How eligibility rules keep grassroots organizations out of real research funding.
Canadian funders love the language of community-led research. They just don’t love paying for it. While a small organization on the ground might scrape together a few thousand dollars to document local realities and push for change, university-led teams chasing similar questions routinely walk away with grants ten or twenty times larger. You know, money that buys the staff, systems, and staying power the community side is still forced to invent from scratch.
That difference shapes everything that follows.
The rules for bigger grants almost always demand the things grassroots groups can’t build without the money in the first place: formal institutional partnerships, multi-year financial track records, dedicated grant writers, and administrative systems that satisfy distant reviewers. So the organizations closest to the issues stay stuck in the small-grant lane. The universities collect the serious resources, produce the polished reports, and get credited with “partnering with community.”
This isn’t theoretical in Canada right now. The nonprofit sector is under real pressure. According to the Ontario Nonprofit Network’s 2024 survey, 56 percent of nonprofits scaled back programs or services that year. More than half reported stagnant or declining revenue while expenses jumped for 84 percent and demand rose for 83 percent. Waitlists grew. Some programs simply disappeared. National data from the Charity Insights Canada Project shows a similar picture: most charities say demand still outruns what they can deliver. Only about one in eight describe themselves as very financially stable. Reserves are shrinking. Staff keep leaving because the pay can’t keep up and the workload doesn’t quit.
The Research Funding Gap
These are the same groups funders say they want leading research. Yet the research funding system still tilts hard toward big institutions. Evidence presented to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research shows that roughly four-fifths of federal research money from the major granting councils lands at the U15 universities. Smaller places and community partners get what’s left. Even the programs labelled “community-based” or “community-led” often require an academic co-lead or institutional overhead capacity that many grassroots organizations simply don’t have.
The result is a quiet contradiction. We praise lived experience and local knowledge. Then we route the actual resources through the places that already have the infrastructure to capture them. Relationship-building, trust, and long-term presence don’t fit neatly into short project timelines or narrow eligible expenses. Community researchers usually keep doing the frontline work at the same time. University teams can treat the research as the main job. When the grant is small and short, the community absorbs the real cost.
Some newer programs try to do better. They aim for direct funding to Indigenous communities, genuine co-leadership requirements, a bit more flexibility on core costs. But those often remain the exception, not the rule.
Fund the Work, the People and the Infrastructure
If the goal is better evidence and fairer power, the funding has to match the rhetoric. That means multi-year money that covers real operating costs, not just project activities. It means trusting community organizations with the resources to hire, retain, and build their own research capacity instead of forever treating them as junior partners. It means dropping eligibility barriers that only the already-resourced can clear.
Canada’s nonprofits are carrying heavier need with thinner margins. The people documenting what that looks like on the ground should not have to beg for the tools to do it properly. Fund the work. Fund the people doing it. Fund the infrastructure that already exists in communities. Anything less is just performance.
