'Tis the season of charitable giving but not for 'under the radar' causes

It's easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of worthy causes asking for help this time of year.

Donationboxes collecting toys for poor children fill up, volunteers make last-minute appeals to shoppers to help the homeless, and mailboxes get jammed with fundraising lettersfrom hospitals, food banks and animal shelters.

According to Imagine Canada, an umbrella organization representing the charitable sector, Canadians give about $5 billion to charitiesin late November and all through December. That's almost 40 per cent of the approximately $12 billion indonations received overthe entire year.

The holiday season is "obviously critical for charities," said Bruce MacDonald, Imagine Canada's chief executive.

But many charities can't seem to cash in on that holiday boost in giving, he said, because they don't have the marketing resources to increase their visibility at this time of year, or because their cause is morecomplex to explain than a short sound byte, tweetor billboard image might allow.

That's a difference Valerie McMurtry has noticed between her last role as CEO of a children's rehabilitation hospital foundation in Toronto and her current job as president of the Children's Aid Foundation, which funds more than 60 child welfare agencies across the country.

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When you're showing donors why their help is needed with an "iconic picture of a child who's ill or a child who's disabled, you don't need to say much more," McMurtry said. But children who have had to be taken into foster care because of abuse or neglect are"under the radar" in the public's consciousness.

"It's not like we are able to put a spotlight on them," McMurtry said, because the identitiesof kids in the care of Children's Aid and other child welfare organizations areprotected.

"These are kids who, through no fault of their own, are really dealt a bad hand in life," she said. "But they're very hard to see."

During the holidays, she's especially worried about young adults18 and older who have aged out of the child welfare system and are "on their own."

One young man, who was in his early 20s and had aged out of care, died by suicide on Christmas Day threeyears ago, McMurtry said. The tragedy helped inspire the foundation to start a holiday support fund for other young adults who had previously been cared for by the system.

"Alot of people misunderstand them and think that they're bad news or they're trouble or whatever," she said. "They're just trying to make their lives work. And they have nobody really backing them."

'Highly stigmatized'

For charities supporting people suffering from less understood diseases, particularly in mental health, stigma is an enormous barrier to fundraising, said MaryAlberti, chief executive officer of the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario.

"Some of our donors want to remain anonymous because of the stigma that is still associated with the illness,"Albertisaid.

Despite high-profile public campaigns to raise awareness around mental illness overall, schizophrenia remains "not well understood and sometimes also associated with [people]being fearful of it," she said.

Some people mistakenly believe that donating money to help people living with schizophrenia is hopeless,Albertisaid.

"People like to understand their giving really goes to something ... really tangible," she said. "Sometimes the perception would be 'do people really get better? What is this actually going to mean to, you know, toimprove the quality of life forsomebody?'

"[But] people with schizophrenia go to university. They can live really good lives,"Albertisaid.

Not 'cute kids and kittens'

Other charities struggle becausethe general public doesn't recognize why they might deserve support.

"We're not a cute kids and kittens kind of charity," said Catherine Latimer, executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, which advocates for fairand humane treatment of people in custody and effective rehabilitation so they can reintegrate into society upon their release.

"It's difficult to attract new donors, because the cause doesn't resonate with people in quite the same way as some of the other charitable causes, and it's not a sort of a top-of-the-mind issue," she said.

For many people, howtheorganizationbenefits the community "isn't clear right off the top," Latimer said.Because people served by the John Howard Society have committed crimes, some question why they should help thosewho are "not innocent."

"If we don't support themand if we don't have the kind of charitable interface with people who wouldn't be getting help otherwise, it's not only inhumane and unjust for them, it creates real problems, because they won't reintegrate well [into the community]," she said.

The John Howard Society doesn't currently conduct aholiday fundraising campaign and relies largely on a small group of year-round donors whose "eyes have been opened to some of the social injustices that are apparent in the prison justice system and in the criminal justice system," shesaid.

But Latimer said she would "love it" if there wasan "infusion of resources at Christmastime."

"There's so much more we could do," she said.

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