Charity begins at home
Published: September 21, 2004
Non-profit organizations in Canada generate billions in revenue but rely on government funding and huge numbers of volunteers to do so, research released Monday indicates.
The voluntary and non-profit sectors of the country employed roughly two million people last year, a work force whose paid efforts was supplemented by volunteers doing the work of an additional one million staff members.
This new data from Statistics Canada show the extent to which these types of organizations play a role in the lives of millions of Canadians, who contribute their time and resources in large numbers.
“Non-profit and voluntary organizations are an integral part of society, serving as vehicles for engaging the efforts of millions of Canadians to address needs in their communities, according to a new study,” the researchers write in Monday’s report.
(Non-profit and voluntary is an umbrella term which includes hospitals, universities, charities, religious organizations and sports and recreation groups, among others.)
A total of 19 million volunteers were reported in 2003, though some of them gave their time to several causes concurrently. Just more than half of the 161,000 non-profit and voluntary organizations operating nationwide were run entirely by volunteers.
The Statscan numbers show that, during 2003, Canadians performed more than two billion hours of volunteer time and donated more than $8-billion to non-profit and voluntary organizations in the country.
Such donations notwithstanding, almost half of the operating funds these organizations receive still came from the taxpayer, the vast majority of it channelled through provincial governments.
Substantial numbers of Canadians participate actively in such organizations, the data show. In 2003 Canadians took out 139 million memberships in non-profit and voluntary organizations, an average of four a person.
By sheer numbers, the most popular such organizations were sporting and spiritual. Slightly more than one-fifth of the non-profit and voluntary organizations were dedicated to sports and recreation, slightly less than one-fifth were dedicated to religion.
“One of the hallmarks of these organizations is their connection to the community through the participation of individual citizens,” the report argues.
Although such organizations, as a group, generated revenue of $112-billion in 2003, a very small number of them accounted for the bulk of these revenues.
About 1 per cent had annual revenues of $10-million or more, collectively accounting for 59 per cent of all revenues.
These larger organizations include sectors that receive the vast majority of their funds from government. Hospitals receive 82 per cent of their money from governments, other health organizations get 70 per cent, social services receive 66 per cent and post-secondary education gets 56 per cent of funds from the public purse.
At the other end of the scale were the non-profit and voluntary organizations which reported annual revenue of less than $30,000– 42 per cent of total number of such organizations – and which accounted for only 1 per cent of all revenues.
Less than 3 per cent of these organizations reported having no revenue at all.
Monday’s report was based on analysis of the National Survey of Non-profit and Voluntary Organizations, which gathered data from representatives of about 13,000 incorporated non-profit organizations and registered charities in 2003.
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