade. What’s striking is that registrations outnumbered revocations in all ten years (and of note, registrations outnumbered revocations all the way back to 2007).

Table F: Private Foundation Registrations vs. Revocations (2014-2023)

Why All This Matters: A Major Shift in Canada?

Illustration: “Of Pride,” in John Day’s “A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation,” London, 1569.

I, for one, am concerned that there are fewer public foundations than before, because the trend suggests that our common understanding of charity is changing from a public duty to private effort and, frankly, moving toward a more of how our society takes care of others. In other words, what we view as worthwhile charitable causes or acts is becoming more privatized, more limited and perhaps more about the rich giving to the “needy” (there are still Canadian charities that use that term).

When you consider the number of closed charities, including shuttered public foundations, you have a picture of a loss of a number of community organizations in all parts of Canada — in cities, towns and villages across all provinces and territories — encompassing every major activity that charities undertake.

The increase in private foundations may reflect the current distribution of wealth in Canadian society and the increasing gap between those who have and those who don’t – or more precisely, between those who have a lot and those who deserve a whole lot more. However, the increase in the number of private foundations might also suggest that our society may be increasingly viewing monied individuals’ or families’ predilections of charity in a more favourable light than collective or community responses. If so, we’re poorer for it.

Don McRae is an old, left-handed, male, Scottish agnostic with Wesleyan-Methodist grandparents (hence the agnosticism). He’s also a former federal public servant and a longstanding volunteer, consultant, writer and researcher on the charitable sector. For more than ten years, McRae has studied trends in the charitable sector by analyzing the revocations of charitable status that are published in the Canada Gazette. He digs deeper into trends by examining data from annual charity tax returns (T3010 forms) at the end of the calendar year, and looks at newly registered charities to see what replaces the revoked ones. McRae can be found on .

Photo is courtesy of Janko Ferlic.

Joe O’Brien, Minister of State for Community Development, Integration and Charities, speaks with someone at the launch of the National Philanthropy Policy.

In December 2023, the government of Ireland launched the National Philanthropy Policy to deepen understanding and knowledge, to create an enabling environment and to accelerate engagement with philanthropy in Ireland for social good.

The policy focuses on five objectives between now and 2028:

1. Communication and Awareness Raising
2. Data and Research
3. Stimulating and Incentivising Philanthropy
4. Government and Sectoral Partnership
5. Capacity Building

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Click here for a video recording of the event, as well as the new TD report, “Trust and Transformation – Canadian Women and Philanthropy,” and reports and resources from the Women’s Philanthropy Institute’s “Women Give” series .

Panellists:

Diana Leat, Philanthropy Advisor & Associate, Centre for Philanthropy and Public Good, University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Keratiloe Mogotsi, Lecturer & Programme Director, Centre for African Philanthropy and Social Investment, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Michael Moody, Frey Foundation Chair for Family Philanthropy, Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy, Grand Valley State University, USA.

Susan Phillips, Professor & Supervisor, Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, Canada.

Charles Sellen, Global Philanthropy Advisor & Instructor, Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, Canada.

Moderated by Jennifer Conley, Chief Advancement Officer at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University.