Executive Summary
The nonprofit sector is often described as facing a “data deficit.” There is truth in that. No single dataset fully captures the workforce that sustains charities, community services, and the broader care economy.
The sector has more evidence than it often uses. But the data deficit is also overstated. The sector has more evidence than it often uses. The problem is that this evidence is scattered across systems, built around different definitions, and rarely organized around the questions nonprofit leaders and policymakers most need to answer.
This is especially true for community care work. Because many of these roles are concentrated in specific occupations and industries, existing labour-market data can already reveal a great deal about the workers, organizations, and pressures at the centre of the nonprofit care economy.
This review identified eight categories of data with well over a dozen distinct datasets relevant to the nonprofit workforce, spanning Statistics Canada sources, sector surveys, administrative filings, and research partnerships. None of these sources is perfect on its own. But when brought together, they can produce a much deeper, more credible, and more policy-relevant picture of the nonprofit workforce than is usually presented.
Before investing heavily in new data collection, we should ask what can already be understood using the data that exists today. The answer is: quite a lot.