Across the sector right now, organizations under real funding pressure are posting senior fundraising roles. Executive Director, Philanthropy. Chief Development Officer. Often into shops that have never had a meaningful philanthropic base, and at the exact moment the money has started to contract. The posting looks like decisive action. Most of the time it is the opposite.
Before I say more, let me acknowledge, that this is not every organization. Some organizations have a strong philanthropic base, and that is a different conversation. Right now, I am specifically talking about the organizations whose core has always run on public money. Social services, settlement services, housing providers. Now reaching for philanthropy to replace what government is pulling back. These are the parts of the sector where public money is the primary revenue, not the supplement. Statistics Canada’s most recent figures put provincial transfers alone above 40 percent of revenue for social services organizations, against roughly 11 percent across the sector as a whole. The decision to hire a senior philanthropy role in this moment is something we need to talk about.
The people making these decisions are not careless. They are leaders grappling with something close to impossible: government funding tightening, demand climbing, a team that is bracing for what is next. Reaching for revenue is a reasonable response to that pressure. It is also, in this environment, frankly, a wish with a salary attached.
Here is what is true. Philanthropy is a zero-based game. Whatever a strong fundraiser manages to raise this year, they have to raise again next year, from the start, before they have added a dollar of growth. Drop someone into a contracting organization, with no existing donor base and ask them to close the gap government has left, and you have not made a hire. You have done three things, and all of them will cost you. You have set a person up to fail on a timeline that was never doable. You will inevitably break trust between the chief executive and the board, because when the hire can’t deliver, the board reads it as a failed bet and the executive reads it as an impossible mandate, and the distance between them widens at the precise moment it most needs to close. And you have entrenched the idea that philanthropy is nothing but overpriced sales and marketing for those who work for the organization delivering the day to day programming. Of course, it is not. It was just never built to survive these circumstances.
Because philanthropy does not fund the core. It never has. For these organizations, government is the primary funder, and it should be. Philanthropy is the over-and-above: the innovation dollars, the risk capital, the room to try something government will not pay to test.
None of this is an argument against philanthropy. Good fundraising can change what is possible for an organization. It can bring new people to the table, create room to try things that would otherwise stay on the shelf, and provide flexibility that other funding sources rarely do. The problem comes when it is asked to solve something it was never built to solve. Philanthropy can strengthen a revenue model. It cannot wholesale replace one, in a crisis.
Health philanthropy is the clearest example I know. The healthcare system runs on public money. Philanthropy funds what sits beyond the baseline: equipment, research, family spaces, ideas worth trying before government will consider turning them into policy and practice. It improves the system. It does not replace it.
Ask charitable dollars to carry the core instead, and you have taken on a cost no fundraising program can sustain, and relieved government of a responsibility to shore up the infrastructure that keeps communities resilient.
So when a senior fundraising hire becomes the first move in a funding crisis, the problem is not only that it will likely fail. It is what the hire allows everyone to avoid.
A contraction is an invitation to look hard at yourself. At what you do, how you do it, who you do it with, what it actually costs. At whether everything under your roof is running at the calibre you would genuinely choose. And those questions are not comfortable ones. What business are we actually in. What is truly core, and what have we simply always done. If the public dollars are finite, are we pointing them at the work only we can do, at a standard worth defending? Is there work we are clinging to that somebody else is honestly better placed to carry? Can the core be done in partnership instead of in isolation? What stops. What moves. What shrinks. Where is the highest and best use of what we have left.
Those questions reach beyond programs and into the balance sheet. Many organizations hold reserves, assets, or accumulated surpluses they are reluctant to touch. Some of that caution is reasonable. Some of it has simply become part of how the organization thinks.
A period like this is one of the few moments that forces a more uncomfortable question.
What are those resources actually there for?
If the work is under pressure and the mission is as important as we say it is, at what point do resources meant to support that mission need to be put to work?
These are the conversations that must happen first. And in too many organizations they are not happening at all, or they are happening in closed circles between exhausted executives, or late at night, never at the table where they would actually count. They are not happening at the board table, and the reason is not mystery. It is fear. A chief executive who walks into a board meeting and says I think we may need to close this program, or merge, or stop, is, in many rooms, talking themselves out of a job. So the questions stay unasked, and the hire gets posted instead, and everyone gets to feel as though something brave has been done.
This is the part the sector keeps stepping around. The hard conversation is the board’s responsibility to insist on. Not to dread. Not to permit if the executive happens to raise it. To insist on, and then to make it safe enough that the executive can actually stand inside it.
A board that treats retraction as failure, or as proof that leadership is incompetent or has stopped caring about the mission, is a board that has guaranteed the conversation will never be had honestly. Let me say this for those in the back: not everything has to live forever. A program can have done real good and still be the wrong thing to carry into the next season. But no chief executive can name that out loud in a room that will punish them for even saying it.
The decisions that matter most in a hard season take nerve. And nerve is the first thing that scarcity and isolation drain.
The work of the board is not to fund the wish when the organization is experiencing contraction, it is to have the hard conversation.
The only question is whether the table you sit at is built to have it.