Charitable activities and ‘wellbeing’ in indigenous communities

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 some individual outcomes. 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; the inclusion of community fixed effects suggests some causality. Propensity Score Matching reveals that charities locate where the CWB is low, and points to an even stronger correlation between the presence of charities and CWB. Individual-level analysis provides additional support of a causal link. Causality is bolstered by nuanced evidence from a stacked-event study examining how the entry of charities affects CWB. We conclude that the services of charities contribute to community wellbeing.