The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how non-profit organizations operate and how they’re funded. Whether it will be enough to help the non-profit sector address growing social problems remains to be seen.
(Piqsels)
The COVID-19 pandemic shone a light on how non-profit organizations operate and how they’re funded. Is it enough to boost non-profit sector capacity to address social inequities post-pandemic?
A teacher holds a child as young women learn business skills at Centre D'Apprentissage Feminin (C.A.FE.) in Bamako, Mali, Africa in June 2018. The school is funded by the Canadian NGO Education internationale, a co-operative offering exchange and development services in education.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Sean Kilpatrick
COVID-19 has presented an opportunity to increase gender equality both in Canada and worldwide. Rebuilding with women at the forefront will help communities succeed post-pandemic.
Community engagement is a key tool in building sustainable interventions.
Sampson Addo Yeboah
In Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, NGO policies directing children’s welfare ignore indigenous knowledge on childhood, and how it can aid the sustainable implementation of interventions.
Hungarian protesters hold glowing cellphones aloft at a 2017 protest against tough laws targeting foreign-backed nonprofit organizations and universities.
STR/AFP via Getty Images
Many countries, ranging from Hungary to Brazil, are using violence and legal measures to control, intimidate and shut down independent organizations – including foreign ones.
WE Charity’s Marc Kielburger, left, and Craig Kielburger, right, appear as witnesses via videoconference at a House of Commons finance committee hearing in Ottawa in July 2020.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
On paper, WE Charity could have been the best partner to implement the federal government’s student grant program. But the failure to be transparent eroded the public’s trust and led to its demise.
Non-profit organisation Nakhlistan and Mustadafin Foundation prepares food for underprivileged communities across the Western Cape.
Photo by Brenton Geach/Gallo Images via Getty Images
Civil society activists responding to the COVID-19 social crisis face important challenges and tensions. They should tackle these choices head-on as they develop longer-term plans.
People march during a climate strike in Montréal in September 2019. Climate change is a top concern for Canadians, but new Elections Canada rules left civil society organizations fearing they could not speak out on the need for climate action during the election.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes
Canada’s new Elections Act may have prevented the type of mammoth election spending seen in the United States via super-PACs, but it’s been at the expense of public debate.
Do social enterprises come to view profit as more important than their original mission? New research suggests they don’t, and the cause remains a key component of their success.
Kat Yukawa/Unsplash
New research suggests that non-profits tempted by the social enterprise model do not necessarily lose sight of their social mission in favour of profits. In fact, the opposite is true.
A migrant rests on a Mediterranea Saving Humans NGO boat as it sails off Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa, just outside Italian territorial waters, on July 4, 2019. Despite being rescued, migrants sit offshore, often in sight of land, as NGO boats become floating mobile border sites.
(AP Photo/Olmo Calvo)
Standoffs at sea represent yet another attempt by EU officials to obstruct the movement of migrants by producing further bureaucratic blockades to mobility.
The Sea-Watch 3 search and rescue ship before it finally docked in Lampedusa.
Sea-Watch handout/EPA
Carola Rackete, captain of an NGO search and rescue ship, was arrested by Italian authorities when landing in Italy. She isn’t the first to be criminalised for trying to save people at sea.
Sochi’s mild climate was impractical for many cold-weather sports.
Reuters/Stefan Wermuth
The ugly turn in Canadian-Cuba relations stemming from Canada’s new visa requirements puts at risk decades of creative, productive connections between Cuban and Canadian people.
Thousands of Liberians took part in a June 2019 protest against President George Weah.
Reuters/James Giahyue
Depending on foreign aid to pay the bills makes moving on when it’s gone harder.
This 13-year-old boy from India’s Bihar state who worked 15 hours a day making bread was rescued by the workers of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan or Save Childhood movement in 2014. India’s far-right BJP is taking aim at NGOs.
(AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)
Narendra Modi’s BJP views NGO activists as defiant because they challenge conventional notions of power, social structures and hierarchies that conflict with the idea of Hindu majoritarianism.
Malawian villages operate according to strict hierarchies. NGOs can unsettle these.
Ismail Mia/Flickr
Brazil’s new president could clear the way for plans to develop remote areas around the Tapajos River basin over the objections of the indigenous people who live there.