The nonprofit sector is often described as facing a “data deficit.” There is truth in that. No single dataset fully captures the workforce that sustains charities, community services, and the broader care economy. The sector has more evidence than it often uses. But the data deficit is also overstated. The sector has more evidence than it often uses. The problem is that this evidence is scattered across systems, built around different definitions, and rarely organized around the questions nonprofit leaders and policymakers most need to answer.
This is especially true for community care work. Because many of these roles are concentrated in specific occupations and industries, existing labour-market data can already reveal a great deal about the workers, organizations, and pressures at the centre of the nonprofit care economy.
This review identified eight categories of data with well over a dozen distinct datasets relevant to the nonprofit workforce, spanning Statistics Canada sources, sector surveys, administrative filings, and research partnerships. None of these sources is perfect on its own. But when brought together, they can produce a much deeper, more credible, and more policy-relevant picture of the nonprofit workforce than is usually presented.
Before investing heavily in new data collection, we should ask what can already be understood using the data that exists today. The answer is: quite a lot.
What existing data already shows
Taken together, the sources reviewed here already tell a clear nonprofit workforce story: the community nonprofit sector is growing, care-related roles are under mounting pressure, and existing data can show where the action is most urgently needed.
The sector is growing, but demand is growing faster. Employment in the community nonprofit sector rose 10 percent from 2019 to 2024. At the same time, current expenditures rose 32 percent and more than 70 percent of charities now say demand for service exceeds their capacity.
Vacancies have surged in the occupational families most central to community care, rising 140 percent since 2015. Vacancies in health occupations rose even faster, increasing 173 percent, while vacancies across the rest of the labour market increased by just four percent.
Shortages are projected to persist in occupations closely associated with nonprofit care work: 45 percent are forecast to face strong labour-shortage risk by 2033, compared with only six percent of all other occupations.
Individually, none of these findings may surprise people close to the sector. In aggregate—and grounded in widely trusted data sources—they form a clearer, more policy-relevant picture of the nonprofit workforce than is typically presented.
They also show the potential of a more deliberate approach to sector data: one that brings existing sources together to identify where pressures are greatest, where investment is most needed, and where future analysis should go deeper.
Job-Quality Risks: Job-quality risks in the nonprofit sector are particularly concentrated in social services, where workers report higher burnout, poorer mental health, and greater dissatisfaction than nonprofit workers overall. Retention risks are especially acute in social services, where 26 percent of workers say they are likely to leave their job within six months — compared with 20 percent of community nonprofit workers and 15 percent of governmental nonprofit workers. A clear earnings gap: community nonprofit workers earn about 31 percent less than the economy-wide average and 26 percent less than workers in government nonprofits.
Volunteer Decline: Volunteer decline is reducing effective capacity across the broader community care ecosystem: social services have lost roughly $7 billion in annual volunteer capacity over the past decade, equivalent to about 115,000 full-time equivalent positions.
This report does not document every technical step behind generating these numbers, but the data sources are clearly identified. Instead, it demonstrates what is already possible and sets the foundation for future analysis. The next phase of work that will be undertaken will build on this approach by refining the definitions, testing the methods, targeting specific occupations and subsectors, and generating more detailed evidence for workforce planning, advocacy, and investment.
Where existing data is already strong enough to act
There is also more evidence available than the sector typically draws on. Some of it is already public: Statistics Canada tables can often be analyzed more deeply, recombined in new ways, or interpreted through a nonprofit and care-economy lens. Doing this well requires familiarity with technical labour-market and economic concepts—such as occupation codes, industry codes, compensation measures, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and supplementary labour income—but these are exactly the tools that allow us to make more reliable estimates from data that already exists.
Other evidence is available but not yet easy to use. Government and research datasets often contain more detailed variables than appear in public tables, but accessing them may require custom tabulations, partnerships, or additional analytical work with raw data.
Sector-led surveys and research tools can then add a different kind of evidence, helping explain job quality, burnout, turnover, organizational capacity, and frontline experience in ways public datasets rarely can.
What we should do next
This report proposes a practical roadmap that builds from immediate insight to longer-term influence. In the near term, the priority is to generate clear, credible insight using existing data to:
NEAR TERM — GENERATE INSIGHT
▪ Produce a shared snapshot of the nonprofit care workforce
▪ Identify priority occupations where shortages are most severe
▪ Bring together key datasets into a common analytical framework
▪ Translate workforce pressures into implications for communities and the economy
BUILD — STRENGTHEN CAPACITY
▪ Develop shared classification systems and indicator frameworks
▪ Create reusable tools, templates, and analyses
▪ Strengthen partnerships across data holders and sector organizations
▪ Support coordinated use of surveys and administrative data
OVER TIME — DEEPEN INFLUENCE
▪ Ongoing monitoring of workforce conditions
▪ Scenario modelling and policy costing
▪ A more coordinated national evidence base
▪ Stronger alignment between data, advocacy, and investment
This roadmap would turn fragmented evidence into a practical system for understanding workforce pressures, targeting interventions, and making a stronger case for investment.
About the Project
This report is an abridged, public-facing version of a longer internal document from United Way Centraide Canada designed to support a labour force strategy for the nonprofit care economy. The initial report included a review of labour force strategies from other sectors, as well as an assessment of the full range of data available to understand the nonprofit workforce in Canada—across government sources, sector research, and administrative data. This report builds on those insights to highlight what is most useful for a broader audience—showing how existing data can be used now, and how more coordinated use could strengthen workforce planning and advocacy across the sector. DOWNLOAD THE FULL REPORT FROM UNITED WAY CENTRAIDE CANADA
Steve Ayer is the principal at Common Good Strategies is an independent research and strategy firm focused on the nonprofit and charitable sector. Its work draws on national datasets, sector research, and community insights to support strategy, reporting, and system-level initiatives across Canada. Ayer has led and contributed to major research projects across Canada’s nonprofit, charitable, philanthropic, workforce, and survey-research sectors, including work with Imagine Canada, CanadaHelps, Volunteer Canada, Community Foundations of Canada, United Way Centraide Canada, YMCA Canada, Toronto Foundation, the Diversity Institute, and the Environics Institute for Survey Research.
United Way Centraide Canada is the national office that represents and supports a network of United Way Centraides serving 5,000 communities across Canada. United Way Centraide is Canada’s largest non-government funder of human and community services, mobilizing over $600 million annually to support basic needs to over 8 million people.
