The 'End of Charity' is both a forecast and a demand.
The 'state' has quietly outsourced huge components of its core obligations - health, housing, education, and the whole span of social care - to a sector run on the exploited goodwill of people driven to do good, while the money meant to fund that work flows uphill.
Food security, shelter, mental health and addictions, disability supports, care for seniors and the dying, children and youth, women fleeing violence, newcomers arriving, people leaving prison. These are what taxes are for. And yet in Canada they run substantially on charity - on donated dollars, precarious contracts, and the unpaid overtime of people who are driven to 'wear multiple hats' as a badge of honour.
Meanwhile the money flows uphill: to hospital foundations and universities; into private foundations whose assets nearly tripled to $116 billion while their required payout sat at 3.5 percent; and into donor-advised funds where a tax receipt is issued today and the giving happens - eventually, maybe. The social service charities closest to the need continue to scramble for what's left.
The questions the sector needs to be asking
The economic anthropologist Jason Hickel puts it simply: the question is not how much aid we give - it is why, after sixty years, we still need to give it at all. If charity worked the way we are told, the need would be shrinking. Streeck (2014) and Hope & Limberg (2022) also note how since the 60's, OECD countries basically shifted from Keynesianism to Hayekianism - replacing (corporate) tax revenue with debt to corporations who mostly park the proceeds of tax breaks and similar tax incentives in the stock and money markets, doing nothing ultimately than to increasingly concentrate capital in the hands of a few, whilst driving up public debt and inequality. A reverse kind of Robin Hood where the poor are being robbed to feed the rich.
Canada's first food bank opened in Edmonton in 1981 as a temporary measure. Four decades later, food banks recorded more than two million visits in a single month. A sector that expands forever is not solving the problem. It is institutionalizing it.
Between 1990 and 2012, Ottawa dismantled the one social transfer that carried conditions - the Canada Assistance Plan obliged provinces to assist anyone in need, with a right of appeal - and converted the fiscal room into permanent tax cuts, while leaving in place a charitable tax subsidy that carries no conditions at all. The state never stopped paying for social need; it simply stopped directing it - which is why a disbursement quota that governs only the speed of the money, and not its destination, regulates only half of the transfer.
This naturally begs the question. Why is the tax forgone by the government - and for which individuals, including through DAFs, and corporations through foundations, are getting tax credits for - not being deployed more quickly and in proportion with the scale and particularity of social needs in communities. And in addition to defining a disbursement quota, should governments also not be defining what percentage should be going to social service causes? Or should government ultimately be rolling back the tax cuts to fund an expanded delivery of critical social programs?
The collapse is underway
This is no longer only an argument - it is a forecast coming true. Canada Helps' "The Giving Report 2025" which covered the period 2018 - 2024 confirmed a decades long trend where giving is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a smaller group of donors mostly in the 55 - 65 year old age bracket while in turn, most of the money flows to a smaller number of charities with 150 organizations - mostly made up of universities, hospitals, and grant making foundations - representing 0.2% of charities, receiving two thirds of donation increases between 2013 - 2022.
Official global aid has fallen 23 percent, the steepest drop on record (OECD, 2026). A new generation of wealth is publicly refusing philanthropy altogether. Foundations have begun fundraising in competition with the charities they exist to fund. The sector starves its own capacity - mostly still refusing to provide generous core and multi-year funding, and thus driving out its most experienced people - while economic shocks push demand up and revenue down. A system shedding money, capacity, credibility, and its own workers is not reforming. It is ending. The only question is what gets built in its place.
What comes after
A better world is designable, and it exists in pieces already. Finland treated homelessness as a housing-policy failure rather than a charity opportunity and became the only country in Europe where it consistently fell - one of a handful of governments now measuring success by wellbeing rather than output. MacKenzie Scott's recipients held twice the operating reserves of comparable nonprofits two years on. Community-governed capital, like the Foundation for Black Communities' $200 million endowment, recognised agency that was always present. And the World Inequality Lab's 2026 Global Justice Report puts it plainly: "reducing inequality is not an ethical bonus but the precondition for everything else". The basics are the responsibility of the state - food, housing, healthcare, safety - all publicly funded. Charity belongs beyond this: research, culture, advocacy, accountability, and repairing the inequities philanthropy helped to perpetuate, rather than address.
End the use of charity as permanent infrastructure for preventable injustice - and replace it with public responsibility, accountable capital, community-informed design, and meaningful agency.
That is the end of charity. Charity as solidarity, not survival infrastructure. A sector whose greatest ambition is its own retirement. The fundraiser of the future organizes belonging; nobody's chemotherapy should depend on a gala.