Harmony House is the only second-stage shelter in Ottawa. What are some of the barriers to second-stage, domestic-violence shelters?

Eskritt: The province wasn’t funding them anymore. We were lucky, because we had private donors who kept us afloat. Government policies actually matter: the police budget is about $332 million, and meanwhile, 160 agencies that operate in the city have to compete for $25 million. That’s quite a disparity. We’re trying to get people into housing, but there’s a housing crisis; Ottawa Community Housing has a seven- to 10-year waitlist. There’s just nowhere for people to go.

But now we’re in the time of COVID, where domestic violence got pushed to the forefront. It tripled during the pandemic. We had a woman murdered in this country every two and a half days during the pandemic. But we’re not counting on it staying this way forever. There’s going to be mental health services that need support, children that need support, elderly people that need support, newcomers — everybody’s going to be competing for these dollars

With agencies competing for money, do you find success with foundation grants for your organization?

Eskritt: We find huge success with grants. We find that foundations are good for funding projects. During the school closures, we transformed our boardroom into a school classroom. We offered free laptops and a teacher to be in our classroom every day to help kids whose parents couldn’t help them at school for whatever reason. They were traumatized and they couldn’t get up — and they spoke maybe five languages, but English just wasn’t their best one — or they had bigger problems to worry about besides making sure their kids were sitting in front of a computer. So, the foundations really stepped up to support education.

The same with our food bank. We moved from giving people unsaleable food that you often get at food banks, and we started giving direct gift cards to buy the food they need. We thought: “Go make it work for your family, not just what we think you might need.” Foundations are good for pilot projects and going above and beyond what we’d normally do. But you can’t count on them for core funding, because they’re being pushed and pulled in many directions.

What other projects had to shift gears with COVID? What are you working on for the future?

Eskritt: The thing you need when you’re healing from trauma is community. That’s the thing that will make your pieces come together again. That’s what COVID robbed us of. We weren’t allowed to have communal meals, we had limited programs, and services went virtual. A lot of the people we deal with have trauma around screens, whether they were being filmed against their wills, having trackers put on their equipment, or not trusting tech anymore because their partner used it against them. It was really hard on everybody because we wanted to see them, they wanted to see us, and it just wasn’t going to happen the way we wanted it to.

We ended up hiring a peer support worker for the first time. She’s a woman who had been at Harmony Hope for years in the past, but came back to volunteer. We offered her a full-time position to help the women get through COVID, so there was always somebody to call, always someone available on video call. Now that we’re transitioning back, we’re bringing back in-person programming. We’ve been lucky that Rogers donated a bunch of phones and plans, so we could give women clean technology if they were exiting an abusive situation, or thinking about it but their partners were monitoring their messages.

Now that we can have people inside again, I’m instituting a new program where, in order to live in Harmony House, people have to teach a course of their own choosing. It’s because they’re all brilliant. You have to be to survive, and there has to be something you can teach someone else, whether it’s a craft, how to knit, or an Algonquin language. They have to do it for an hour once a month just to reinforce that they are capable of running something.

Our boys’ program has also been successful because we hired a young man who grew up here. Now the little gents who have never had a positive man in their life can have someone show them how to be strong, but also how to hug, and cry, and cook, and run.

Can you speak more about the process of incorporating those with lived experience as your employees?

Eskritt: Everybody who works here has been touched by trauma; we have lived experience. This peer support worker we just hired is the only one on staff who has lived here, and this job was specifically for somebody who has lived at Harmony House. We also have a position on the board that’s held specifically for somebody who has graduated from our housing, and that’s really important to us. Most people on the board have either experienced, or are close to someone who experienced domestic violence. We tend to hire people who understand it internally, more so than hiring people going through school.

How did the MPNL program contribute to the work you do in your organization?

Eskritt: I’m a radical. When you’re a radical, you need that paper behind you. They may never respect what you have to say, but they know you’re not stupid. I was looking for respect from my colleagues because I had lived experience and two degrees, but I was struggling to make ends meet. I knew I was an expert, so I decided to upgrade my education. Now, I’m included on national panels and I’m an international speaker. I was able to take the microphone because I had initials after my name. Not that it’s fair. Not that it’s correct. Not that the smartest people get it. I was lucky to have the support of my family and have great success with school.

It was also really great to experience solidarity with other nonprofit professionals who don’t agree with the industry’s rules, and now we get to go change it, because we’re in charge now. It was exciting.

Ray Eskritt is on . Sherlyn Assam is on and . Photos are courtesy of Eskritt and Harmony House annual report.

The convergence of the global pandemic and accelerated movement for the racial/Indigenous justice are set to reshape governments’ relationships with civil society. How public services are financed and delivered, how governments engage with communities and the nonprofit sector, and how both governments and nonprofits practice meaningful inclusion will need to be radically reformed.

Reinventing service delivery

Think ahead, say, to five years. You can’t visit grandma in palliative care, send your kids to summer camp, go to the theatre or access many other services that matter to you. The barrier is not a continued requirement for physical distancing, rather that the charities and nonprofits that once provided these services no longer exist due to COVID-19.

The first challenge for public management post-pandemic, then, will be how to recoup lost services valued by citizens. COVID-19 is already having a devastating effect on Canada’s charitable and nonprofit sector, which employs about 10 percent of the workforce (Statistics Canada 2017). With fundraising events cancelled, venues closed, ticket sales lost, other earned-income evaporated, and volunteers forced away, 70 percent of charities are experiencing reduced revenues, on average about a 30 percent decline (Imagine Canada 2020; ONN 2020; Sask Nonprofit 2020). One in five charities, out of 86,000, will likely close or merge (Imagine Canada 2020), negatively affecting a diversity of subsectors including human services, arts and culture, faith, sports, and international aid. The effects are likely to be place-differentiated, with some locales hollowed out of organizations to a greater extent than others, creating “charity deserts” (Mohan 2015) that leave already vulnerable communities even more vulnerable (Black to the Future 2020). COVID-19 has also pulled back the curtain on the gendered nature of the sector and on precarious work that is under-paid, lacking pensions and benefits and unstable due to short-term contracts, which particularly impacts racialized and immigrant women (Thériault and Vaillancourt n.d.; ONN 2018). In addition, the essential, often invisible role played by volunteers (mainly older women) and families in shoring-up under-staffed facilities became apparent as the pandemic took its toll on long term care homes.

An optimistic, short-term approach for recovery of the nonprofit sector is to extend wage subsidies and other community funding so that there is a “ramp” rather than a “cliff” (Social Ventures Australia and CSI 2020) off the public sector supports, allowing organizations to retain staff and regain stable revenues. The assumption of this “organic” approach to rebuilding is that, with the help of philanthropy and innovative new business models, resilient organizations will survive and, over time, new ones will spring up to replace those that do not make it. This scenario will not be an effective route to restoring publicly valued services and a vibrant nonprofit sector, however. Philanthropy is no substitute for government, and charitable giving and volunteering has been stagnant for years (Lasby and Barr 2018). Although almost $50 billion in assets are held by private foundations in Canada (PFC 2019) – most of it held in perpetuity with a mandatory payout of 3.5 percent annually – this will not suddenly be spent out to cover the $15 billion that is predicted to be lost from the sector due to COVID-19 (Imagine Canada 2020). More than a return to the status quo of 2019 will be required: the “charity model” that has been an integral part of the liberal welfare state over the past fifty years needs to be reinvented.

The charity model relies on a “goodwill” motivation or “passion bonus” to substitute for full compensation of wages and organizational operating costs. With centuries old roots in religion, the charity model was secularized in the Victorian era, absorbed into the creation of the modern welfare state in liberal regimes such as Canada and widely expanded under New Public Management (NPM) beginning in the late 1980s. The contemporary manifestation, which Canadian public administration initially dubbed “alternative service delivery (ASD),” puts an emphasis in government-nonprofit contracting on state control and accountability for public money (Armstrong 1998). Governments determine the deliverables of contracts, manage competitive bidding processes, set results-based frameworks and impose strict accountability and reporting requirements. These contracts rarely pay the full cost of service provision, however, reflecting a popular view that funders (and donors) should not be responsible for “overhead” or administration costs. For nonprofits, this has fuelled a “starvation cycle” (Hager et al. 2004; Lecy and Searing 2015) – a systematic under-investment in the infrastructure such as technology, training and personnel that supports resilience and innovation. This also makes it very difficult to accumulate reserve funds that could support more than three months of operations (ONN 2020), which is contributing to the quick demise of many charities.

For Canadian governments, the charity model has enabled policy neglect of this sector. While there have been attempts at reform, most with limited success, these have focused quite narrowly on contracting arrangements (e.g. Independent Blue Ribbon Panel on Federal Grant and Contribution Programs 2006) or charity regulation (e.g. Joint Regulatory Table 2003), rather than on the broader policy frameworks and machinery that structure and guide relationships between the state and the sector (Anheier and Toepler 2019). A Special Senate Committee on the Charitable Sector took up some of these broader issues in its 2019 report, offering 42 specific recommendations for strengthening the sector and its relationship with the federal government – recommendations that have yet to be implemented. However, the “rubber hits the road” relationships occur primarily with provincial governments, some of which have demonstrated open hostility to nonprofits, particularly those undertaking policy advocacy, in recent years.

Canadian public administration scholarship has not motivated deeper examination of these policy frameworks and, indeed, has facilitated considerable complacency. Beginning in the 2000s, Canadian scholars embraced the paradigm of “New Public Governance (NPG)” which originated in Europe and emphasizes networked, collaborative governance and the co-creation of policy between governments and nonprofits. Conceptually, NPG has much to offer as a model of cross-sector collaboration. But we have failed to test well empirically its existence in the Canadian context. Indeed, we often repeated the notion that such co-creation existed until we began to believe it, or based our evidence on a few, usually favourable case studies. Thus, we tended to conclude, with some cautions, that “co-governance of policy offers the nonprofit sector unprecedented opportunities to influence policy and craft policy solution” (Brock 2020: 267).

I hope that I am wrong in my own, unsubstantiated assertion of the limited presence of collaborative governance in Canadian public management. Perhaps opportunities are unprecedented, but policy co-creation with the nonprofit sector still seems constrained in our country. It is telling, for instance, that the initial federal proposal for wage subsidies for workers displaced by COVID-19 and other supports for employers did not include charities and nonprofits, and it took quick advocacy by sector leaders to get them covered by these programs (Emergency Coalition of Canadian Charities 2020). The fiasco of the agreement (and its subsequent cancellation) with Canada’s “celebrity” charity – the We Charity founded and run by the Kielburger brothers – to manage the $543 million Student Service Grant program on the justification that it was the only charity capable of such delivery sadly reflects on how little the federal government understands or has constructive dialogue with the sector.

Community mobilization

As Canadians (for the most part) heeded the call to “stay home” during the early stages of the pandemic, an informal movement of “caremongering” arose – neighbours formed small pods to help neighbours and grassroots groups of mutual and community aid quickly formed (Moscrop 2020). This informal, place-based community mobilization has been counterbalanced by the nation-wide protests and other forms of collection action in support of the international anti-racism movement. What makes the 2020 round of anti-racism mobilization a critical change moment is its broad base of support: while Millennials and Gen Zs have been the primary participants in demonstrations, three-quarters of Canadians support the demonstrations, with such support consistent across the country and across gender, ethnicity and social-economic status (Narrative Research 2020).

The combination of local, self-help and national, systemic-change movements creates new dynamics for public policy and management. A renewal of the importance of place can be anticipated. The effects of COVID-19 have been felt quite differently in different places – between urban and rural, among and within cities – highlighting place-specific economic and social disparities, the importance of leadership by mayors and municipal governments, and the need for policies on opening the economy to be place-sensitive. In pandemic recovery and rebuilding, the exigencies of place will need to be incorporated into public policy and service reconfiguration by all levels of government. In spite of a spatial turn in public policy and in social science scholarship (Logan 2012) in many other countries over the past decade or so, the national and provincial politics of Canada have made differentiation by place quite difficult. And, Canadian scholarship has similarly lagged behind, with few taking up Bradford’s (2005) call to take place more seriously in policy and research. The pursuit of more place-based policy, planning and philanthropy, however, needs to avoid an inherent paradox: that with a greater focus on locale, the risk is diminishing the ability to draw together cross-sector in order to pursue big issues such as sustainable development goals and climate change.

Action on such issues will hinge on meaningful forms of public and community engagement by governments. With heightened collective action, particularly the pressure for fundamental changes to public services such as policing and the revival of attention to climate change post-pandemic, the current practices of “consultation” will be neither legitimate nor adequate to support the kind of systemic changes that are in motion. New processes and mechanisms that engage civil society leaders and citizens in deeper dialogue on complex issues and ways to rebuild the nonprofit sector will need to be developed and tested. Perhaps we will get to NPG after all. We also have an opportunity to build upon the community mobilization of COVID-19 to strengthen the culture of philanthropy and create stronger infrastructure for volunteering, participation and giving.

Diversity, equity and inclusion

The third challenge is not only engaging in more meaningful ways with diverse communities, but ensuring diverse communities are more meaningfully engaged within both governments and civil society organizations. While better practices of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have been on the agenda for years, they are now at the heart of the ability to implement major change.

Accompanied by mandatory reporting on the legislated “equity” categories, the federal and many provincial governments have achieved increased representation of racialized and Indigenous employees, nearing or even surpassing the levels of workforce availability, although with reduced participation in the executive categories (TBS 2020). However, the nonprofit sector lags behind governments in DEI. While data are limited and there is no mandatory reporting on the composition of boards of directors of Canadian charities or their senior management, only an estimated 12 percent of those in leadership roles are from racialized groups, and in a city as diverse as Toronto, only 17.4 percent in 2017 – a slight decrease from 2014 (Cukier 2018).

Inclusion is more than a number, however, but is both a behaviour and an outcome. As Fredette and Bernstein (2019) note, having a critical mass of “minorities” (including youth) on a board not only produces more equitable boardrooms, but it shifts control that is often held in check by the majority, and thus promotes the exercise of collective influence that changes behaviour and can advance change. Meaningful inclusion needs to cultivate leadership pipelines and talent development, strengthen governance and management practices, and provide better reporting on DEI practices (Omidvar 2020). The post-pandemic world will put an onus on nonprofit leaders and public service executives to be more strategic and risk taking as they adapt to the digital and technological transformation and work-from-home routines. If post-pandemic there is a large scale exit of leaders from the public and nonprofit sectors, the opportunity window to implement a human resource renewal plan and cultivate new leadership in an inclusive manner will be narrow.

Conclusion

“Never waste a good crisis” – the line simultaneously attributed to Machiavelli, Churchill and Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals – is a fitting mantra for 2020. Canadian public management faces not one, but two historical moments that have created an imperative for change in policies, practices and scholarship. The disastrous effects of COVID-19 on the nonprofit sector require not mere recovery and restoration of the status quo but reinvention of models of service delivery, better means of engagement in policy development, and more effective inclusion and human resource strategies. More place-sensitive approaches supported by better data and data analytics will be essential. The mobilization of grassroots self-help as well as Millennials and Gen Zs demonstrating against racism creates an opportunity to renew a culture of philanthropy, volunteering and activism. Finally, public management scholarship has much work to do in providing better conceptual and empirical analyses of the government-civil society nexus.

Susan D. Phillips is a Professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University and an Editor of “PANL Perspectives.” This article was originally published as part of “Beyond COVID-19: Five commentaries on reimagining governance for future crises and resilience,” in Canadian Public Administration, on Sept. 25, 2020 (). Photos are courtesy of Unsplash and @geraltyichen (woman on subway), Erik Mclean (debit-credit sign) and Etienne Marais (tire).

References for “The COVID Crisis & the Imperative for Change”

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Black to the Future. 2020. COIVD-19 Emergency Aid Report. Toronto: Black to the Future.

Bradford, Neil J. 2005. Place-Based Public Policy: Towards a New Urban and Community Agenda for Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Policy Research Networks.

Brock, Kathy L. 2020. “Government and non-profit collaboration in times of deliverology, policy innovation laboratories and hubs, and New Public Governance.” Voluntas 31: 257–270.

Cukier, Wendy. 2018. Brief to the Special Senate Committee on the Charitable Sector. 10 December.

Emergency Coalition of Canadian Charities. 2020. Letter to Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Ministers. 25 March.

Fredette, Christopher, and Ruth Sessler Bernstein. 2019. “Ethno-racial diversity on nonprofit boards: A critical mass perspective.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 48 (5): 931–952.

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Prepare for the worst and hope for the best

Plan, plan, plan. Plan for everything, from to your CEO winning the lottery or . The pandemic has reminded us of the importance of technological literacy and access. Board members reluctant to meet over Zoom have been thrown into the abyss of remote technology. But why did it take a pandemic for people in the charitable sector to update their ways? Organizations could have considered the necessity of e-voting, remote meetings and virtual document sharing before the crisis, and the transition for many could have been much smoother. An emergency-preparedness plan has to include provisions in governing documents to allow such provisions and ensure the plan’s consistency with the law under which the organization is incorporated.

The board is the boss

It’s easy in turbulent times to over-rely on your organization’s top executive to steer you clear of a crisis. Traditional boards are set up to delegate daily concerns to their CEOs. That’s fine under normal conditions, but in a time of rapid change, the board must step in to support the CEO, give direction and, most importantly, ensure the organization’s accountability toward its constituents and mission, and protect its assets. Amidst chaos, board members can easily forget that they’re ultimately the ones legally liable for the organization’s actions. A pandemic isn’t an excuse to stop meetings, avoid contingency measures and neglect due diligence over organizational spending; the organization’s survival often depends on stable and consistent attention to governance.

Take a breather and don’t overreact

While it’s essential to be proactive in times of crisis, the lessons learned must not lead to a situation where an organization always operates in emergency mode. One day, the crisis will be over, but a new (and perhaps different) reality will emerge. Some measures, protocols and policies might be necessary to survive the crisis but not helpful in normal circumstances. For example, the board might need to meet more regularly during a crisis (definitely not less), but such frequency should not be enshrined. Meeting fatigue is a real thing that can lead to disengagement among board members.

Organizations are people too

Saving for a rainy day to lessen the effects of a crisis on an organization, we often forget about the people within and the impact of crises on them. Emergency-preparedness plans should anticipate and allow for difficult conversations about leadership changes, impacts on beneficiaries, responsibilities of board members, or the need for staff layoffs. Discussing the unthinkable, the death of the organization, is the required first step in planning and deserves a place in what-would-you-do scenarios.

These difficult times remind us that organizations are first about people: the people we serve, employ, and affect. Planning for governance emergencies ultimately protects those we care about.