Reading a community from the public record.

The people who decide whether a charity closes are volunteers, and most of them are facing the question for the first time. What they usually lack is a view of the whole: how many organizations around them are in the same position, who could take on the work, and which of their neighbours' closures were chosen and which simply happened.

The record can give them that view. It cannot give them a verdict about any one organization, and we do not use it for that. It can show a whole sector at once, honestly, in a way that a board chair, a funder, or a regional council can recognize as their own community. That is what a case study is for: to put that view in front of people before a decision is needed, so that the decision is made early and not alone.

A case study is made from a small connected group of federal ridings, or from a national body whose registrations can be picked out by a shared business number or by their names.

The first step counts the sector from the CRA's 2024 returns: how many charities, how small, what purposes, how many on boards of three or fewer, how many the model flags. The second draws the board map: which organizations share a director, with no name on it. The Gazette gives the revocations, chosen and not, where its notices have been matched to the same ridings or the same body. Then the case study says what the sector looks like there, where it is strained, what closing looks like there, and what we would do about it. It ends with the questions the record cannot answer, and with links to what the community has reported about itself.

Two rules run through every case study. No count under five is printed, so that no organization can be found by subtraction. And no organization is named unless its ending is complete, on the public record, and honourable to the people who carried it; a registration that lapsed for want of a filing is named only where the board's own decision to end was already public, and otherwise never. Everything else is in the method brief: the sources, the model and how far to trust it, the limits, and how to check our arithmetic.

A case study ends with an invitation. The T3010 returns it is built from are limited and uneven, so it can only be a starting point, and it is meant to bring people together to talk about how organizations close in their community. That meeting is a roundtable: six to twenty community leaders, for a day or an evening, hosted by a healthy local charity with a meeting room and a small budget for lunch. They go through the case study and correct it, and they work out the particular difficulties facing the charities near them that have grown too small, too weak or too unsteady to keep up their work, or have drifted from what they were for. The host provides the room and the facilitator; a sponsor helps defray the cost; we provide the agenda, the questions, the invitations, and a report in the room's own words.

What comes out of a roundtable is a group of leaders who have looked at their own sector together and, if they want it, boards that close together. A small number of organizations that have decided, or are deciding, each pass a board motion naming a coordinator from their own community, and take their own Toolkit licence, at no cost where the board has already decided to wind down. We bring the method, the binder, the training, and support by phone. When the last of them has closed, the method stays in the community. If your community or your body should have a case study, or you would host a roundtable, say so.