Charitable Activities and ‘Wellbeing’ in Indigenous Communities

Abstract

Abstract Although charities are created expressly to benefit communities, it has proven difficult to capture the extent to which this mission is fulfilled. We tackle this challenge by focusing on charitable services provided to First Nations’ reserves and Inuit communities. Benefits are captured by their impact on a uniformly measured ‘community wellbeing’ (CWB) index, and on a comparable ‘individual wellbeing’ (IWB) index. Geo-coding technology enables the matching of the location of charities, Indigenous communities, and their residents. OLS estimations reveal robustly positive associations between the charitable sector and the CWB and IWB indicators; a Propensity Score Matching approach suggests that the presence of at least one charity is associated with about a 5-point or 7.5% increase in the CWB index. Nuanced evidence of causation is provided by an event-study exercise and the inclusion of community fixed effects. Several robustness tests corroborate the positive association between charities on CWB. JEL codes: H00, I31, J15, D64, H49