Like many people working in the non-profit sector, it has been difficult not to feel despair when seeing the trends in Canada: rising extreme wealth concentration sitting side-by-side with food insecurity and a housing crisis.
Compounding this, higher cost of living has eroded the disposable income of middle-class households which has fundamentally altered the landscape of charitable giving. As smaller donations evaporate, charities are pivoting aggressively toward wealthy donors and foundations, who are seeing record numbers of funding requests.
While charitable giving has long been framed as a mechanism for redistributing wealth toward social good, the ‘charitable industrial complex’ is structurally unsuited to solve systemic problems. Driven by an entrenched fixation on rapid, measurable impact, the sector forces non-profits to compete for funding by promising immediate results. This traps organizations in a cycle of short-term, project-based interventions, preventing them from addressing the deeper policies and power structures that perpetuate social, economic, and environmental crises.
As a result, charitable dollars often sustain band-aid service delivery models, while reducing public revenues through tax exemptions and tax-sheltered philanthropic endowments, limiting the state’s ability to fund durable, systemic solutions. In 2024 alone, the federal government lost an estimated $3.8 billion tax revenue due to charitable donation tax credits.
I have seen this dynamic from the inside. Having worked at a private foundation managing multi-million dollar grant portfolios, I can tell you that the cognitive dissonance of philanthropy is hard to ignore. You want to believe your desire for systems change aligns with your grantees, yet you operate within an organization that is itself a symptom of the economic system driving the concentration of wealth.
The philanthropic sector has shifted recently—particularly during the pandemic and following the racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder. Incentivized by this momentum, many progressive foundations in Canada made funding applications more inclusive, transparent and participatory to reach equity-deserving, underfunded communities.
What was exciting about this time was that it made me realize how much freedom philanthropic funders have when deciding how to give and that most of the barriers to giving more flexibly are self-imposed.
Yet we need to go further and challenge progressive funders to look beyond merely changing how they grant money. The real task is to use our power to support social movements in achieving systemic shifts.
This is the essence of solidarity philanthropy. It invites us to critically examine our complicity in the very systems we aim to change. Funders currently incentivize charities to deliver services that only cushion the human cost of inequality. Solidarity philanthropy demands we stop maintaining the status quo and start resourcing the long-term work of social equity by funding social movements.
Social movements are the most effective, yet underfunded, actors in promoting solutions to structural inequalities. Throughout history, they have been central to major societal advances, including movements for Indigenous sovereignty, civil rights, women’s suffrage, and the recognition of same-sex marriage.
More recently, climate movements have been critical in shifting public discourse and creating the political tailwind for climate legislation. In fact, a cost-benefit analysis by Giving Green found that funding climate activism is significantly more effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions than traditional interventions like carbon offsetting.
In 2025, tenant organizing achieved important wins across the country in blocking renovictions, holding landlords accountable, and, in Ontario, halting legislative changes that will facilitate tenant evictions.
Social movements and grassroot organizations are critical actors in promoting long-term, systemic solutions to the social issues many progressive funders are concerned with. Yet they are not considered ‘usual suspects’ for donations.
What if funders saw social movements as critical actors to achieve their missions? What if funders supported tenant rights movements as part of their strategy to reduce homelessness? What if funders supported land defence and environmental rights advocates as part of their strategy to address climate change? What would need to change?
Supporting social movements requires significant unlearning by both individual and institutional donors about what effective social change funding looks like. Traditional philanthropic practices—short-term, restricted grants tied to narrowly defined outputs and a preference for established organizations—are poorly suited to the dynamic, non-linear nature of movement building.
First, you don’t need to be the expert. I spent 10 years working as a specialist in one specific area: cash transfer programs in the Global South. Yet the moment I moved into the philanthropic sector, I was suddenly expected to judge the effectiveness of programs I had little expertise in—ranging from newcomer integration in Canada to nutrition projects in Guatemala.
It was a stark lesson in how our sector works: we conflate wealth with wisdom. The power to decide ‘what works’ is skewed toward the person holding the chequebook, rather than the communities holding the actual expertise.
I felt quite stressed out about the expectation to know it all until I spoke with a phenomenal Indigenous leader who told me: “You don’t need to know it all. No one does. You just have to trust communities having the solutions, because they are living the consequences of the problem.”
Admitting you don’t know it all is uncomfortable. But setting up rigorous due diligence processes just to give yourself a sense of control undermines your mission. This doesn’t mean abandoning standards. It means front-loading the due diligence. Once we have verified that a movement’s mission and strategy align with our goals, we need to trust them to execute.
Social movements need unrestricted funding to respond flexibly to shifting political moments, like hiring organizers during a surge in momentum or building infrastructure when things slow down. While project-based funding traps organizations in a cycle of rigid service delivery, unrestricted funding allows them to build actual power.
Second, change your perception of risk. For funders, risk equals reputational damage if investing in the ‘wrong cause’ or in the misuse of funds. But foundations rarely get the bad press when there is a scandal—it’s the grantee that does (unless you make really bad decisions, like renting your warehouse to ICE or being Epstein’s friend).
Funders need to be less risk averse and invest in the potential of organizations, rather than in their track record of success.
Fund social movements like you want them to win and like you have nothing to lose—because you don’t. The funds were not meant for your financial gain. They are resources designated for the public good that would otherwise have been collected as tax.
Third, invest your time to become an ally. Shifting to flexible funding models frees up funders’ time to do the work that really matters. When I worked at a foundation that slimmed down its reporting requirements, I quickly realized I now had the time to do the real work: going into the community to listen to partners, supporting learning and network building, and advocating for change among my peers.
Philanthropic donors are uniquely positioned to use their access and platforms in favour of movements. Giving with no strings attached does not mean stepping back. It means stepping up as an advocate to change the system that created the need for philanthropy in the first place.
