Case studies · Kitchener and Cambridge
Six hundred charities in a city that keeps growing.
Kitchener Centre and Cambridge, in Waterloo Region, where the churches are becoming housing. 643 charities that filed a 2024 return, read from the public record.
Growth hides strain until the filing is late.
What the sector looks like here.
Kitchener Centre and Cambridge have 643 registered charities, in two of the three cities that Waterloo Region calls the Tri-Cities. The Region is planning for a million people by 2050. The median charity runs on $229,000 a year, and two in five run on under $150,000.
More than half are congregations. Waterloo Region's churches are its oldest civic institutions, Mennonite, Lutheran, Catholic, Reformed, and the newer congregations of the communities that have arrived since. Many of them own the buildings the rest of the sector meets in, and the Region has begun turning church buildings into housing rather than letting them go. Community benefit comes next: the hospital and university foundations, the arts organizations, the service clubs. Relief of poverty and education follow, smaller than their need.
The median board has six members, and eighteen per cent have three members or fewer. Inside Cambridge people still say Galt, Preston, and Hespeler, the three towns joined in 1973, and the register still shows three of many things. A growing region does not produce directors any faster than a shrinking one.
By annual revenue
By charitable purpose
Purpose is the category head on the CRA return. Median revenue here is $229,000; the median board has 6 members.
What the record shows about strain.
The model flags forty-five organizations, seven per cent of those scored, below Canada's nine per cent. A flag means only that an organization's filings over several years resemble those of charities that later lost their registration. In a growing city the filings that look that way are a lease that outran the budget, a program built on a grant that ended, a founder who is still the whole board.
Eleven of the forty-five have the model's stronger flag, the one it reserves for filings that look like the last few years before a closure. Twenty-six of the forty-five run on under $150,000 a year. The model is a screen and not a verdict, and eleven stronger flags in six hundred is what a healthy sector looks like when its small organizations are stretched.
Twenty-two registrations were revoked between 2022 and 2025. Seven were voluntary. Fifteen were for failing to file, the kind of closure nobody chooses. We do not name them. Several were the sponsoring committees and small congregations that a city's civic life is built from, run by volunteers doing a job nobody had explained to them.
What an ending looks like here.
Distance is not the problem here. Counsel is down the road, there are accountants who know the sector, and a program that has to move has a dozen organizations within twenty minutes that could take it. The Region's own Vital Signs report says the problem is belonging: people do not know what is available or where to go. That is true of boards too.
The record that shows the strain also shows the capacity to answer it. The foundations and the universities are in the same two ridings as the eleven stronger flags. Boards closing together here would not need to import anything. They would need a host to invite them.
Who sits on the boards.
The boards here are loosely joined. Fewer than a hundred organizations share a director with another, and no one sits on more than three. One reading is that this is capacity, boards deep enough not to borrow each other's people; another is that a board in trouble here has fewer directors who have served on other boards. The filings support both.
Bubbles are organizations, coloured by purpose and sized by revenue band. Dots are people who sit on two or more of these boards. Drag to move, scroll to zoom, click to see one organization's connections, click the background to clear. No one is named: the shape is public, the people are not.
The work
What we would do here.
Kitchener and Cambridge would show how the method works in a city, where the sector has far more capacity to close organizations well if someone organizes it.
A host charity, usually a healthy one with a meeting room and a small budget for lunch, invites the boards that have decided to close, or are deciding, to close together. Each organization that joins passes a board motion naming a coordinator from its own community and takes its own Toolkit licence, at no cost where the board has already decided to wind down. Public Benefit brings the method, the binder, the training, and support by phone. The knowledge stays in the Region.
Nothing in this case study names a living organization, and we do not use the model to approach anyone. A board that recognizes itself here can start the conversation.
Roundtables · the community of practice, in one room
Come and correct us.
A day or an evening in Kitchener–Cambridge, hosted by a local charity.
The public record only shows so much. A roundtable brings six to twenty community leaders in Kitchener–Cambridge together for a day or an evening to go over this case study, correct it, and work out what the charities near them are facing. It is hosted by a healthy local charity with a meeting room and a small budget for lunch, and a sponsor helps defray the cost. Within the month we send a report in the room's own words, and the corrections this case study owes are made and dated in the correction log. How a roundtable works, and who provides what.
What we will ask at the roundtable.
- The Region's own Vital Signs found that belonging is under pressure and that people do not know where to go. Which of the 643 organizations in this case study are the ones people do not know about?
- Eleven organizations have the stronger flag. Which of the region's funders would recognize them from the description alone, and what would they want to know first?
- Churches here are turning into housing rather than closing. Which congregations own buildings they can no longer afford to keep, and who advises them when they decide?
- Volunteer Waterloo Region reports fewer hours than before the pandemic. Which boards have quietly gone from seven members to three, and who is still signing the return?
- Galt, Preston, and Hespeler were made one city in 1973. Do the three still run separate boards for the same purposes, and would any of them choose to join now?
The Critical Path
Closing an organization in Ontario.
A charity in Ontario closes twice: once under the Not-for-Profit Corporations Act, 2010, which governs the corporation, and once under the Income Tax Act, which governs the registration. The two have an order, and no government page sets it out.
The Critical Path, Ontario edition, is that order on one folded sheet: each step from the first hard conversation to the last filing, who decides it, and the document it files, with its regulator, its fee, and a specimen of its first page. This case study is printed inside it. It will come as part of Foundations, with the Guide and access to the Foundations Course. Foundations is in development.
Also in Ontario.
How this case study was made.
Public data, and math. The full method brief.
The counts are arithmetic on three public files: the Canada Revenue Agency's list of charities and their annual returns, 2011 to 2024; the Canada Gazette's notices of revocation; and Elections Canada's postal code file, which places a mailing address in a riding. A "flag" is the mark our model, Canary v3 / Distress v3, puts on a charity whose filings over several years resemble those of charities that later lost registration. It is a weak signal and we say so: about 1.4 in a hundred charities lose their registration within three years, about 2.9 in a hundred flagged ones do, and the rest carry on. We use flags to count, never to approach anyone.
A mailing address is not a service area, and 22 of Canada's 343 ridings are not yet in the postal-code crosswalk. Where a count is under five, we print "fewer than five", so that no organization can be picked out of it. The method brief has the model's validation, the counting rules, and the limits in full.
Local record, as reported: Waterloo Region Community Foundation, Vital Signs 2025; Volunteer Waterloo Region on the decline in volunteering; CTV on Waterloo Region churches selling land for housing; CBC on the Region planning for one million residents.
Sources: CRA List of Charities and T3010 returns, 2011 to 2024; Canada Gazette, Part I, revocations 2022 to 2025; Elections Canada, 2023 representation order. Model: Canary v3 / Distress v3, 1 July 2026; out-of-time AUC 0.68; flag precision 2.5 to 3.3 per cent. Counting script: case-study.py; the riding-level counts it produces: case-studies-aggregate.csv. The organization-level score file is available to a reviewer under a data agreement, and the method paper on request. If you find an error in the counting, write to info@publicbenefit.ca; we will correct the case study and record it in the correction log.