Women's groups should develop a common vision and guiding principles with the active participation of all national equality-seeking women's groups.

Women's groups should:

• Undertake preliminary discussions with all stakeholders around common vision and guiding principles as soon as possible
• Develop a broad-based communication strategy to disseminate the outcome of these preliminary discussions to all national equality-seeking women's groups
• Create and maintain an accurate national directory, updated regularly, as "the source" for communicating with national women's and girls' organizations
• Develop a strategy to disseminate this and any further information on the issue of collaboration in fundraising to local and provincial members
• Refer to the 'Federation Model' and to the appropriate Appendices in this Report in the development of common vision, guiding principles, membership criteria, and policies

While the development process will determine membership criteria, it is already evident that:

Revenue Canada guidelines on charitable status will significantly affect which women's groups can participate in a workplace giving campaign.

Revenue Canada guidelines prevent the issuing of tax receipts for donations made to organizations which do not have charitable status. A workplace giving campaign relies heavily on the ability to issue such receipts. Therefore, only member organizations with charitable status will be able to benefit from the workplace giving campaign, though it is possible that funds to non-registered organizations can occasionally be channeled through an Administrative Trustee, which must be a registered charitable organization.

Less than one-third of the women's groups who responded to the Project questionnaire do not have charitable status. Some groups have applied and been denied charitable status. Many groups report increasing pressure from government to restrict activities to those which are charitable in the narrowest sense. Coalitions have proven to be effective vehicles for carrying forward single issues and are the most appropriate structure for challenging the Revenue Canada restrictions.

Women's groups should address accessibility to charitable status by forming a coalition to broaden charitable registration access for national women's groups.

• National women's groups should form a coalition, separate from any collaborative fundraising structure, and launch a lobbying and advocacy effort using bureaucratic, political, and legal avenues to broaden the current definition of charitable purpose
• National women's groups should join forces with other organizations and foundations seeking to accomplish the same objective
• In the short-term, national women's groups should carefully examine the Administrative Trustee concept to channel charitable dollars to women's groups that do not have charitable status

Chrow

Gibson

Omidvar