In August 2021, Imagine Canada published findings from a survey of more than 1,200 charity leaders. The headline was sobering: more than four in ten charities were still experiencing revenue declines, and among them the average decline was substantial. At the same time, nearly half reported rising demand for their services.
Reading those results years later, what stays with me is not the severity of the numbers but their unevenness. The pandemic was a shared crisis, yet its burden fell very differently from one organisation to the next.
Two kinds of vulnerability
The study distinguished, in effect, between two forms of risk. Some organisations could not operate at all under public-health restrictions — their work depended on gathering people together. Others could operate but were overwhelmed, with demand exceeding anything their staff and volunteers could meet. Both groups were struggling, but they needed quite different kinds of help.
This distinction has shaped how I think about support ever since. A generic response — the same grant, the same webinar, the same advice for everyone — rarely fits either group well. Resilience is built by understanding precisely where an organisation is fragile.
The digital divide within the sector
The pandemic also revealed how unequal the sector’s technological readiness was. Organisations that already had cloud systems, secure remote access and online giving adapted within weeks. Those that relied on paper, shared office computers and in-person collection faced months of improvisation.
That observation is one of the reasons technology support sits at the heart of our work. A charity’s capacity to serve in a crisis is determined, to a surprising degree, by the unglamorous infrastructure it built beforehand.
Lessons worth keeping
- Diagnose before prescribing. Ask what kind of pressure an organisation faces before offering solutions.
- Invest in readiness during calm periods, when change is less costly.
- Fund flexibly. Organisations facing different crises need the freedom to respond differently.
Crises end. The lessons they offer need not.
This article is commentary and personal reflection, not news reporting. Facts and figures are drawn from the publicly available sources listed below; the views expressed are the author’s own.
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