Challenges in Partnered Research: Should I Start a Non-Profit?

Edits have been made to this written Q&A for clarity, style and tone. Listen to the podcast above for full guest introductions. 

What challenge or opportunity led to your decision to launch a nonprofit organization? Why was that challenge or opportunity important for you? 

Elaine Leung: I started doing research in marine biology when I was doing my undergrad at UBC, and I’m really spoiled to share that my first real job outside of high school was where I started doing research on sea lions for the UBC Marine Mammal Research Unit. I fell in love with marine biology and basically never looked back. 

I’ve since been working for over 15 years, studying threatened marine animals all around the world for different governments and universities. 

When I finished my Ph.D., I realized that over 30 of the species I studied would go extinct within my lifetime. It made me realize that doing research for governments and universities was not resulting in conservation action fast enough. 

At the same time, kids are inheriting a planet in bad shape, and we’ve put this responsibility on their shoulders to fix our mistakes. But kids these days are spending most of their waking hours indoors behind a screen and losing their connection with nature. 

This is a huge problem because you only protect what you love. So the whole idea of Sea Smart is, “Let’s get kids really excited about our oceans, help them foster this connection, curiosity, and love so that they protect what they love. In doing so, we’re really hoping to also be able to combat climate anxiety, which is disproportionately affecting youth. 

I realized that working as an academic or for conservation-driven nonprofits couldn’t solve these problems.  

Paul Kershaw: I wanted to launch a nonprofit ultimately because I wanted to make the evidence we were producing at my lab at UBC more powerful in the world of politics. We knew that evidence is but one factor shaping public policy, and there are many others that have little to do with evidence. By creating the nonprofit to join forces with the lab, we could do the things that people who are wanting to influence the world of politics and don’t have evidence on their side do all the time. 

They think like a movement, they think like a lobby, they think like a marketer, they think like a political scientist. So we wanted to do all that. The evidence that was motivating us to take on this big challenge of fusing a nonprofit, a charity, into our lab was the fact that younger Canadians are being hammered in today’s economy. 

They go to school more and pay more for the privilege to land jobs that actually pay less once you adjust for inflation compared to baby boomers, only to face home prices that are hundreds of thousands of dollars. They then get locked into a lousy consolation prize, which is raising rents. 

One of their major adaptation strategies is to delay, delay starting their significant relationships with their loved ones, their spouses, and starting their families. 

But you can only delay so long. Biological clocks are tick-tock, tick-tocking. When people start their families, childcare becomes another mortgage-sized payment, and going on parental leave is another rent-sized payment. So, that was the vice grip that we found younger people were facing. They also inherited a larger public debt, both government debts and the environmental debts that Elaine is referring to. 

In my lab, we decided that younger folks are just getting creamed with environmental debt, government debt, and the housing market. So, we asked ourselves, how do we empower them—and the parents and grandparents who love them—to come together with us to make the evidence more powerful in the world of politics? 

That’s why we launched a nonprofit. 

What are the benefits of running a nonprofit? 

Elaine Leung: I think the sheer impact of what you’re able to create is probably one of the most heartwarming things for me. I remember giving a presentation to 300 grade 12 students, and this was only a few months after I started Sea Smart. One of the students asked me, “What’s the biggest impact that you’ve ever had on the planet as a marine biologist?”  

Immediately I said, Sea Smart. It wasn’t my 15-plus years as a scientist studying threatened marine animals, helping to inform government policies and industries on how to mitigate the impacts. It was truly educating the next generation and empowering that ripple effect.  

One of the main things we tell our students is that when you’re in Sea Smart, one of your biggest responsibilities is not only learning how to love and protect the ocean but also sharing that knowledge. We get our students to work on action projects where they develop group projects to teach their friends, classmates, and communities about how to protect the ocean.   

This is where we see the biggest changes. We have these kids who start projects inspired by what they’ve learned. For example, from a school workshop series on Species at Risk funded by the Department of Fisheries, we taught 1,200 kids about at-risk species and their threats.  

These kids developed projects that reached over 29,000 people. In a world where huge environmental problems can seem so overwhelming that you can’t do anything about them, these kids are actively reaching 29,000 people and showing that we can make a difference.  

Paul Kershaw: I think there are a range of benefits. I would encourage anyone thinking these days, “Hey, I’m an academic. Should I start a nonprofit? Should I go in this direction?” to first ask themselves, “What’s your theory of change? How are you going to move your evidence into action?”  

In my case, my theory of change led me to realize that policymakers rarely respond to evidence alone. They respond to those who organize and show up. So, what does organizing and showing up look like? Creating the nonprofit to fuse with the lab at UBC was part of doing that.  

At Gen Squeeze, we now have an alliance of over 43,000 people. So, when I’m invited to brief the Prime Minister’s office, the Premier’s office, or finance ministers, they’re not just inviting me because I’m one clever academic, although I like to think I am. They’re doing it because I represent a constituency of tens of thousands of people who are asking for the evidence to be acted on.  

Some may be able to find a way to build an alliance around the evidence they are producing in their labs at UBC or any university without having to start a nonprofit. But when I started mine, it was in an era with different legislation and restrictions on what charities could do.  

Back in the day, before the Supreme Court in Canada decided otherwise, charities were limited to spending no more than about 10% of their money on what were considered “small p” political activities. The definition of small political activity was so broad that it included if a professor said, “Hey citizen, you should take this evidence and send it to your decision maker,” that would make lawyers at UBC nervous.  

To put nervous lawyers at ease, we went through the process of creating a nonprofit. Thankfully, we wouldn’t have to do that today, but there might still be other reasons to launch the nonprofit side, such as organizing the alliance building.  

There’s a ton of work involved in keeping 40,000+ people engaged. That work is not always about doing new and better research. It’s often about doing new and better knowledge mobilization and bringing on the right kind of people with that expertise, who don’t always fit into the very research-oriented infrastructure at the university.  

If you do it successfully, then, like Elaine’s amazing stories of 1,200 kids reaching thousands of others, we can achieve similar results. We can have our 40,000+ people within a year reaching about a billion impressions and engaging the public with the material.  

And that’s really helping to scale up the reach of the work we’re doing. A peer-reviewed application, I like to joke, “gets read by seven people, including my grandmother.” Sadly, my grandmother passed away, so it’s six people now. So, we have to find other ways to broadcast the material and give evidence a greater chance to compete with the fake news out there, which is often emboldened by practices that don’t always align with the evidence produced from our universities. 

What are the challenges of running a nonprofit? 

Elaine Leung: One of the biggest challenges for a nonprofit is funding. A lot of people think, “Well, you’re a charity, and I only want to donate and support the cause. I don’t want to support any overhead.” 

People need to realize that overhead includes many essential things, such as the executive director’s role—my role in running and maintaining this charity every single day. My role is considered overhead, as are expenses like rent for our office, car insurance for running our programs, and liability insurance for delivering them. Even all the staff, except for those who spend 100% of their time on programming, have roles that encompass some level of overhead. Yet, it’s very challenging to find funders willing to help cover those costs. 

That’s where you’ll hear about the different types of funding, such as unrestricted and restricted funding. Restricted funding is typical for most grants, especially for government grants where you have to be extremely prescriptive about how you spend the money, account for every single cent, and ensure it goes towards charitable programs. 

Unrestricted funding is almost impossible to find from grants, foundations, or donors. Yet, unrestricted funding is what we need to cover the costs required to run a charity efficiently and effectively. I also find one of the challenges in the nonprofit sector is the belief that, since we’re doing something good for the world, we shouldn’t have to get paid very much. 

This means I have a really hard time attracting and retaining staff because we pay them far below what comparable industries in the for-profit world would pay. Even for myself, most of my staff earn more than I do, because I need to invest in them. Yet, as a consultant, I could be making thousands of dollars a day. 

Telling people who work in the nonprofit world that they have to choose between living a purposeful career and having a financially sustainable one is another significant challenge. We really need to change perspectives on how money is spent for nonprofits. 

This is where trust-based philanthropy is becoming more popular. Instead of having nonprofits spend hundreds of hours applying for grants and reporting in meetings, trust the charities to know where the money needs to be spent and trust them to spend it accordingly. 

Paul Kershaw: Any academic will know that a significant part of their life involves the challenge of raising funds for their lab. Full disclosure, starting a nonprofit is not an easy solution to suddenly have a cash cow available to you. That’s not what it’s about. 

In my case, I’m not struggling to raise funds for my own remuneration because I’m paid to do the lab side of the university-community collaboration. The work I do for the nonprofit I founded is all done on a volunteer basis. 

Elaine is right—it’s been hard to hustle the funds to support contractors and consultants working at the charity. Beyond that, I’d identify some other challenges. They’re not insurmountable, but in the spirit of full disclosure and understanding what’s involved in launching a nonprofit that you might want to fuse around your research, it’s important to be aware of these issues. 

The moment you start a nonprofit, you face a significant governance and infrastructure issue. You can’t be a nonprofit without being incorporated. To be incorporated, you need to file a range of paperwork with the CRA and other federal or provincial government departments, depending on how you set it up. This process is going to require money. 

So, you need money to start your nonprofit, and that’s not necessarily the easiest cash to raise. You’ll also need governance. I just came from a governance team with a dedicated group of directors and members who have fiduciary responsibility for the nonprofit. And that creates another layer of administrative work to what is already a challenging, busy schedule of teaching, being a professor, running a program, and conducting research. 

As a result of all that you’ll need to be audited on an annual basis. This means you’ll have to come up with thousands of dollars each year to pay for the auditors. As Elaine pointed out, there’s a range of what I’d call infrastructure costs just for existing. 

In some regards, that can put you tens of thousands of dollars in the hole before you even start doing the work you hoped the charity would do to amplify your academic activities in the lab. So, there are those challenges, but it comes with some opportunities. 

There’s a nimbleness to the charity I’ve created that sometimes doesn’t exist at a university. I wouldn’t say our university is always the most agile place. UBC, like many institutions, has a large bureaucracy and strict rules about things like data storage, including email addresses, and what servers can be used. 

If you’re a nonprofit in Canada, you’re probably relying on inexpensive systems to manage a database of web profiles that help you keep track of the thousands of people in your network. Sometimes, these systems might use clouds organized in the United States, which may not be permitted within UBC itself. 

I want people to recognize that starting a nonprofit can be incredibly motivating. And, it comes with baggage. It’s important to be upfront with yourself about this baggage, as it can feel heavy and be a drain at certain moments. You need to know that the payoff from your theory of change and the investment in building this infrastructure is worth it. This way, you can save a lot of hours and perhaps use those hours, as well as some of the cash or infrastructure, differently to make a greater impact. 

Essentially, there’s a tradeoff and you want to make sure you’re making the right tradeoffs. 

Elaine Leung: The main thing people need to understand is that starting your own nonprofit might seem like it will give you a lot of flexibility to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems. However, the reality is that there are many restrictions on what you can do, how you obtain funding, and how you can spend the money. 

I just wanted to raise a word of caution: starting a nonprofit might not actually be the best way to tackle the problems you want to solve. 

What role do you think universities could have in supporting those who want to run a successful non-profit? 

Paul Kershaw: I think about my experience at the University of B.C., where for many years now the university has invested in the University Industrial Liaison Office (UILO). 

This is a part of campus that is really oriented towards helping researchers whose work could be commercialized bring it to the world. They have lawyers and other professionals set up to do that well. 

But then that’s kind of has become the model for thinking about how to social enterprises into the world. My lab isn’t doing research to make the next widget or drug that will make a spinoff company millions or billions of dollars.  I’m working to make childcare and housing more affordable, and to ensure we reduce pollution so that we don’t leave extreme weather as our legacy for our kids and grandchildren. 

There’s no money to be made from the work I’m doing, but the university finds my example of having a nonprofit fused around my lab and thinks, “What is this thing? We don’t really get it!” They don’t have practices for it and so they’re worried we’re giving up our intellectual property. But if you look at our strategic plan, the whole point is to mobilize our intellectual property for impact in the world, including policy impact.  There’s no commercial aspect to monetize. Having this nonprofit helps us broadcast material better and build a constituency that makes the evidence more powerful. 

So, the barrier to being a social entrepreneur on campus is that we don’t yet have an infrastructure that’s ready for it. 

In early efforts to be a social entrepreneur, we often run into barriers based on assumptions about the commercialization of research. 

I believe the academy today is not what it was several decades ago. I’m deeply fearful about the role of fake news and misinformation in shaping public dialogue, as it spreads so virally over social media channels these days. More and more, we need a decent share of our academics to step up and protect the truth. Mainstream media doesn’t have the funding it used to, and we can’t rely on it as the fourth estate to translate evidence from academia. It’s up to us to take on that role. 

I want to make it clear that I am enormously proud to be a professor at the University of British Columbia. I take great pride in our strategic plan, which this President and previous ones have worked hard on. We no longer define scholarly excellence solely as the production of research; it also includes its application for impact. This emphasis is built into the highest plan of our organization, which fosters a lot of outside-the-box thinking and innovation in knowledge mobilization.  

More and more, we’re seeing small startup-sized grants offered to form university-community collaborations. These grants are also addressing the power dynamics that sometimes privilege professors with a stable income over struggling nonprofits that want to partner with academia. They’re asking, “What’s the question the nonprofit wants to answer?” or “What are the needs of the nonprofit?” This shift helps ensure that the collaboration is genuinely responsive to the needs of both parties. 

I think the more the university can facilitate the creation of new university-community collaborations with seed grants, the stronger that approach will be. Elaine’s observations, combined with mine, highlight that building a partnership or new infrastructure around evidence created on campus often means creating a new little institution like a nonprofit. There are costs involved in that, such as those for lawyers, accountants, auditors, and governance. Having some seed money to support these initial expenses can be crucial for getting things off the ground. 

Reflecting on the UBC strategic plan within the constraints of its funding pressures, I think we’ve made real strides to seed these kinds of university-community collaborations. We also want to encourage our lawyers to approach these collaborations with enthusiasm and a willingness to think nimbly and courageously, rather than with nervousness and anxiety about those trying to push the boundaries on how to bring academic impact to the world. 

Elaine Leung: I really thought I was on the path to becoming a professor after finishing my Ph.D., but when I started looking at the lives of top academics in my field, especially within biology, I realized it wasn’t a lifestyle I could envision for myself. I know there’s lots of different academics and different fields, but especially within Biology it was the whole “publish or perish” issue. 

You don’t really get to do your own research anymore. You’re supervising several students, you’re expected sit on various committees, teach classes, and travel the world speaking at international conferences and attending meetings. I would look at all these professors who were at the top of their field, and they were barely ever in their labs, and they didn’t have time for their own research, and when they were in their labs their grad students would be lined up down the block waiting to meet with them. 

So I think in order for me to consider trying to do the work that I’m currently doing with SeaSmart through academia or a university that I’d need a guarantee from the university that they would provide me with the resources – the time and space – that I need to do this work. Ideally it wouldn’t be volunteer work, it would be a part of the job.  

You keep hearing me talk about funding because ultimately that’s the reality. None of the work we do can happen without funding.  

Paul Kershaw: The big question is “what does the university value?” For many decades, it was primarily the peer-reviewed publication that was valued—this was the key to succeeding as a professor. In more recent years, UBC has developed a pathway to tenure and promotion that also recognizes excellence in teaching in the classroom. 

As a professor, I think Elaine is pointing out—and I certainly support this—that there needs to be a third pathway to tenure, promotion, and scholarly success. Some of the groundwork for this path already exists within our tenure and promotion guidelines, which recognize contributions that have a tangible impact in the world. 

The more we can ensure that this third pathway to tenure and promotion values those who translate research into real-world impact, the better. Yes, peer-reviewed literature is necessary for establishing knowledge, but we also need to support academic entrepreneurs and change-makers like Elaine. We should seed, fund, and create the time for them to engage in this work.