BCBusiness

February 2019 – Is B.C. Losing Its Edge?

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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44 BCBUSINESS FEBRUARY 2019 P H I L A N T H R O P Y SOURCE: ADAPTED FROM 30 YEARS OF GIVING IN CANADA, RIDEAU HALL FOUNDATION AND IMAGINE CANADA generation," says Montreal-based Hilary Pearson, presi- dent of Philanthropic Foundations Canada, a national group representing mainly family foundations. "They're socially engaged, they're participating, they're loyal to organizations—they're doing things," she says. "The fact is, millennials don't have as much money as 65- to 70- year-olds." Among the findings com- ing out of a recent survey by non-profit Vancouver-based polling firm the Angus Reid Institute was that people weren't strategically planning their charity contribu- tions. "Basically, people's intentional giving muscle has gone slack," says Shachi Kurl, the institute's executive director. "People are giving, but they're giving in a very unintentional way; they give in a prompted way." Instead of being deliberate with donations, there's often a spon- taneous element to our charitable contributions—a cash register donation, for example. What to do? Some, like Vancouver-based CHIMP (short for "charitable impact"), a public foundation that co-funded the Angus Reid study, may offer a solu- tion. Founded by former corporate finance worker John Bromley (whose father, Blake Bromley, is a well-known charity lawyer), CHIMP is an online donation platform providing donor-advised funds (DAFs), a charitable investment vehicle initially developed as an alternative for those who wanted to actively give but who didn't have the means to, say, set up a costly private foundation. It's working: since its start in 2014, some 110,000 donors have used CHIMP to contribute more than $400 million to charity. CHIMP's donor-advised funds are accessed through an online platform. In return for their contributions, donors receive an immediate tax receipt—even though they have the luxury of deciding where to apply the funds at a later date, making for more considered choices, and donors who are therefore more engaged. (The "basic" CHIMP F EW E R H A N D S From a peak in 1990 through 2014, the percentage of Canadian tax filers claiming charitable donations fell by roughly a third while the average amount claimed almost doubled. The bottom line: charities depend on a shrinking number of people 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 30% 28 26 24 22 20 $1,800 1,600 1,400 1,200 1,000 800 T A X F I L E R S A V E R A G E D O N A T I O N C L A I M E D DONOR R AT E AV E R AGE DON AT ION

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