Time to deal with racism in Canadian charities
Not-for-profits and registered charities, a multi-billion-dollar sector employing two million Canadians, are a vital part of the Canadian economy. They reach into virtually every aspect of Canadian life.
They will be called upon and will play an important role in helping us through this challenging period of recovery and transformation. Indeed, the unfolding story that WE Charity has been tapped to administer a $900-million federal student aid program underscores this new reality.
Despite the trust and dollars we donate and invest, many of these organizations face serious internal issues. There is often a wide gap between their public mandates — improving people’s lives and advancing society — and their private behaviours. Rampant in the sector are weak governance structures and outdated human resource policies that together often promote, rather than prevent, injustice.
We have been confronted, nearly daily, by the pandemic with a window into our society’s systemic inequities. It is time we demanded new rules and governance models that hold non-profits to account. When employees and volunteers raise the alarm about systemic racism, discrimination or harassment, of any kind, they must act.
The Ontario Non-Profit Network reports that 80 per cent of employees in the sector are women. They are often women who are immigrants, are racialized, or have disabilities. They face inequality in compensation and unsafe systems for reporting discrimination and harassment. They have limited opportunities for advancement into the executive or management levels of their organizations.
If these women or their colleagues identify a problem with how they have been treated, can they be confident their complaint will be met with a just response? Sadly, no. Non-profit boards are often made up of well-meaning volunteers, with little training or authority. There may be real reluctance to increase the role they and the senior staff need to play to ensure safe and discriminationfree workplaces.
Outside of having a board, organization bylaws, conducting an annual financial audit and filing reports with the Canada Revenue Agency, what can give an organization’s members and donors confidence its commitment to a safe and respectful workplace? That it responds appropriately when reports on discrimination are received? There can be little confidence without transparency that is too often missing.
The requirement to have a board of directors will not change. But their role should be to provide real leadership for staff, volunteers, members and donors when discrimination rears its ugly head. When the people who raise these issues are not treated with dignity — and the legitimacy of their experiences is not acknowledged — the situation can get very ugly, very quickly.
First, the sector must stop using nondisclosure agreements to silence revelations related to discrimination and harassment. Organizations with proclaimed progressive values requiring whistle-blowing employees to sign gag orders in order to address wrongdoing is simply unacceptable.
Second, tough reporting requirements must be implemented. The sector needs diversity disclosures for boards and management. It also needs an annual disclosure to provincial and federal regulators on the number of complaints made, on those that were resolved and those that weren’t.
Those same governments need to establish regulators for the sector, including legally required investigations of issues reported. When employees raise issues of discrimination the investigators cannot be those who hold the purse strings.
Overt and systemic discrimination relies on two things. The first is silence. The second is that “good” people refuse to stand up, speak up and support the targets of discriminatory behaviour. It’s time for Canadian non-profits and charities to talk, walk and live their human rights values to end systemic discrimination and racism in the sector.