5 minute read
Being Given the Opportunity to Help Others
Sara Neely
Do you want to help make the community you care about happier, safer, healthier, brighter, greener, kinder, more tolerant, more compassionate, and/or more equal?
Most of us make charitable gifts because of our own values and beliefs. We have feelings of compassion for others and a desire to help a cause we believe in.
We give because our values are aligned with the organizations we support. We believe in their mission and what they are trying to achieve for the people, animals, and places they serve. Why we give resonates with why they do the work they do.
During our lifetime, a gift to charity can be a way to help satisfy the kinds of desires arising from the values we hold dear. Donations help charitable organizations carry out their work in making positive impacts on the people and places around us. Through our gifts, the organizations we choose will help perpetuate our values to the generations that follow. The gift keeps on giving long after we are gone, leaving a lasting positive impression.
After you consider what you have and what you need during your lifetime, and what you will leave in your estate to family and friends, there are many ways to support the causes and concerns in the community that reflect what is important to you and your family.
During the darkest days of The Depression, Burges Gadsden founded the Victoria Foundation on the belief that people would choose to support each other if they were given the opportunity. Through an Act of the BC Legislature in 1936, the Victoria Foundation became a registered charity and Canada’s second community foundation (after Winnipeg).
Its first financial gift was received in April 1937 from Burges’s mother Fannie Gadsden. She gave $20 and enclosed a letter with her donation, “I wish I could afford $100 to so fine an undertaking.”
Fannie may have worried that her gift was small, but that $20 changed a community forever. Today, over 80 years later, the Victoria Foundation still stewards that first gift—and the many other gifts that followed. And as we have seen over the decades and in the recent challenging months, people continue to look after each other.
We may give because charities have affected our own life. They may have helped us along the way, educated us, or inspired us.
One donor established a scholarship at a university in memory of her father who had been a professor in one of the faculties. After a few years, one of the students who had received the scholarship made his own gift to the scholarship fund. That contribution helped increase the number of scholarships to be awarded. A few years later, the student, as a school teacher, encouraged his own class to raise money for the scholarship fund. That effort instilled the act of giving in the younger students.
We give for personal reasons, because of what matters to us and the impact we want to have today and for the future.
Over the next decade, it is estimated that $750 billion will pass from one generation to the next. That number will be impacted by the market volatility our world is currently experiencing, but the opportunity will be the same. People will have the opportunity to help others, to make gifts that reflect the values they want to pass along to future generations.
In 2020, through the campaign for the Rapid Relief Fund, created in partnership with the Times Colonist newspaper and the Jawl Family, the Victoria Foundation received over $6 million in gifts from over 15,000 people. Those donations have been granted out to charities working on the frontlines of providing food, housing, and physical and mental health supports to the most vulnerable populations on southern Vancouver
Island affected by the health, social, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And the charitable, or civil society sector as it is known, continues to need support to carry on. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented disruption in the charities that serve us every day. Whether it is a day care, seniors centre, environmental conservation program, arts and cultural performance, youth mental health clinic, food bank, school, or place of worship, those organizations are challenged beyond their resources.
A recent study conducted by Vantage Point, in partnership with the City of Vancouver, the Vancouver Foundation, and the Victoria Foundation, illustrates the impact of COVID-19 and the challenges charities in British Columbia face for their operations and delivery of programs. Titled No Immunity, the study tells us that no subsector, size of organization, geographic region, or community served is safe from the impact of the pandemic.
For those who are able, we need to lift those organizations up and sustain them or many will be lost.
As Burges Gadsden said over 80 years ago, people look for the opportunity to support each other and the community values they share . . . the values that create systems that support the vulnerable and the helper . . . the values that ensure our home is a place to live, learn, work, and grow . . . the values that create a vibrant, caring community for all. s Sara Neely is the Director of Philanthropic Services at the Victoria Foundation. Scrivener half page_environment.pdf 1 2019-03-11 9:29:42 AM
ENJOY THE CERTAINTY
THAT YOU HAVE MADE A GOOD DECISION.
What will your legacy be? You can guide the future of your community and the causes you care about by making a legacy gift to the Victoria Foundation. Our endowment fund is one of this community’s greatest strengths, allowing us to manage charitable gifts and bequests in perpetuity. We continually build the fund and invest in our community — granting annually to a broad range of charitable organizations and worthy causes. If community matters to you, the Victoria Foundation is where you can make your priorities known.
Please contact Sara Neely at 250.381.5532 or sneely@victoriafoundation.bc.ca for more information. victoriafoundation.ca
The mission of Imagine Canada is to strengthen Canadian charities and non-profits so they can better serve individuals and communities both here and around the world.
Imagine Canada’s May 2020 Sector Monitor: Charities and the COVID-19 Pandemic, provides further insight into the organizational, financial, and human resources impacts of the pandemic on charities in Canada and how the response is different than that experienced during the 2008/2009 financial crisis. The just-released Multicultural and Newcomer Charitable Giving Study by Imagine Canada sheds light on the experience of newcomers to Canada and the values they bring to their support of charitable organizations in their new home. The precis of the report reveals “newcomers to Canada and second-generation citizens are driven to give and volunteer out of a strong sense of duty to advance the well-being of their communities and Canadian society generally.” Both reports are available through www.imaginecanada.ca.
