Charities and nonprofits are trying to address some of society's most challenging problems: poverty, homelessness, addiction, mental health, and environmental degradation, to name just a few. Tackling these problems requires both innovation and systems-level change.

Universities hold significant potential as partners for charities and nonprofits seeking innovation. Indeed, there are numerous instances of successful campus-community collaborations. However, these partnerships often prioritize the 'campus' over the 'community.'

This report discusses the social sector’s interest in innovation and the factors affecting its innovation capacity. The authors argue that it is time for campus-community partnerships that build on reciprocity and genuine collaboration to foster real innovation and systems change.

DOWNLOAD 

This guide and template are designed to help you chart the best path forward as you make decisions within your organization.

Nonprofits need to be able to make quick decisions in order to keep operations moving forward. From board members to fundraisers, a decision making framework is useful to help determine the best possible data-driven decision.

Imagine Canada and Keela have teamed up to bring you this Decision Making Framework to help you make quick and smart decisions that will help lead you to success.

In this guide, you will:

• Learn why data-driven decision making is important
• See a nonprofit-specific example of a decision making framework in action
• Receive a template to start creating your own decision making framework

Update on the report, posted in April 2025:

‘Diversity is our Strength’ was released in the Fall of 2022. The analysis we did for this report was based on the Statistics Canada data related to the nonprofit workforce that was available at the time. Since the release, this data has been updated, including significant revisions to the data the report was based on. As these changes affect some of its conclusions, this report has been unpublished. Instead, we invite you to read the report People First: A Portrait of Canada’s Nonprofit Workforce (published in April 2025), which is based on an analysis of Statistics Canada’s most recent data.

Download the 73 standards and access a gap analysis tool intended to help organizations identify the gaps in their governance processes and get a sense of their progress toward organizational excellence.