Home › Philanthropic Brokerage › Blog

Charities Directorate - New Year's Resolution

Posted November 28th, 2008 by Gena Rotstein

The CRA Charities Directorate newsletter was just released.  They have made a New Year's Resolution to "...decrease the [charity application] inventory on hand."  Here is an excerpt from the article.  Attached is a PDF of the entire newsletter.

Based on the first six months of this fiscal year, the CRA will recieve 4500 applications for new charitable status.  That is one application every two hours, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

On the other hand...

2200 charities will lose their charitable status this year for a variety of reasons from ceasing to operate to misfiling.  This represents one charity losing its status every four hours, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Something that I have blogged about in the past is the need for:

a) so many charities

b) lack of regulation of duplication of services

The CRA has informed us that they will put materials on their site to help people make better decisions on whether they should be setting up a charity to begin with. 

I do not think that is enough. 

The CRA has the ability to highlight to applicants when their charity is going to be duplicating services already provided.  I feel that by leaving it in the hands of individuals whose passions are wrapped up in the decision making as whether or not they should become a charity leaves for too much room to make emotionally driven decisions.

In the meantime, the CRA has hired more staff and streamlined some of the processes to address the backlog of applications.  This however, does not address the root of the problem - too many charities, doing too many of the same things and not speaking/learning from each other.

Attachment Size
Charities Directorate newsletter.pdf 283.97 KB

Comments

Regulations!...?

On November 30th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) says:

Article is informative, but potentially very misguided and somewhat explosive. Consider the comment from the article,

"b) lack of regulation of duplication of services"

Really? Do we need more government regulation? I think not. Regulation is always a constraint, for obvious reasons. Perhaps we need a little more in depth study before tighting the noose around well meaning citizens.

  • reply

Regulation Response

On December 2nd, 2009 Gena Rotstein says:

Dear Anonymous (please let us know who you are... makes for more honest dialogue);

From my perspective, with the charitable sector growth doubling over the next decade, more foundations being created as a result of the wealth transfer, I think there is a stronger role for those issuing charitable numbers.

I see this benefitting the sector and society overall in several ways:

  1. It will help donors in their decision making process
  2. It will save millions of dollars that is being directed at multiple overheads for similar programs and services
  3. It will streamline the sector, allow for more knowledge sharing, break down some turf issues and build stronger communities
  4. It will create new space for social enterprise to grow(instead of the current - make more tax incentives to get people to donate... which just perpetuates a cycle of uninformed giving and those charities that have large marketing budgets might not be the charities that are doing the best work)

I am not saying that there is one silver-bullet solution.  But I do think that our system is broken.  We keep feeding into the system by creating a cycle of subsistance; charities with their hands out saying, "Please sir, can I have some more..." and increasing the numbers of those charities who are asking.

  • reply

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.