Strengthen Employee Financial Well-being with a Relief Fund Built for Crises
Canary delivers fast, tax-free charitable grants to employees when your team needs them most, so a single financial emergency doesn’t undo everything else you’ve built for your team.
How Grant Circle Works
Canary sets up and runs an emergency relief fund for your organization, called Grant Circle. You decide who’s eligible and how it’s funded, and our team handles everything from the application to the payment.
Design the fund
Choose eligibility and qualifying events, and set a budget. Employees, customers, and partners can contribute to the fund as well.
Spread the word
We provide launch materials and guidance so people know the fund is there before they need it.
Employees apply
A guided online application is available any time. HR and managers never see who applied.
Requests reviewed
Every application gets a first response from Canary’s grant specialists within two business days. Each request is then reviewed against your fund’s criteria and decided.
Grants paid out
Approved grants are paid tax-free through PayPal. It’s a grant, not a loan, so there’s nothing to pay back.
Canary’s Emergency Relief Fund in the News
It’s Not Just Good People Sense. It‘s Great Business Sense.
Most employers already know a stressed workforce is a distracted one. What’s less obvious is how much of that stress traces back to one unpaid bill, one missed paycheck, or one medical expense insurance didn’t cover. An employee relief fund exists to catch people in those moments, before a short-term problem becomes a long-term one.
Financial stress shows up in the body, not just the budget. More than 80% of Canary’s grant recipients reported high financial stress when applying for a grant. Within a week of receiving a grant, that stress drops by roughly half, and 16% say they stopped experiencing physical symptoms that were unusual for them.
The right money at the right time matters when:
- 63% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and over 60% of households experience a financial hardship each year.
- 49% of American families can’t cover essential expenses
- 37% of adults can’t afford a $400 unexpected expense.
- Before receiving a grant, 36% of Canary's recipients said they'd skipped meals to get by.
Employee Relief Matters for the Bottom Line
Financial stress doesn’t stay contained to an employee’s personal life. It shows up at work with distracted employees or team members that can’t make their shift. In turn, financial stress costs U.S. employers more than $1.1 trillion in lost productivity each year.
It’s more cost-effective to offer a tangible solution in the face of financial hardship than to deal with the financial fallout of unresolved financial stress.
- Among Canary's grant recipients, 18% had already missed work or arrived late because of a hardship
- Once they received support, 19% said they were able to direct more attention to their work
- And 11% said they were able to keep working when they otherwise might not have been able to
The Impact of Grant Circle
From a Grant Recipient
“My Grant Circle experience made me feel appreciated by my company. It helped to relieve some stress along with boosting my morale in the workplace. It has allowed me to start the conversation with others about how we can help one another in different ways. We all experience hardship and should not feel ashamed, but instead feel some relaxation in knowing that there is assistance available!”
Anonymous Grantee
Grant recipient
From an Employer Partner
“At Ocean Spray we do offer a robust benefits package that complements the total well-being of our team members and their families. From physical wellness to mental to financial to work-life balance, etc. but we did find that there was a gap on the financial side. Working with Canary gave us the ability to fill that gap. We recognize that sometimes team members need an extra hand financially. Life can throw unexpected or unusual events at them that make it hard to afford basic living expenses, for example.”
Keri Gannon
Senior Benefits Specialist, Ocean Spray Cranberries
Client Stories
People-first support. community-wide impact.
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The Expertise Behind Canary
Canary was founded by Rachel Schneider, who spent years studying how American households manage money, as opposed to how other financial experts and products assume they do. Her research, published in The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton University Press), followed families through a year of real income volatility and remains one of the most cited studies on financial instability in the country.
It’s her background and expertise that sets Canary apart. Grant Circle is a solution that began from a different place than the solutions built by other emergency-relief providers. It is a modern, nimble platform designed to work for organizations of all sizes, small home healthcare agencies to large global enterprises. Rachel recognized the need for a new solution to target dignified, fast cash infusions to the people that need it, when they need it most.
How Does Canary Compare?
Weighing Grant Circle against 3rd party alternatives or managing a fund in-house? We put together a side-by-side breakdown of pricing predictability, turnaround speed, employee experience, and more so you can compare the actual tradeoffs instead of the pitch. See how Grant Circle, Canary’s emergency relief platform, stacks up.
Latest Annual Report: How Relatively Small Grants Impact People and Organizations
Canary’s latest Strengthening the Safety Net report examines what an average grant of $1,015 actually changes for an individual in crisis, and what employers gain in return.
Ready to See the Impact of Employee Relief in the Workplace?
Learn why the HR and Benefits teams at DoorDash, Ocean Spray, Visionworks, and more know employee well-being starts with reducing employee financial stress and investing in their financial stability.
Are you an individual looking for a grant?
Find out if your organization currently works with Canary: