2024 WORKPLACE WELL-BEING REPORT  

INSIGHTS TO IMPACT

The State of Employee Well-being in Canadian Nonprofit Organizations

 

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Introduction

Let's start with an opinion: We take our charities and nonprofits for granted.

Nonprofits provide fundamental services that act as a critical backbone to community well-being. Across community and government organizations, the nonprofit sector employs 2.5 million Canadians, comprising 14.5% of all jobs in the country. The sector contributes nearly $200 billion to our economy by addressing the most pressing community issues like child care, poverty, climate change, housing, food insecurity, mental health, physical health, arts, culture, criminal justice and human rights, youth well-being, and inequity. You almost certainly engage with at least one nonprofit in your community without even knowing it.

Without the nonprofit sector, our communities would lose the champions of our most significant societal challenges.

Despite its importance, the nonprofit sector experiences a sense of constant insecurity and that creates a difficult environment to work in for extended periods of time. If you ask ChatGPT "Is employee burnout a challenge in the nonprofit sector?", it provides not one, not two, but nine different reasons why burnout can be so prevalent in nonprofits:

  1. High Emotional Demands: Dealing with critical social issues can be emotionally draining for employees
  2. Resource Constraints: Nonprofits frequently operate with limited financial resources
  3. Passion-Driven Work: Passion for causes can lead to overcommitment and lack of boundaries
  4. Lack of Work-Life Balance: Commitment to the mission can blur the lines between work and home
  5. Insufficient Compensation: Nonprofit employees earn lower salaries compared to their for-profit counterparts
  6. Organizational Culture: Nonprofits often take on a taxing "do more with less" culture
  7. Vicarious Trauma: Constant exposure to others' suffering can lead to secondary traumatic stress for employees
  8. Fundraising Pressures: The ongoing uncertainty of funding adds to job and financial insecurity
  9. Lack of Professional Development: Opportunities for growth may be limited due to financial constraints

Every one of those reasons is a significant driver of burnout, but when you combine all nine together? That is a recipe for deep-seated, systemic challenges. These nine challenges can likely be summed up in one succinct statement:

Doing more with less in an emotionally-charged and under-funded environment is a recipe for systemic employee well-being challenges.

The goal of this report is to paint the picture of what this looks like in practice and why employee well-being is so critical in the nonprofit sector. Over the last year, we have collected data from thousands of nonprofit employees in Canada and thousands of Canadians receiving services from nonprofits. In the following sections, we will outline (1) how these pressures are impacting employees working in nonprofits, (2) how employee well-being is impacting the stability of the nonprofit sector, and (3) how employee well-being is impacting the services that nonprofits are able to provide in their communities.

Let's start by describing who we heard from.

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Who We Heard From

At YMCA WorkWell, we care about data.

Our Insights Assessment is a quick and validated employee experience pulse survey that allows leaders to gain valuable insights on employee well-being, culture, engagement, and performance. Every time we conduct an Insights Assessment with an organization, we use their results to identify the most pressing needs in their employee experience so that we can focus strategic action directly on the specific areas that will have the most meaningful impact on employee well-being. 

Every organization's needs are unique, but it's in the aggregate that we start to see notable trends. In the last 12 months, we collected insights from over 20,000 unique employees across Canada, with over 13,000 responses coming from nonprofit employees working in a wide range of areas including child care, community health, community development, and housing.

In the last year, our team at YMCA WorkWell has also expanded our services outside of the workplace to collect feedback from the community members that nonprofits serve - for example, collecting feedback from families accessing an organization's child care services. In this time, we collected insights from over 35,000 community members accessing those same nonprofits across Canada to better understand how our nonprofit partners are serving their communities and their communities' needs.

In our efforts to really understand why employee well-being matters in nonprofits, being able to connect the dots between the employee experience and the experience of those that nonprofits serve was a critical puzzle piece in telling this story.

It's worth noting: We have a lot of data to speak to and in the interest of creating a more digestible report, we've decided to choose a sample of compelling stories to share instead of hitting you with pages upon pages of graphs - something we know only a small percentage of readers actually have an interest in. With that said, if you're interested in learning more, please feel free to reach out to our team and we're happy to share more. 

So... why does employee well-being matter in nonprofits? Let's start with reason #1: nonprofit well-being challenges impact our people.

Nonprofit Well-Being Challenges Impact Our People

Nonprofit work is naturally engaging.

We've all heard about the "employee engagement survey". For years, understanding the employee experience meant understanding employee engagement. Are you engaged by the work that you do? Do you feel inspired and feel like the mission and values of your organization resonate with you? These questions were viewed as the secret sauce that led to satisfied and committed employees.

At its core, nonprofit work excels at ticking those boxes - providing housing for those who might not have it, supporting the health and well-being of equity-deserving groups, providing a space for at-risk youth to safely connect with their community, providing child care for new parents who would not be able to work otherwise. It is easy to find purpose and meaning in your work when you spend your days helping people who need help and this buoys much of the work in the nonprofit sector.

We see this very clearly in our data. In the past year, over three quarters of the 13,000 nonprofit employees we surveyed had a healthy Engagement score in response to the question "I often feel engaged by my job". Let's imagine that in context - this would suggest that if 100 Canadian nonprofit employees walked into their workplace tomorrow, 76 of them would feel a healthy level of engagement in the work that they do and another 14 would have an adequate level of engagement. That is a remarkably high number.

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Of course, nothing is perfect - 10% of nonprofit employees did have unhealthy Engagement scores, but there are nine employees for every one with an unhealthy engagement score. They are well and truly outnumbered.

If engagement was everything to a healthy employee experience, nonprofits would be thriving. Those of us working in the nonprofit space know that most of us aren't. The narrative of a "burnout epidemic" started during Covid-19 as organizations and their teams struggled to cope with the uncertain job demands of a global pandemic. We're now over four years out from the start of the pandemic and our last Insights to Impact Report showed that many industries were starting to bounce back to healthier workplaces.

The bounce-back in the nonprofit sector, however, has been much slower. Nonprofit organizations were on the front lines tackling some of the most pressing challenges during the pandemic, only serving to amplify emotional demands and trauma, while trying to hold true to the mantra of "doing more with less". Now, four year laters, we're still seeing concerning levels of burnout in our country's nonprofit sector. 


The statistics are sobering: 1 in 4 nonprofit employees are reporting burnout "Often" or "Extremely Often", and particularly worrying, 1 in 3 nonprofit leaders. If you include those reporting burnout "Sometimes", that number climbs to 58% of all employees and 71% of leaders. That is more than half of our nonprofit industry experiencing at least semi-regular burnout.

Let's talk about scale for a moment. If we extend this data to the 2.5 million Canadians working in the nonprofit sector, this would suggest that 625,000 nonprofit employees in Canada are experiencing burnout "Often" or "Extremely Often". That's almost the entire population of Luxembourg.


Importantly, there is one more systemic challenge in the nonprofit sector that ChatGPT missed: Nonprofits struggle with employee recognition. Of course, compensation plays a role in recognition, but it's more than that. Our data suggests that across the sector, only half of nonprofit employees feel like they receive appropriate recognition for their work, and 29% - more than one in four - have unhealthy recognition scores.

Think about it this way: Imagine you are a nonprofit leader hosting a meeting with ten employees - odds are only five of them would feel as though they receive a healthy amount of recognition, and three of them would feel like they don't receive enough. 

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Why does this matter? Feeling like you are recognized and valued in your role is a foundational aspect of healthy work. Think about the moments in your career where you've felt like you were really thriving - odds are, you had a leader or team that made you feel like you and your work mattered. Recognition is like an amplifier on your well-being - it can make make the good things that much better when you have it, and it can drain you that much more when you don't. 

We see these effects clearly in our data when we combine recognition with burnout. Specifically, 52% of respondents with unhealthy recognition scores were experiencing regular burnout - over half. But for those with healthy recognition scores? The number dropped to 12%. In other words, respondents with unhealthy recognition scores were 4x more likely to experience regular burnout than respondents with healthy recognition scores.

These are two very different problems. At its core, employee burnout is a complex and systemic challenge that requires long-term strategic intervention to address. Employee recognition, however, can be addressed tomorrow and requires small but targeted changes in how we interact with our teams. But despite their differences, burnout and a lack of recognition continue to be two challenges defining the nonprofit employee experience in our country.

At YMCA WorkWell, we work in the consulting space. While we understand the importance of demonstrating the ROI of employee well-being, we also want to emphasize that employee well-being should be a priority on its own. The nonprofit sector is comprised of hundreds of thousands of highly engaged and purpose-driven Canadians, but also hundreds of thousands of burnt out and under-recognized Canadians that deserve to work in an environment where they are able to feel healthy and valued.

If our people working in this sector are not healthy, we are not doing a good enough job as leaders and our teams deserve better - and again, that should be enough to inspire action.

The added reality, however, is that employee well-being is having a significant effect on our organizations and the stability of our sector and this is the second reason why employee well-being matters.

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Nonprofit Well-Being Challenges Impact Our Organizations

During the pandemic, we heard a lot about The Great Resignation. Employees were leaving their jobs in record numbers and it was placing undue stress and costs on organizations across North America. Ever since, "please help us manage our turnover" has been one of the most frequent requests that our team at YMCA WorkWell receives - regardless of the organization.

This makes sense - the workforce is the lynchpin that holds sectors and organizations together. No matter how innovative or revolutionary our work is, our progress and effectiveness is still driven by our people. It's why our team at YMCA WorkWell views strong retention as a mark of excellence - it is what allows organizations to thrive, leverage institutional knowledge, and foster resilient and long-lasting organizational cultures.  

While the Great Resignation hit Canada hard during the pandemic, the nonprofit sector has been dealing with turnover challenges for far longer. Even before the pandemic, turnover in the nonprofit sector was higher than the Canadian average and there are some easy explanations why: the sector is both highly educated and underpaid. According to Statistics Canada, nearly three quarters (74%) of Canadian nonprofit employees have a post-secondary education, compared with just over half of the total Canadian economy (56%) - and yet, nonprofit employees earn 26% less than the Canadian average in terms of their income. This is a dangerous combination when it comes to employee retention - it's easy to make the case to leave if you feel like you are not earning what you deserve.

The pandemic, however, only served to exacerbate these challenges. On top of the "highly educated and underpaid" label, nonprofits were stretched especially thin during Covid-19 - tackling significant community challenges with resources that were more constrained than ever. What this meant was that many nonprofit employees now felt underpaid, but also exhausted, under-appreciated, and burnt out. Now, four years on, the nonprofit sector continues to experience its own Great Resignation and recruiting and retaining talent are the top two challenges identified by nonprofit leaders in Canada.

The numbers are staggering. Of the 13,000 nonprofit employees we surveyed in the last year, 1 in 5 were considering leaving their role in the following six months. If we extend that statistic across our sector of 2.5 million nonprofit employees, 500,000 would be considering leaving their role in the next six months.


That level of turnover comes with a monumental cost. This is admittedly very quick math, but let's get a sense of what kind of impact that can have across the sector. In Canada, the average front-line nonprofit salary is $44,464 and a conservative rule of thumb is that replacing just one front-line employee costs approximately 30% of their annual salary - that is, $13,339 per employee. If 500,000 employees were to leave their role in the next six months, that balloons to a $6.7 billion dollar cost across Canada and that does not even include the turnover of leaders (where turnover costs can rise to 200% of their annual salary). That is billions of dollars in an industry that is already bootstrapped in terms of capacity and resources - imagine how much of an impact those billions could have if they were being invested in employees and communities instead?

This level of turnover can also be devastating within individual organizations. It takes a substantial amount of time, energy, and financial resources to replace even one staff member, let alone hundreds - and many nonprofits are doing so with strapped human resources and finance teams. For example, imagine you run a nonprofit of 250 employees - you'd need to replace approximately 50 employees in the next six months at a cost of approximately $667k. This is a number that would change the fortunes of many nonprofits and does not account for the capacity challenges created by under-staffed teams dealing with the transition. When you put numbers to it, it's clear why turnover is placing such a significant strain on leaders, teams, and organizations, and why we hear from so many leaders desperate to find a solution.  

If we want to stop the bleeding, it's important to start by understanding why employees are leaving. Across the 13,000 responses, we asked all respondents who indicated they were considering leaving their role: "What are the main reasons why you are considering leaving your organization? Please select all that apply".

 
Given the financial constraints of the nonprofit sector, it's no surprise that compensation is the top consideration driving turnover in the industry - with 61% of those considering leaving their roles citing it as a key driver. At YMCA WorkWell, we know that there is often only so much that a nonprofit can do to address compensation in a significant way - that is why we often tell nonprofit leaders that if you can't match the compensation demands of your employees, you need to be providing a fantastic experience in the other areas of your culture.

To be clear, there is always a risk that employees will look to leave your organization if they feel under-compensated - but finding ways to help employees feel valued, to feel like they are developing, growing, and finding true meaning in their work can help offset the gap in compensation. They need to feel as though they are receiving an experience that they wouldn't be able to receive elsewhere.

This is why it is so worrying to see burnout and a lack of appreciation - something we've already established are critical concerns for nonprofit employees - rounding out the top three reasons why nonprofit employees are considering leaving their roles. For every employee looking to leave their role, 2 in 5 are doing so because they felt burnt out, feel under-appreciated, or both. For employees who already feel under-paid, it is difficult to make a case to stay if they are also feeling burnt out and like they aren't valued in their roles.

To help paint the picture further, let's flip that script. Those that are looking to leave their roles are doing so because of burnout, but is an employee more likely to consider leaving their role as their burnout increases? The answer is a resounding yes.


Only 10% of employees who report burnout "Not At All" or "Rarely" were considering leaving their role in the next six months, compared to almost half of employees who report burnout "Extremely Often". It's clear that when employees feel burnt out more frequently, they are more likely to consider their options and look for greener pastures.

As the data shows, however, feeling burnt out and feeling valued often go hand in hand and the trends are even more compelling when we consider them together. 

Specifically - only 5% of nonprofit employees that feel a healthy level of recognition and low burnout were considering leaving their role in the next six months. This is significantly lower than the 15% Canadian average. On the other hand, 60% of employees that feel an unhealthy level of recognition and high burnout were considering leaving their role - that is a 12x increase.

This tells a compelling story: Unhealthy work experiences are literally driving turnover in the nonprofit sector. One in five nonprofit employees are considering leaving their role in the next 6 months, with burnout and a lack of appreciation being clear drivers, and this will present considerable expenses for the sector to take on.

This is why employee well-being is so critical in the nonprofit sector. We need to be providing employees with reasons to stay and relying on our missions to do so is simply not enough. Investing in employee well-being is not only an investment in employees, it's an investment in the well-being of our organizations and the well-being of our sector too.

As the last piece of the puzzle, it's important to understand how investing in employee well-being is also an investment in the well-being of your community. That brings us to our last reason why employee well-being matters in nonprofits: It matters because it impacts our communities. 

Nonprofit Well-Being Challenges Impact Our Communities

Given the critical role that nonprofits play in the well-being of our communities, it's worth asking: what happens when nonprofits are less effective in executing on their mission? If child care organizations are less effective at caring for children, housing organizations are less effective in finding shelter for the unhoused, and social justice organizations are less effective in providing supports for equity-deserving community members, what is the impact that would have on our communities? What are the trickle down effects that this can have on our society as a whole?

We've outlined some of the fundamental well-being challenges that nonprofit employees are experiencing and how it is impacting the sustainability of our nonprofits, but given their importance to our communities, it's also important to ask whether employee well-being is impacting nonprofits' abilities to provide critical services.

To help address this question, we complemented the Employee Insights data that we have collected from nonprofits in the last year with data from thousands of community members accessing their services to better understand their experiences. The bulk of these community responses came from two sources: child care nonprofits and community health nonprofits in Canada - so that is where we will focus our attention in this section.  

Child Care

Of the 13,000 Employee Insights responses we received from nonprofit employees in the last year, over 3,000 came from employees working in child care across Canada - both infant and toddler care.  In that time, we also received responses from over 12,000 families accessing child care through those same organizations. In total, we received employee and family data from 123 child care centres in Canada.

Let's start with an important note: burnout in child care is even higher than our nonprofit average, with 32% of front line child care staff and 38% of child care leaders surveyed in the last year experiencing regular burnout. Our data also suggests that burnout is the primary driver of turnover in the sector - over half (54%) of all child care employees considering leaving their role cited burnout as the primary reason. This speaks to the nature of the sector's challenges, where under-staffing in particular has been a significant driver of burnout in child care centres.     

How does this affect families accessing child care? Our data suggests that employee burnout in child care centres is having a significant impact on the experience of families and their children - and in many important ways. For example, one important objective of a child care centre is to support a child's development while in their care - helping them to learn, grow, and hit developmental milestones. The graph below illustrates the relationship between burnout and families' belief that their child care centre is supporting the cognitive development of their child.

Now, we know that a regression graph is (understandably) not for everyone - but here are the important things to consider: Each green dot on this graph represents a child care centre in Canada. As you move right along the graph, the percentage of employees experiencing burnout "often" or "extremely often" in a centre increases. As you move down the graph, a centre's average score out of 100 on the question "I believe that our child care centre supports my child's cognitive development (e.g., learning, thinking, reasoning)" declines. The grey line then tracks this relationship across all 123 centres - in other words, it illustrates the predicted cognitive development score at each level of burnout.


If you aren't a fan of statistical analysis, here's the important story it's telling: As employee burnout in a child care centre increases, families are less likely to believe that their child care centre is supporting their child's cognitive development.

Here is another way to process this information: Of the 30 child care centres with the highest cognitive development scores, only two had more than half of their employees reporting regular burnout - that's 7% of the healthiest centres. Of the 30 centres with the lowest cognitive development scores, 21 had more than half of their employees reporting regular burnout. That is 70% - or a 10x increase.  

That is a big deal. And here's the kicker: We don't only see this effect with cognitive development (we figured you'd only want to see one regression graph!). As employee burnout in a child care centres increases, we also see statistically significant declines in families' scores on:

  • Their child's physical development
  • Their child's emotional development
  • Their child's language development
  • How responsive staff are to their family's needs
  • How much staff care for their child(ren)
  • How approachable staff are
  • How much fun their child is having in their centre
  • Overall satisfaction

Across 123 child care centres, this paints a concerning picture. Centres with higher levels of employee burnout are not providing the same experience as centres with lower levels of burnout, and it isn't only impacting the experience of parents and caregivers - it's impacting the development and experiences of their children too.

Overall, our child care data suggests that burnout is a notable concern in child care centres, it is driving turnover, and it is impacting the quality of the services they are able to provide. When it comes to impact, it's hard to think of something that should ring the alarm more than the development of children in our communities.

Community Health

These effects are not confined to child care - we see similar effects in community health organizations as well. Of the 13,000 Employee Insights responses we received from nonprofit employees in the last year, over 4,000 came from employees working in community health across Canada. This included areas like recreation, physical health, mental health, and specialized health management programming.

In that time, we also received responses from over 23,000 customers, members and participants accessing services through many of the same organizations. In total, we received employee and member data from 81 community health centres and branches in Canada.

Let's start by highlighting some of the differences with child care: On the whole, burnout in the community health organizations we surveyed was lower than child care organizations. Overall, 19% of community health employees cited regular burnout in their role. While this still represents a concerning 1 in 5 community health employees, it is significantly lower than the 34% seen in child care organizations. As another departure from our child care results, burnout was not cited as the #1 reason why community health employees were considering leaving their role - with a desire for higher compensation and feeling under-appreciated taking the top two spots.

If that's the primary area of focus, let's talk about recognition and appreciation. While community health organizations seemed to fare slightly better than the nonprofit average in burnout, recognition remained a notable challenge. Only half of all community health employees surveyed (51%) had healthy recognition scores. To put that into context, if you walked into a community health centre and there were twelve employees working around the front desk, only six would feel like they receive the appropriate amount of recognition for their work.

Why does this matter? You guessed it - it is having a tangible impact on the experience of their community members. To illustrate how, let's focus on an important experience question that we asked members of these community health centres. Having a positive impact on the personal well-being of its members is the ultimate objective of a community health centre, so we asked members to agree or disagree with the following statement: "I believe that my experiences at [org name] have had a positive impact on my personal well-being".

To provide another graph walkthrough: each green dot on this graph represents a community health centre in Canada. As you move right along the graph, the average employee recognition score in a centre increases on a scale from 1 to 100. As you move up the graph, the average member well-being impact score increases - also on a scale from 1 to 100. The grey line then tracks this relationship across all 81 centres and provides the predicted member well-being score as employee recognition increases. 

To tell the story of this graph in one sentence: Community health centres that struggle to adequately recognize their employees are less likely to have members who believe that their experiences are having a positive impact on their personal well-being. 

Similar to our findings in child care, these results stretch across many important outcomes in community health centres. As employee recognition scores in community health centres decline, we also see statistically significant declines in members' ratings of:

  • Their own physical health
  • How cared for they feel by staff at the centre
  • How welcomed they feel by staff at the centre
  • How responsive staff are to their needs
  • How safe they feel at the centre
  • How inclusive the centre is
  • How convenient the centre is
  • Overall satisfaction

Overall, this data is telling. In both child care organizations and community health organizations, we have strong evidence that the well-being of nonprofit employees is not only impacting our organizations, it is also impacting our communities. It is impacting the development of our children, the health of our community members, and the overall experiences of those in need of the most critical services in our communities.

We don't have enough data yet to be able to confidently speak to these relationships in areas outside of child care and community health (keyword: yet), but we firmly believe it is fair to assume that we'll find these effects in other sectors.

The reality is: We simply can't perform at our best when we are not well at work, and when our work provides critical services to the most vulnerable in our communities, there are going to be significant consequences of that.

So where do we go from here? There are some important places to start.

Where Can You Start?

This report presents a concerning insight into the state of employee well-being in our Canadian nonprofit sector and its downstream implications. Despite engaging missions and meaningful objectives, working in the nonprofit sector is hard; it can be emotionally draining, a breeding ground for vicarious trauma, and financial constraints mean that teams are asked to do more with less, both in terms of staffing and compensation.

There's a common adage that "that's how it's always been" is one of the most dangerous phrases in organizations. Sadly, we often hear resigned leaders claim that "this is the nonprofit way", but it's time to dream a little bigger. One thing is clear: If we care about our nonprofit employees, our nonprofit organizations, and their impact in our communities - something needs to change.

Here are some places that you can start to make a difference.

We love national data because it provides insights across a wide range of organizations, industries, and demographics – but your own organization is unique, with its own strengths, challenges, and opportunities. Using this data to inform your employee well-being strategies is a great place to start, but the best way to understand the needs of your unique employees and community members is to ask them. Our YMCA WorkWell Insights Assessment takes less than five minutes to complete and provides valuable metrics on Well-Being, Culture, Engagement, Performance, and employee Net Promoter Score. Our burnout add-on also provides a detailed assessment of burnout in your organization along with its root causes. 

Our reports are designed to help leaders clearly identify the most pressing employee needs in their organization and the specific teams that require the most urgent support. Every report includes tailored consultations with our team, along with targeted recommendations. If you are concerned about well-being in your organization, collecting strong employee insights is a critical place to start.

Whether we like it or not, burnout and recognition have been key themes in all of our community reports to date and this one is no different. It is clear that these are systemic challenges in a post-Covid economy in nonprofit and for-profit organizations alike.

Because these challenges have been so prevalent, we have built many of our services around addressing them. Here are some of the services we offer:

Workshops: We offer targeted workshops like Preventing and Addressing Burnout, Tackling the Workload Challenge, and our most popular workshop Building a Culture of Appreciation. These workshops are offered both virtually and in-person and can be offered in two-hour, half-day, and full-day formats.

Workload Analyses: Workload is one of the leading causes of burnout in the nonprofit sector. For leaders who are already acutely aware of workload challenges in their organization, we offer tailored projects to support cross-functional teams in developing actionable recommendations. We work with your teams to identify the most significant sources of workload and stress to identify the clearest upstream solutions to help your teams identify the most efficient and effective processes.

Leader & Team Coaching: Our team of accredited coaches can help you grow your leadership capabilities, gain insight into your leadership superpowers, accelerate team cohesion, and set clear goals.

Advisory Services: Add a workplace well-being expert to your bench. We offer a variety of advisory packages to provide guidance and insight to support executive strategy and decision-making around well-being.

Perhaps most importantly, we need leaders of Canadian nonprofits to advocate for their employees.

Connect with your local, provincial, and federal leaders and use data like this to make the case for why our nonprofits need more support. We need to shake the narrative that the nonprofit sector should just expect this type of working experience.

Caring for and supporting our nonprofits means caring for and supporting our community members - the millions that work in the nonprofit sector and the millions more that access their services. And that message will only be heard loud and clear if the members of our community make it known.

If you would like to learn more about these services, please contact us any time. We are always happy to work with leaders who care about creating healthy work experiences for their teams.

Overall, this report speaks to systemic well-being challenges across our nonprofit sector in Canada. It is important to note that change can happen, but this type of change can only ever happen at the community level if people take it seriously and act in numbers. We don't need a handful of organizations to take this seriously, we need the sector to take it seriously.

So, let’s fight for it. Let’s work from the belief that healthy workplaces should be a right for all employees, not a privilege. If we do that collectively, when we look at our data in a year's time, hopefully we can see incremental changes towards the healthy nonprofits we all deserve. 

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We're Here For Good

For more than 150 years, the YMCA has been devoted to building healthy and connected communities across our Three Rivers communities (Guelph, Stratford-Perth, and Waterloo Region). As a charitable organization, our aim is to create a positive and lasting impact on the communities we serve.

Throughout our history, we’ve worked to ensure that our programming and services meet our communities where they’re at. Now, more than ever, your community, your Y, needs you. Without you, there is no Y.

This data underscores why we’re here. This is our commitment: To be here for good. To build stronger, more vibrant, healthier communities – one connection at a time. But, we can only do it with your support.We need you to keep showing up with us. To continue meeting our communities’ needs. To continue building safe, welcoming spaces to learn, grow, thrive, and connect. Not just today. But every day.

Think of all the good we’ve done. Now, imagine all the good we can do, together. Learn more about how to support our YMCA.

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