Oh Canada

Photo by Nicolas Way Age 2

Canada Gives!

In this week’s Globe & Mail there was an article which jumped out at me. “Canada Ranked Second-Most Charitable in the World”. Globe writer Sarah Boesveld, writes a clear message “Canadians are a giving group of people”. Not surprisingly I was attracted to this headline as I too am Canadian. The World Giving Index commissioned by the Charities Aid Foundation, ranks countries “giving” based on three criteria:

Giving money
Volunteering time
Helping a stranger

As I dug a little deeper into this article and the Charities Aid Foundation website I learned another piece of information which I found very interesting. Here is a quote from the World Giving Index report:

“the survey asked people whether they had given money to charity in the last month and to rank how happy they are with life on a scale of one to ten. For all countries CAF compared the strength of the relationship between giving with both a nation’s GDP and the happiness of its population. CAF found that the link between happiness and giving is stronger than the link between wealth and giving.”

So the happier you are the more you want to share. Seems like a pretty basic concept our parents tried to teach us while growing up. I’m teaching the same to my 3 year old to this day. You will be happier if you share your toys with your friends rather than hording them for yourself or pulling them out of their hands and then hording them for yourself. Sometimes I wonder where we forgot this simple lesson in this world.

So my questions to you are the following.

Why do you think Canadians ranked so high on the giving index?
If you are a person that gives back, in what form do you give:

Donating money
Volunteerism
Helping a stranger
Helping the planet
Do you think we are a happier nation?

I look forward to hearing from you.