Summary Report on the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector in Rural Ontario

The Foundation for Rural Living (FRL), in partnership with the Imagine Canada (Formerly the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy), is engaged in a formal research project designed to build the understanding of the trends and patterns affecting the rural voluntary sector. The Government of Canada, through the Canadian Rural Partnership, The Co-operators, and The Laidlaw Foundation aided the partners in completing the first phase of this research study. The Ontario Trillium Foundation has supported phase two. Both studies have been published.

Entitled The Rural Charitable Sector Research Initiative, the program is a full-scale research study - the first of its kind in Canada - involving several phases that will aim to describe the current situation in the rural nonprofit sector, rationale for it, and establish a baseline to measure change. The focus of the initial phases is Ontario although some of the description and analysis is relevant to the nation and beyond.

A preliminary research study completed by FRL in August 2002 suggested a level of immaturity in the rural charitable sector. Working closely with Statistics Canada, this simplistic study used a consistent definition of rural and urban to analyze data from lead charitable organizations and activity at a cursory level. This material was complemented by interviews with select community and rural agency leaders.

In the spring of 2003, Imagine Canada researchers began Phase 1 of the full-scale research initiative - a review of existing literature on the rural voluntary sector; a comparative analysis of the 2000 National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (NSGVP); and an analysis of voluntary organizations registered as charities with the Canada Custom and Revenue Agency (CCRA) in 1999. Their findings have been compiled into a 77-page report on The Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector in Rural Ontario.

In late 2004 Phase 2 of the research was launched. Key informant interviews with rural practitioners and charitable sector experts were undertaken to gain a more qualitative understanding of the issues from an individual and organizational perspective. Findings were compiled in to a 32 page report entitled The Capacity Challenges of Rural Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations in Rural Ontario.

• View the Phase 1 full report here. (Requires Adobe)
• View the Phase 2 full report here. (Requires Adobe)
• Or, view the expanded summaries from FRL.

Key findings about rural nonprofits:

• Rural voluntary organizations are small and receive less revenue from government than urban organizations
• Many rural organizations are unable to fundraise effectively
• Rural voluntary organizations have fewer full-time staff and higher staff turnover
• Rural volunteers put in longer hours than in the cities
• Rural charitable networks lack the technology to be more effective

Key findings about rural volunteers and donors:

• Most top donors live in urban areas
• Rural residents volunteer at a higher rate than urban residents
• Rural donors give to a cause or volunteer for it because they or someone they know personally is affected by it; because of a sense of religious obligation, and out of sense of obligation to help and of community obligation
• Rural charitable organizations face aging and burn-out of volunteers, and the challenges associated with recruiting and managing sufficient new volunteers and members
• Volunteers lack sufficient expertise, time and infrastructure to be able to adapt to change and growth
• Barriers to technology use include lack of skills and equipment, cost and lack of awareness or conviction about the benefits
• Rural organizations generally feel isolated from broader policy exercises

Rural charitable organizations face the following funding challenges:

• Problems with government funding relationships: Organizations experienced trouble getting information they needed to identify funding opportunities and trends; funding criteria sometimes specified population levels that limited ability of rural areas to participate; process too lengthy, cumbersome and unclear; funding came with too many restrictions; difficult application process had to be repeated annually; relationship with funding officials became too impersonal, more top-down, or simply non-existent because of amalgamations and cutbacks.
• Insufficient human resource and structural capacity to fundraise: Urban organizations have more professional staff, systems and structures in place to facilitate fundraising; efforts made by rural voluntary organizational staff to manage perpetual funding crunch time found to be extremely energy-consuming; few organizations used info technology to access info from the government about funding opportunities, reflecting a potential structural barrier to financial capacity.
• Relatively small pool of funds available to organizations in rural areas: Non-metro agencies more likely than metro to experience challenges in expanding their funding sources; rural charities cannot raise enough money to be sustainable from within their small communities.

What the researchers found from their analysis of the charitable sector in rural Ontario (from CCRA) - most recent data from 1999:

• Some 25,000 registered charities were located in Ontario in 1999, with nearly 5,000 found in rural areas. These charities had combined revenues of over $38 billion, with $1.6 billion going to organizations in rural areas. Yet between 14% and 17% of Ontario residents live in rural.
• A greater proportion of rural than urban charities are religious organizations (59%); religious charities traditionally tend to have relatively small revenue bases.
• Just over 1 in 5 or (21%) of rural charities receives government funding, while just over 1 in 4 or (26%) of urban charities receives government money.
• Rural charities spend half of what their urban counterparts spend on fundraising;
• Only about 5% of rural charities in Ontario are foundations, compared to about 13% of urban charities.

Conclusions:

In 1999, Ontario's charitable organizations took in revenues of more than $38 billion; $1.6 billion of that went to organizations in rural areas. Yet between 14% and 17% of Ontario residents live in rural. Why the discrepancy? This is where the researchers appear to be uncertain - more research is needed.