May 2019 Charity & NFP Law Update
As discussed in the October 2018 Charity & NFP Law Update, the Special Senate Committee on the Charitable Sector (the “Committee”) launched an e-consultation with an online questionnaire for charities (the “e-consultation”) to complete to help the Committee better understand the challenges faced by the charitable and not-for-profit sector. On May 17, 2019, the Committee released its partial findings of the e-consultation.
The partial findings were based on the responses of 695 charitable and non-profit organizations across Canada. The e-consultation found that charitable and non-profit organizations were generally small, with approximately 65% of the respondents indicating that their organizations had 10 or fewer employees, and one-third of the respondents indicating that their organizations had only one to five employees. With respect to volunteers, the e-consultation found that organizations with no paid employees were most likely to indicate that they were “very concerned” with finding and keeping volunteers. The e-consultation also found that 51% of respondents did not collect data on senior management diversity, and 56% of respondents did not gather data on employee diversity.
The Committee’s published findings are based only on the results from the e-consultation, and are only partial findings to date. As the Committee has completed its consultation process, it is now in the process of preparing its full report, which is expected to be released in September 2019.