As Canada’s affordability crisis mounts, Micheal Shier’s research aims to boost the capacity of non-profits on the front lines of anti-poverty work

Photo of Daily Bread Food Bank’s Spring Public Food Sort, March 2024, by Nick Lachance for Toronto Star via Getty Images

Affordability is a top concern for Canadians these days, based on recent polls and widespread media coverage of the topic. What people are really worried about is poverty, says researcher Micheal Shier, though they rarely use that emotionally loaded word.

There’s good reason for their worry: poverty rates are increasing across the country. And non-profit organizations serving people are at the frontlines of this pressing social issue, running programs and developing strategies to tackle poverty head on.

Facing mounting service demands, dwindling donations, and reduced government funding, human service non-profit organizations urgently need guidance on the best ways to allocate their time and resources to continue their work. Understanding what practices help or hinder their success is becoming increasingly vital.

That’s where Shier’s research comes in. The social work professor at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work is partnering with human service non-profits nationwide to boost their poverty-reduction capacity.

Professor Michael Shier

“We want to know how we can support these efforts so they can have a much larger positive social impact,” says Shier, the Canada Research Chair in Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship in the Human Services.

Poverty reduction includes anything organizations do to directly tackle the main indicators of poverty, which are all on the rise, including unemployment, precarious employment, and food and housing insecurity.

“This often means coming up with innovative ideas to foster new economic development activities in the local community,” says Shier.  A non-profit might buy a business so it can offer employment while also generating revenue for the organization. Or it might purchase a building and provide affordable housing to its clients.

In Shier’s current pilot project, his team is surveying and interviewing a diverse range of non-profit leaders and staff across Ontario about their poverty-reduction initiatives. “We’re collecting information on exactly who’s doing what, and where,” he says, noting that the next stage of the project will expand this work across Canada.

To determine the organizational factors that promote or hinder non-profits’ poverty reduction efforts, the research team is gathering information on governance structure, staff development, program focus, market engagement, and collaborations. “We want to know if non-profits are using their own funds to run these programs, for example, or collaborating with businesses or government,” says Shier.

Once Shier and his team have identified the internal and external factors that lead to productive poverty reduction strategies, they’ll distribute this information widely across the non-profit sector in a variety of ways.

“We plan to produce a Community Economic Development Capacity Tool that non-profit leaders can use to bolster their poverty reduction activities,” he says. This tool will allow them to assess the value of their current approaches and see where they should invest in new resources or collaborations.

The findings will be disseminated through a variety of educational modules for non-profit leaders and staff. In the past, Shier created YouTube videos on topics such as social entrepreneurship to communicate his research in an accessible way.

“We’ll also be sharing our results with government,” says Shier. “Certain policies around funding, procurement and partnerships can elevate the ability of the non-profit sector to carry out poverty-reduction work.”

The importance of this work in the current economy can’t be underestimated. “There’s a lot of upheaval in our economic systems right now and it’s affecting people’s livelihoods,” he says. “At the same time, the cost of living is going up, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. We haven’t seen government responses that fully address these issues.”

Food Banks Canada, for example, recently gave the Canadian government a D in its annual Poverty Report Card, which grades governments’ legislative efforts to alleviate poverty.

“The overarching goal,” says Shier, “is to help create systems that allow non-profits, the government and for-profits to be as effective as possible in supporting the overall socioeconomic wellbeing of the population.”

By Megan Easton

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