From Relief to Resilience: Reimagining Investments

The events of 2020 revealed unvarnished truths that demand that philanthropic organizations take action to build economic well-being for all. This long-overdue moment emphasizes the critical need for strategies that provide a range of support to women and Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian people, who are struggling due to deep financial disparities. Today’s disparities are built on, and exacerbated by, long-standing inequities created by structural racism, sexism, and classism, which have limited financial security and overall well-being for those affected. This brief responds to the urgency of this moment, reimagining and building on past recommendations to map more just paths to economic resilience moving forward.



Canadians’ Well-being in Year One of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Given the scope and the diversity of the reports and studies that examined the impacts of the pandemic on well-being, it can be challenging to absorb and understand all the ways in which quality of life has been affected by COVID-19. The well-being literature offers an approach that may help.

This report brings together diverse findings that illuminate changes in quality of life since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and provides valuable insights through examining these results through a well-being lens. Several widely used frameworks exist to describe the dimensions of well-being, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Framework for Measuring Well-Being and Progress.



State of the Child Report 2020: Protecting Child Rights in Times of Pandemic

The 2020 State of the Child Report includes six recommendations and gives a snapshot of some of the challenges New Brunswick children and youth will have to overcome as the province moves forward and juggles the new realities of public health measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 while respecting child rights.



State of the Child Report 2019

This report's release was part of Child Rights Education Week and also in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). 2019 was declared the International Year of Indigenous Languages by the United Nations.

The report contains an overview of some of the serious challenges facing New Brunswick children and youth, including more than 200 statistics presented in the report’s Child Rights Indicators Framework. A special emphasis was placed on education rights.

Some of the concerning findings revealed in the report include:

  • nearly half of youths in poverty feel socially excluded;
  • half of all youths have no one they look up to; and
  • one in four youths with special needs does not feel that they belong at their school.



The Common Approach

The Common Foundations are a minimum standard for how to do impact measurement without prescribing a particular tool or approach. This can help to overcome a widespread challenge of grantmakers, donors, lenders and investors imposing impact measurement approaches on the social purpose organizations that they give money to. They do this for assurances that the impact measurement is of a sufficient quality and comparability. The Common Foundations solves part of this problem. Funders can require social purpose organizations to demonstrate that the are doing all five essential practices while leaving the social purpose organization to choose which tools and approaches to use.

In addition to the quick guide, videos, key documents, and a self-assessment are provided as tools to meet the standard of impact measurement in Canada.