Core funding impact story: New Brunswick Coalition for Pay Equity

The New Brunswick Coalition for Pay Equity is a group of individuals and organizations that pursues and promotes the right to pay equity and decent work for women, through awareness, research, and public policy.

The Coalition is dependent on project-based funding which lacks flexibility, as it is provided for specific programs and actions. There can be gaps of months or even more than a year between us receiving major project-based funding. Although the Coalition organizes yearly fundraisers, the proceeds of these events do not even cover basic operational expenses (i.e., rent, full-time ED’s salary, telephone, transportation).

As such, the Coalition’s lack of core funding has several key impacts:

• Our ability to raise awareness on emergent issues and to participate in public policy dialogue is limited.
• The coalition cannot do as much in-depth research as we need in order to inform our engagement and participation in government consultations. 
• We’re less able to represent women’s perspectives about the workplace in discussions about public policy that impact them. This is especially true for women in women-dominated and non-unionized jobs.
• Our organization’s financial stability and long-term sustainability is not secure.

The greatest threat to our organization’s long-term sustainability is the loss of expertise. Due to unpredictable and uneven funding, our staff are financially insecure and question their future with the organization. In such a small organization, the loss of even one employee has a huge impact. A few years ago, we had three full-time employees. Due to a lack of funding, there are now only two and this could be further reduced to one in a few months if we do not get new funding. Additionally, if the Coalition does get more funding in the future, we will then need to use more resources to hire and train new people.

We could focus our energy, time, and resources on our mission, rather than on constantly trying to find funding. We could better adapt our offerings to the changing socio-economic context and to meet new needs. We would no longer have to create projects that sometimes have very little to do with our mission to ensure our organization’s survival. We would keep qualified employees and the expertise they develop over the years and would be able to fulfill our mission with more confidence.