The turbulent economy has made fundraising so challenging at Burnaby’s T.B. Vets Charitable Foundation that the 65-year-old charity has laid off 14 of its 20 staff, cut several divisions and decided to focus on its original mandate of providing key tags to donors.
Much like the War Amputations of Canada (War Amps), T.B. Vets provides donors with coded tags to attach to key rings. Lost keys can then be returned to their owners via the charity if the finder drops them in a mailbox.
For decades, T.B. Vets has employed people between December and March to run that program. Its management decided in 2001 to branch out to provide more services to generate revenue, keep staff employed year-round and potentially increase the funds the organization can raise to finance respiratory disease research, doctors from University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health and the Centre for Disease Control.
That broadened scope included:
•selling the Green Zebra coupon book that has discounts at environmentally sustainable businesses;
•folding and mailing pamphlets for clients such as the St. Paul’s Hospital Foundation; and
•creating recognition awards by hand-stamping ribbons and shoe tags with lettering.
But T.B. Vets chairwoman Kandys Merola said that each of the new initiatives drained the charity’s treasury.
Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) data shows that T.B. Vets lost more than $176,000 in the 2010 calendar year.
Most donations to T.B. Vets flow through the Ability Group Society (TAGS), which generated nearly $2 million in 2010. Management expenses were $264,000 while TAGS spent $1.9 million on expenses for “charitable programs,” which includes operating the money-losing divisions.
CRA considered the programs to be “charitable” because most of the employees that T.B. Vets hired have hearing loss and other disabilities.
“We have to be responsible to our donors first,” Merola said. “We have to ensure people who are sending money that most of their donation is going to the hospital that they thought they were donating to.”
Donors do not want their donations to subsidize a failing coupon book, she added, before revealing that T.B. Vets has been losing money for years.
Last September, the organization was forced to sell its 16,000-square-foot building on Graveley Street in Burnaby for $3 million.
Later this month, T.B. Vets will move to a 2,800-square-foot site near Boundary Road in Vancouver that it will lease.
“When we sold our building we had the chance to really look at ourselves and say, ‘What do we really want to do here? Are we going to continue losing money? Or are we going to try to downsize and get our key tags [business] going and save the organization?” Merola said.
About 60,000 people have T.B. Vets key tags. That’s a small fraction of the eight million people who have War Amps key tags.
Key tag recipients at both charities are not charged a set rate for their tags. Instead, they’re encouraged to donate what they feel is appropriate.
“Our business has been pretty steady because we provide a service of lost key return,” said War Vets executive director of communications Danita Chisholm. “We have customer loyalty for that. A lot of people have had their keys returned.”
Neither War Amps nor T.B. Vets gets government funding; both rely on donations. As with most charities, much of their revenue is spent on administration and other expenses unrelated to their cause.
For example, according to the CRA, War Amps generated $31.8 million in revenue in 2010. It spent $30.4 million on costs before it had anything to give to what the CRA calls “qualified donees.”
B.C.-based charities close in size to T.B. Vets are in a similar situation.
For example:
•AIDS Vancouver generated $2.1 million in revenue in 2010 and spent nearly $2 million on expenses before providing gifts to what CRA considers qualified recipients;
•Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Vancouver generated about $1.2 million in revenue and spent all but $8,840 on expenses; and
•the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Society of B.C. generated $1.7 million in revenue and spent $1.6 million on expenses.
B.C.’s largest foundation, the British Columbia Children’s Hospital Foundation, generated $55.6 million in revenue and had slightly less than $20 million in expenditures before allocating gifts to qualified recipients. •
