This article originally appeared in PANL Perspectives and is shared with permission of the author.

One of the many effects of the pandemic and its related health restrictions was the shutdown of many forms of face-to-face volunteering. Meetings stopped, museums closed, theatres were dark, sports venues were empty and choirs lost their voice. And this is important because 58% of charities across Canada are solely volunteer run.¹

While virtual volunteering tried to fill the gap and the easing of restrictions has brought back many types of person-to-person volunteering, the number of volunteers and hours is not back to pre-pandemic levels.

But something else is changing. Our traditional model of volunteering was hit by a major shock with the pandemic, one that stressed and, in some cases, broke our ways of helping each other. As a society, we need to find ways to build back better. But first, we need to recognize that the pandemic sped up changes that were already occurring in volunteering and philanthropy; specifically, the loss or erosion of a number of volunteer hubs.

Many of the organizations that are incubators for volunteering or that facilitate and provide resources toward that end are in trouble. Data on the registration of new charities and the revocation of older mature groups suggests we are losing parts of our system of volunteer support with little else but computer screens to replace the assistance and personal contact our society has come to rely on.

We are losing the groups that bring people together at the local level and that provide space, tools and money to support community causes. We are losing churches, service clubs, auxiliaries and other groups that provide the structure for volunteering at the local, regional and national levels.

Churches

In 2019, the National Trust of Canada predicted that we will lose 9,000 places of worship the next ten years. And it is clear, from the revocation data on charities, that the bulk of these will be mainstream Christian churches. With the exception of Baha’is Assemblies, which are usually too small to have their own building, the other major religions in Canada are creating more charities than they’re losing.

The information from the charity database shows this trend. Since 2000, 7,171 Christian charities have been registered and 8,036 Christian charities have been revoked for a difference of 865 charities. The data from 2022 shows that 299 Christian Churches were registered as charities while 364 were revoked; the majority of these were from United, Anglican, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Lutheran and other larger denominations.

Churches are neighbourhood organizations. They provide funds for local groups, set up soup kitchens or foodbanks, run thrift shops, provide opportunities for youth like Scouts and Guides and sponsor immigrant and refugee families. They advocate for their neighbourhoods and communities. Most churches have kitchens, meeting rooms, auditoria, gyms and stages. But it is not only the loss of one congregation and its volunteer habitat that’s at stake.

In 2020, a report entitled No Space for Community² looked at what would happen to Canadian communities when faith buildings close down and are no longer available to community groups and nonprofits.

Thirty-two percent of respondents said that they paid nothing for their spaces and 27% said they had other arrangements including bartering or exchange of services. Other groups said that they paid minimal amounts. The organizations using these spaces were arts and culture, recreation and sports, social clubs, education and research, food security and daycares. The convenience of the location is a major factor for these groups. The loss of this community infrastructure and social capital is clear. But they are not the only change in the charitable sector.

Service Clubs

Service clubs bring people together to volunteer and raise funds to improve the health and wellbeing of their communities. These clubs undertake a number of projects to meet local needs. They support school breakfast programs, youth activities, medical research and equipment, seniors, scholarships and bursaries, summer camps, sports, recreation, music festivals and more.

The charity database shows that there are 440 Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis and Optimist Clubs charities in Canada. It also shows that another 283 have been revoked. On the face of it, these numbers look good. If we look at the number of new charities and revoked charities since 2000, the picture changes. There were 88 new club charities since 2000. In the same time period, 199 of these clubs were revoked.

A quick scan of budgets of 46 Lions Clubs indicated that more revocations are coming. Fourteen of them (30.4%) had annual revenues under $1K and nineteen of them (41.3%) had revenues under $5K.

Auxiliaries

Auxiliaries volunteer and raise funds for hospitals, seniors’ homes and other areas in health. Hospitals were essential during the pandemic, but not all of their functions continued. Those people who worked for the auxiliaries stayed at home. Gift shop volunteers, people who provided information, helped out with fundraising, who delivered books, who undertook the little acts of caring that improved the patient’s experience were gone.

There are 357 auxiliaries registered as charities and another 238 of these groups that have been revoked. Again, if one looks at the numbers since 2000, the picture changes. There have been 39 new charitable auxiliaries since 2000, but 163 of these groups have been revoked since then. The pandemic hit these groups hard and several lost their charitable status, in part because their members are older, and still have health concerns about face-to-face volunteering.

Community Resource and Public Amenities

These are the categories for groups that undertake activities in local communities. Community resource groups include daycares, community resource centres, women’s groups, friendship centres and immigrant settlement to name a few. Public amenities groups include libraries, museums, playgrounds, historical societies, recreation centres and cultural associations.

Because they’re community-based, the pandemic meeting restrictions hit these organizations particularly hard. There were 205 community resource groups registered since January 1, 2020. Over that same time period, 294 groups have been revoked for a loss of 89 groups. Similarly, 208 public amenities groups were registered since January 2020 and 292 have been revoked for a loss of 84 groups.

A sampling of the revocations shows the loss of community information groups, daycares, seniors’ groups, heritage and historical societies, local recreation groups, family services and museum support groups. A good number of these groups were in smaller or rural communities where they may have been the only provider of the service or activity.

Volunteer Centres

And then there are volunteer centres and bureaux; the groups readers might have thought would be first on this list. On the whole, volunteer centres have a precarious funding model. With the exceptions of some government support in Quebec and New Brunswick, there is no concerted government support for these groups in Canada. The other provinces and one territory in the survey have a dog’s breakfast of support, much of it based on project funding. By and large, the centres show wide fluctuations in their revenues.

In a survey of 61 volunteer centres with charitable status, it was found that 30 centres had a decrease in funding in the past year, five maintained their budget levels and 24 had budget increases. The bad news was that two of the centres closed down from the previous survey. Thirty-two of these groups have been revoked with 25 of the revocations occurring since 2000. Twelve volunteer centres have been registered since 2000.

Volunteer centres not only provide a wide range of volunteer opportunities, they also target their placements. They help students to find interesting positions so they not only meet their school volunteering hours, but also find possible career choices. They help newcomers to learn language and social skills while making a contribution to their new community. They provide seniors with specific supports—reducing their social isolation and giving them the sense of inclusion and fulfillment that volunteering provides.

The Way Forward

In some respects, this situation is not new; charitable organizations have a life cycle. They form to fill a community need; they meet it and then the wind down operations and close. Sometimes, like for community information centres, much of their business can now be met by a quick Internet search. The problem is that the “information part” has been resolved for consumers, but the “community part” of this equation is lost.

Many of these groups either don’t have or can’t initiate succession plans to rejuvenate their organizations. In their last Public Information Returns, volunteers from churches, auxiliaries and similar groups have mentioned that the next generation of people were not taking over. Several tried methods to recruit new people to carry on, but the efforts were too late and did not bear fruit.

The point is that a number of the key organizational building blocks of volunteering in our society are under stress or disappearing and we have not created the organizational structures to replace them. Our model is changing and the pandemic has only sped up this process of loss.

There are three things that we can do:

1. research to understand the changes,
2. recognize the need to act, and
3. provide sustainable funding to voluntary organizations.

The pandemic has shifted the ways in which we volunteer. We know anecdotally and from a few limited surveys that volunteering rates have gone down. There has been dislocation. Volunteer managers were redeployed or let go during the pandemic. We know that virtual volunteering has found a place in our support to communities, but we have little idea of its effectiveness, especially over the long term.

We need to have comprehensive research to show us what has changed and what has remained the same with an emphasis on face-to-face volunteering, especially for older volunteers. Then we need to re-tool and carry out a National Action Strategy on Volunteerism to support or recreate the role these groups play in community building.

But the key to success rests on action. Funders, from foundations to corporations to government and charities, need to recognize the loss that is occurring and then be willing to address this issue together. Hollowing out our downtown cores or rural centres is a straightforward loss of the community. It can only lead to mounting social costs over the long run.

For example, churches are closing down in rural, urban and suburban parts of Canada. In some cases, the cause is a declining number of congregants paired with an increasingly old and expensive building. If the building is still in good shape, it can (and has) be repurposed as a community hub, giving groups a place to meet and undertake activities. There have been recent successes in Edmonton, Toronto and Ottawa toward that end. It has taken a fair amount of good will and a coalition of funders, especially from the former owners, but it has worked. We need more innovation like this to move on.

Finally, support from funders must recognize operational needs. Too many groups depend on a fragile patchwork of funding sources. A number of recent revocations have shown mature charities failing after decades of cobbling budgets together when one partner changed their funding priorities.

Most voluntary groups, even if they respond to the specific priorities of funders, don’t receive the support necessary to fund their full operations. They receive support for expenses related to projects and rarely for the full operational infrastructure of the group. It doesn’t support the policy development, research, evaluation and expertise that make voluntary groups the ideal candidates to build social capital.

The ways in which we volunteer have changed because our society is transforming. Older models aren’t as effective as they used to be. Some models were shaken or even broken by the pandemic. We see this in the revocation of charities that supported communities. We know what is happening; we just need the will to address it.

Don McRae is a retired federal employee who worked with charitable and voluntary organizations for more than 30 years. He has been a volunteer for more than 40 years and currently serves on the Board of Volunteer Canada.

1 Canada Helps. "The Giving Report 2023 – It’s Time for Change" p 29.

2 Ontario Nonprofit Network. (2020). "No Space for Community – The Value of Faith Building and the Effect of Their Loss in Ontario, Faith & the Common Good."