All our staff, including our senior leaders, serve with World Vision because they are committed to the work we do and to our core values. They don’t expect their pay to be comparable with positions they might otherwise hold in business or industry. There are intangible benefits to being part of a charitable organization like ours that seeks to make a difference in the world.

However, we do want to recruit and keep top-quality staff members so we can do the most effective work on behalf of children worldwide. Appropriate compensation is one part of attracting those people. As we set staff salaries, especially for our managers and leaders, we try hard to balance the need to attract and retain quality staff with our commitment to careful stewardship of donors’ generous gifts and the expectations for the use of those funds.

We regularly review the compensation levels of our senior staff and have policies in place to help us find this balance. Our approach is overseen by our volunteer Board of Directors, none of whom are members of management. Our overall policy is to match salaries for non-management positions to the average in our local market, while significantly widening the gap below this market average for senior staff. In recent years, salaries for senior positions show that our management staff members earn at least 10% and as much as 35% below comparable positions. Our president earns 35-50% below.

In our annual report to the Canada Revenue Agency, we publicly disclose information about executive compensation. As that report shows, in 2009 our five most senior leaders were paid more than $120,000. In the interest of greater transparency to our donors, we have gone beyond our legal requirements by disclosing that our president has the top annual salary of about $180,000.

Our donors expect us to keep our administrative costs as low as possible, and World Vision is committed to doing that. In 2009, we are pleased to report that 81.2 per cent of all revenue was spent on programs that benefit children and families.

Related Information
Where Donations Come From
How Program Dollars are Used
Revenue and Expenditures
World Vision Canada Annual Report 2009
World Vision Canada's 2009 Audited Financial Statements