Students Win Prestigious ANSER Award

Anna Hamilton, Jing Jia, Michelle Murphy and Tara Russell receive the ANSER 2025 Master’s Thesis/Capstone Project Award for their report, Mind Blowing, Powerful, Deficient: Scoping Philanthropic Grantmaking Data in Canada.

Anna Hamilton, Michelle Murphy and Tara Russell accept ANSER award.

The ANSER award, in collaboration with Philanthropic Foundations Canada (PFC), is the students’ Capstone Project, part of their Master of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership (MPNL) graduate degree at Carleton University.

“It’s very humbling and exciting to be recognized by peers across the sector, people who are doing wonderful things every day in their own research,” Anna says. “We had an incredible supervisor, Michele Fugiel Gartner, and incredible support from Nathan Grasse and Anil Varughese.”

“We benefited from guidance, developed a strong team and engaged in insightful conversations with experts in the sector,” Jing adds. “We learned a great deal from the project—both professionally and personally. Being recognized with the ANSER award is deeply meaningful and serves as a motivating milestone as we move forward to the next stage of our work.”

Michelle agrees. “We felt encouraged by the Capstone process, and felt it was necessary to have more people doing this kind of work to better inform the sector – and we wanted to get the research out into the world.”

“The award was extremely fulfilling, and Dr. Gartner gave us a lot of her time and was thoughtful with guidance and feedback,” Tara adds. “I have a lot of experience in a niche area, in my current employment, and the Capstone diversified my experience, and the ANSER award is an accolade in another arena.”

The award, from the Association for Nonprofit and Social Economy Research (ANSER), recognizes graduate student research related to nonprofit organizations and the social economy.

“Our project essentially looked at the challenges in accessing and interpreting philanthropic, grantmaking data in Canada, and it builds on some of the work that PFC did in the 2024 Landscape Report,” Anna says. The report found two main data challenges in the Canadian nonprofit sector: (1) poor data quality, including filing errors and inability to categorize funding destinations on T3010 tax forms; and (2) data gaps at Statistics Canada, partly because of its notable lack of focus on the charitable sector over the decades.

Tara, Anna and Michelle present research findings at the ANSER conference in June 2025.

Three of the four students attended the ANSER conference in June to accept the award.

“It was a conference in Toronto, and a dinner reception, where we met other award winners,” Anna says. “They announced our accomplishment, and we had the opportunity to speak a bit about what our work means to us. And they presented us with beautiful prints by a Canadian artist, titled The Sisterhood, which was beautiful, because the print represented the four of us coming together and working together on the project.”

“I’ll add that the print was symbolic and thoughtful,” Michelle says. “That personal, thoughtful touch landed deeply with our team.”

“Thanks to the MPNL program for the encouragement, and also thanks to the conference, we’ll probably submit a manuscript to a journal and pursue some sort of publication,” Tara adds. “So, the award was both a recognition of the work and a push to reach for other academic opportunities as well.”

An annotation of Mind Blowing, Powerful, Deficient: Scoping Philanthropic Grantmaking Data in Canada is available. For the full report or to connect with the researchers, please contact Dr. Michele Fugiel Gartner at mfgartner@pfc.ca.