CambridgeToday received the following Letter to the Editor from Joan Fisk, CEO, United Way Waterloo Region Communities:
Umbrellas can heal our communities.
Does that sound odd? It might. Until we understand the role and importance of umbrella organizations in our fight against social crises, ranging from poverty, to food insecurity, to mental health and addictions.
A 2023 report from the Mental Health Commission of Canada notes that Canadians are becoming more stressed and anxious as overlapping crises, such as a lack of housing and affordability, intensify and hit closer to home. The Canadian Institute for Health Information found that “Canadians’ self-rated mental health has declined since 2015,” while Food Banks Canada highlighted that Canada’s “failing social safety net” hits single persons, people receiving social assistance, people with disabilities, Indigenous people, newcomers, and low-income workers, the hardest. Tough times are getting tougher, and it’s showing.
Solutions to our growing social crises are absent, because Canada’s social safety net was designed largely to tackle each ‘crisis’ individually. Combine each crisis and overlap them, and it overloads the system.
The point? One level of government, charity, or organization alone cannot solve a systemic problem. Only an integrated network of organizations working together in unison to shelter and protect a community, can. This is where the concept of an umbrella comes in.
The Government of Canada defines a “charitable umbrella organization” as “one that works to achieve a charitable goal by supporting, improving, and enhancing the work of groups involved in the delivery of charitable programs.” Umbrellas integrate, collaborate, and build bridges between charities and non-profits across seas of otherwise unmanageable complexity.
How? While umbrellas shelter us from bad weather, umbrella organizations shelter our communities by creating collaborative conduits of information, expertise, and funding that allow our charities and non-profit organizations to expand their reach and scope efficiently and effectively by harnessing the power of a shared network to address the roots of a crisis together.
This is the modus operandi of non-profits such as the United Way. For decades, we have operated as an umbrella organization by raising funds for a plethora of local charities, allocating funds strategically by using teams of experts to support the front-line workers and organizations living at the ‘pressure points’ of society, putting out the fires of emergent social crises before they have a chance to take hold, or grow.
Take our crisis of food insecurity. Statistic Canada recently reported that nearly 22 per cent of Canadians – almost nine million of us – recently experienced food insecurity in some form. First, it is absolutely essential, in the face of food insecurity, to support local food banks today. Every Canadian deserves nutritious food. However, food insecurity will never be solved unless the root causes driving this crisis are addressed; poverty, addictions, mental health, precarious housing, illiteracy, gender-based violence, and many others. All or any of these in combination can entwine to create a crisis that cannot be addressed by tackling one issue alone.
The challenge, as every Canadian feeling stressed over recent waves of inflation and interest rate hikes knows, is monetary. Umbrella organizations work only as well as the financial support provided to them by their community. The catch-22 is, as the cost of living rises and needs escalate, charitable giving has dropped to “historic lows” in Canada. We can reverse this trend by making the conscious choice to use our monetary donations in their most efficient way: sending them to umbrella organizations that allocate funds based on need and forward-thinking strategy, changing lives today while staving off emergent crises in the future.
This is why, on Thursday, Sept. 19, the United Way Waterloo Region Community’s ‘March of 1000 Umbrellas’ represents much more than a stream of socially-conscious residents walking from the City Halls of Waterloo to Kitchener. It is a declaration that umbrella networks play an essential role in addressing today’s tremendous overlapping social needs, while also equipping local charities and non-profits with the funds to help solve the issues of tomorrow.
Umbrellas are an essential tool in healing any community suffering from vast social crises that are too big for any person or organization to tackle alone. I urge you to support your local non-profits and charities that are integrated in these networks, which shelter us all from life’s storms.
Joan Fisk,
CEO, United Way Waterloo Region Communities
