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Originally Posted by JET
Those are significant salaries for non-profits, I can think of lots of people in non-profit services helping the poor and homeless who could only dream of such salaries; I bet they even have pension plans. Two realities.
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Depends on the non-profit and the role it occupies, unfortunately. For Veith House or the Ecology Action Centre or Feed NS, or most organizations supporting the homeless, unfortunately, those would indeed be big salaries. At United Way or the Cancer Society or the AGNS they'd be pretty meagre.
The median salary at Discovery Centre looks to be around 50k, with a full 4/10ths of their full-time staff making below 40k and only one making six figures. That's completely reasonable. Non-profits have to pay decent wages to attract good talent—we'd like to believe the best and brightest will work there out of nothing but goodwill, but it doesn't work that way.
Disclosure: I worked at United Way in Toronto, and made a decent salary. So did my colleagues, and the staff were of a much higher calibre than would have been at penny pinching wage levels (we pinched pennies in other ways, like only buying used office furniture, printing double-sided, using computers that were a little out of date, etc.)
But I always encountered clueless people telling me that United Way must be raking in government cash and splashing out on big salaries, blah blah blah. These people had no idea that they could simply look at an audited year-end financial report and that would all be disproven. They didn't want to either, I bet; it gave them an excuse to be cynical.