Charity: What doctors care about

Go to any charity event and chances are you’ll encounter a few doctors as you network your way through the room. “You’ll always see doctors at charity events and fundraisers,” observed Mike Sheffar, a financial planner and partner at SPM Financial in London, Ont., whose client roster includes several dozen doctors. “They do a lot of personal giving of money and time. I think it’s part of their DNA.” The most recent Statistics Canada social survey on giving, volunteering and participating suggests doctors may be among the most generous when it comes to charitable giving. According to this 2018 survey, Canadians in healthcare professions have a higher donation rate, at 76%, than those working outside healthcare. They also give more, donating an average of $713 a year, compared to $561 for everyone else. Canadian doctors are also habitual givers. In an online poll by the Medical Post at the start of 2022, close to 80% of doctors said they make regular financial contributions to charitable or nonprofit organizations and just over 40% said they volunteered their time regularly. An October 2022 Medscape survey of 540 Canadian physicians across nearly 30 specialties confirms this profession’s ethos of giving back, with close to 55% of doctors reporting they either donated to or helped raise funds for a charity or organization that aids social issues. Almost 30% said they donated their time to help people affected by social issues. “I have some clients who are really, really engaged and involved with charitable causes, even though they’re very busy,” said Sheffar. “A number of them sit on the boards of charities.” While many of his physician clients make “some sort” of charitable contribution each year, Sheffar said these gifts tend to be in the hundreds of dollars. Only a handful of clients have made significant gifts. “I’ve seen a couple do planned giving, like buying life insurance with a charity as beneficiary or naming a charity in their will,” he said. “But even the uber wealthy ones I work with aren’t doing any advanced planning right now for philanthropic giving. Maybe they’re not ready to start thinking about legacy. My guess is those planned giving discussions will happen over the next 10 years.” Issues and causes So what causes matter most to Canadian doctors? Medscape’s survey found one out of two doctors were concerned about healthcare access while one in five were worried about climate change. Close to one in 10 doctors were troubled about domestic violence. While there aren’t any statistics that track, on an aggregate level, what charitable organizations doctors actually open their wallets or calendars for, anecdotal evidence suggests they favour health-related causes. Sheffar observed that some doctors prefer to give to causes within their areas of specialization, or that address a particular health issue they encounter often in their work. One doctor he knows, a nephrologist, donates an “immense amount of money” to kidney research and kidney-related charities. Another doctor, who works as an emergency physician, directs his charitable giving to organizations focused on mental health. “I’m guessing he deals with this a lot in his work,” said Sheffar. Money and time Dr. Sarah Gower, a family physician in Elora, Ont., said the bulk of her charitable financial donations goes to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The rest goes to local food banks and kids’ meal programs. When it comes to volunteering, these days she’s spending a lot of time working to build a six-bed, 370-square-metre hospice in her community. “I’m leading that project along with another doctor and a steering group,” she said. “It’s a passion project that we’ve always talked about and now we’re working to make it happen. We now have the land—donated by the county—we have a building plan and we’re working on incorporating.” To get government approval and funding, Dr. Gower and her team need to come up with a portion of the project’s budget. “Our goal is to raise $6 million,” she said. “We’ve already started getting donations.” Other doctors have lent their time to help build healthcare facilities, added Dr. Gower. She pointed to two Ontario hospices—Mariposa House Hospice in Severn and Chapman House in Owen Sound—as examples of projects that were led by volunteer physicians. For some doctors, volunteering their time requires getting on a plane to distant communities. Dr. Steven Moss, a Toronto pediatrician and inventor of Nosebrush—a medical device shown to effectively collect and remove viruses from the nose—recently travelled with his wife and daughter to Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana to provide vision screening to underserved children. “This trip will produce sustainable testing and a research paper,” he told the Medical Post in an email that included a link to a GoFundMe page created to support the project. As of mid-November, he had raised $5,408 against his goal of $10,000. Dr. Duncan Etches, a retired family doctor in Vancouver, has taught doctors in places as far as Nepal, Argentina, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Pakistan and China. “Was I ever in danger? Maybe,” he said. “When I was in Pakistan, they had armed guards meet me at the airport and there was one at the compound where I was staying.” Does age matter? According to Statistics Canada’s survey on charitable giving, Canadians tend to donate more as they get older and as they attain higher levels of formal education. These findings may be true as well among the country’s doctors. Dr. Etches said being a young doctor just starting out in his career certainly made it harder to dig deep into his pocket for the causes he cared about. But as he advanced in his profession and accumulated wealth, he also upped his charitable giving. “For a long time I had a young family and I had student loans—it was hard for me to give as much as I wanted to,” he said. “Now that I’m financially secure I can give more, about 20% of my income.” Dr. Etches has, over the years, also increased the number of charities he gives to. Today, he supports about 30 charities in total. He takes a strategic approach, starting with local organizations then expanding to regional, national and global. “Close to home, I give to a number of charities related to Indigenous communities, like Kinspire, which is focused on educational activities for First Nations, and Raven, which does legal advocacy on behalf of First Nations people,” he said. Like Dr. Gower, he donates to MSF but also spreads his financial gifts to international charities such as Hope in Healing and Farm Radio International, a non-profit that empowers African farmers to help themselves. Dr. Etches said he also directs a significant portion of his giving—in both money and time—to political parties. “Because they are the agents of change,” he said. “By giving money and being involved, I’m supporting people who can actually make change happen.”

Charity: What doctors care about

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