Two Declines, One Story: What the Data on Volunteering and Donating Tells Us About the Future of Giving in Canada

Drawing on the GSS-GVP, the only longitudinal dataset that tracks giving and volunteering simultaneously at the national level, this session examines a striking pattern: every major measure of civic participation has declined between the most recent comparable survey cycles. Donor rates and volunteer rates have fallen together, and a substantial share of the volunteer hours that disappeared represents unreplaced civic labour with a meaningful economic floor. The webinar moves beyond the headline figures to surface what the data reveals about concentration risk, the withdrawal of early-career adults, and the structural implications for organizations that continue to manage volunteer engagement and donor development as separate functions.

Participants will:

• Interpret recent GSS-GVP trends in donor rates, volunteer rates, and overall civic participation, and identify the structural forces driving them.
• Apply a concentration-risk lens to their own volunteer and donor portfolios, recognizing the parallel concentration pattern across both sides of the sector.
• Reframe volunteer engagement as a leading indicator and pipeline strategy for fundraising, rather than a separate operational function.

Speaker:

Chantelle Ramsundar is the Knowledge Translation and Mobilization Manager at Volunteer Canada, where she leads the Data-Driven Engagement program and contributes to the National Volunteer Action Strategy. Her background is in public health and global studies. She speaks and writes on the future of volunteering and giving in Canada, donor and volunteer concentration risk, knowledge translation in the social sector, the ethics of care, and the conditions that sustain civic participation within Canada and globally.