This President’s Report has four main sections:
1. A review of the 2023-24 fiscal year including decisions made with respect to 2024-25;
2. A review of the 2023-24 financial statement;
3. My plea for your continued support;
4. New ways to help us.
Review of 2023-24
The 2023-24 fiscal was a challenging one. Thanks to a late influx of donations, we received sufficient funds to pay for the awards we had approved. In total, we gave out 205 awards totalling $312,750.
Our awards continue to make a significant impact in the lives of our recipients and their families. Here are some written letters and one audio letter that tell heartwarming stories on how your donations have impacted these students. Simply click on the link to open the files:
Letter 1 Letter 2 Letter 3 Letter 4 Letter 5 Letter 6 Audio letter
The Board of Directors made a number of important decisions at its May meeting:
1. It approved 212 awards totalling $342,750. This represents roughly three awards for each of our 65 schools. 18 additional awards have been funded by organizations and donors.
2. It raised the amount of the award from $150 per month to $160 per month to compensate for the loss due to inflation since the last increase in September 2022.
3. It introduced the “Steaming Student”, a grade 10 student who will stay in the Program until graduation, provided they continue to meet the selection criteria (hard-working and living in difficult financial circumstances). When we reviewed awards from the previous few years, we saw that most selections were for Grade 12 students. Schools seemed to prioritize graduating students to help them with all of the costs associated with graduating high school. We wished to go back to our original dream of helping students from the time they are selected to graduation. We only asked schools to select one Streaming Students so that they could still have the flexibility to select students in more dire circumstances.
4. It adopted the School Ambassador program. Ambassadors will represent HOST in 4 to 6 schools in their assigned sector. We created 13 sectors in the Ottawa area. Ambassadors will meet the students to inform them of their award and follow-up with schools who have not yet selected their students or with recipients who have not yet opened a bank account. We currently have four Ambassadors confirmed. For more information, click here. If you are interested in becoming one, send me an email with your work history; I will follow up if your profile fits what we’re looking for.
2023-24 Financial Statement
The 2023-24 Preliminary Financial Statement is available by clicking here.
We are in good financial shape.
I would like to focus on the second section, Statement of Reserves. All revenues and expenses are assigned to one of three reserves: Administration, Restricted and Unrestricted.
a. Administration: revenues are donations from Board members and interest on our GICs. Administrative and marketing expenses are recorded here.
b. Restricted: these are donations and awards that are funded by organizations and donors. For example, MacEwen Petroleum funds five students in the Upper Canada region (e.g. Cornwall, Vankleek Hill).
c. Unrestricted: these are your donations and the awards approved by the Board of Directors. This is the core of the HOST Program. If you look at the Unrestricted columns in the Statement of reserves, you will note that net donations (after CanadaHelps fees) were $299,554.50, a drop of about $10,000 from the previous year. We gave awards totalling $282,250. That means that we earned enough to pay for the awards and put some extra into our Unrestricted Reserve, which now stands at $284,421 (see the Balance Sheet.)
The Board set a goal of maintaining the Unrestricted Reserve at 75% of our Base Year. The Base Year is defined as the awards approved for 2024-25:
a. Students in our Program in 2023-24 who are renewed for the next school year continue to be paid during July and August;
b. 212 awards at $1,600 per year; and
c. 5 awards at the President’s discretion.
This 75% standard will provide a reasonable guarantee that we can meet our obligations for another year.
Your financial support
We currently have 60 monthly donors. On an annual basis, they provide funding of $52,000, about 1/6th of our total awards. The rest comes from one-time donations, ranging from $50,000 to $20.
It has been our practice to only send out one reminder to renew, one year after the previous donation. We don’t want to pester donors with repeated requests to donate. So please donate when you receive our reminder.
Once again, I ask you to consider setting up a monthly donation. If you donate monthly one-tenth of the one-time donation that you intended to make, it gives us a bit more money and it gives us a stronger base so we can plan better. You can set up, modify, pause or cancel monthly payments very easily on the CanadaHelps web site, accessed through our donation web page.
New ways to help us
1. Legacy Giving
If you are supporting one or more charities, are you comfortable that your estate will continue that support? You can make a simple change to your Last Will to ensure that your favourite charities receive a share of your estate. A sample is available here.
2. Donate an old car
CanadaHelps has teamed up with Donate a Car Canada to accept a car from you with the proceeds going to your favourite charity. They do all the work, transfer the proceeds to CanadaHelps and you get the tax receipt in the amount of the proceeds. For more information, click here.
I wish you a wonderful summer.
Richard Lussier
Co-Founder and President