Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the invitation.
I'd like to speak briefly on three topics today: first of all, Heart and Stroke's work during the pandemic; second, the financial impact to our sector and to ourselves; and third, the impact of federal incentives to date and the need for further investments.
The current pandemic has demonstrated that our work is needed more than ever. Those who are living with conditions of heart disease and stroke are among the most vulnerable and have the highest mortality rates from COVID-19. Our teams have worked to pivot quickly to meet the needs of both patients and their caregivers. Through webinars, web-based tools, videos, direct outreach and our online peer-to-peer communities, we have been a source of credible, easy-to-understand information and guidance for our populations to stay safe, eat healthily and access key services during this pandemic.
We have also seen alarming drops in patients going to emergency rooms. Therefore, as a result, we've been raising public awareness for Canadians who are experiencing signs of heart disease and stroke that, if they see these signs, it's absolutely critical that they get emergency medical attention right away.
Next, I want to highlight the financial strain on our sector and on our organization. This will highlight some of the other comments that you've heard today. Health charities, as a subset of the sector, our coalition together has $670 million in revenue a year. We employ 2,500 Canadians and we support 2.9 million patients. To date, the health charities in our coalition are being impacted by a 50% revenue drop due to fundraising efforts impacted by COVID-19 as well as economic hardships.
At Heart and Stroke, following the public health guidelines, we have, as others, cancelled all of our in-person fundraising events, which was a direct hit this spring and summer of over $25 million to our budget. As well, like others, we're seeing an immediate drop to fundraising sources outside of our event-based fundraising. Our annual research budget this year, which would have been $33 million, is heavily at risk and, like others, we have been forced to make very difficult decisions about staffing. Last month, we laid off over 200 employees, which was about 45% of our staff. As Andrea Seale mentioned in her comments a few minutes ago, in our 60-plus years as a leading health charity, we've never seen the financial hardship that we're seeing right now.
We are greatly appreciative of assistance delivered by the federal government, both the wage subsidy program and the emergency community support fund. The wage subsidy program is absolutely being helpful. It's allowed us to keep more staff than we otherwise could, but clearly not all, as I've mentioned. We're in early discussions to see if potentially some of our programs might qualify for the community support fund. Unfortunately, many of our core costs are not being supported. Rent is an example, and while we thank the federal government for bringing forward the emergency rental assistance program, the reality is that it doesn't benefit us and many others.
As you probably know, you need to have a 70% drop in revenue, you can't be an organization with over $20 million in revenue and your landlord needs to subsidize some of your payments. That means that Heart and Stroke doesn't qualify, but also many other charities don't qualify. Our hope is that, in the same way after the wage subsidy was announced and then our sector was consulted, and the stipulations were adapted, there could be similar discussions on the rent program as well.
As you heard last week from Imagine Canada's testimony, the charitable sector overall needs $8 billion to $10 billion in what we're calling emergency stabilization funding. We strongly support this request at Heart and Stroke, and in addition to both the wage subsidy and the community support funds, there are other specific initiatives that we believe could make a real difference for the charitable and non-profit sector.
Three examples of those initiatives would be, first, a grants and contribution program designed to cover immediate and urgent core costs and health research programs. Second, similar to what Shimon mentioned, a mechanism that would further incentivize Canadians to be more generous in donations, whether—as he mentioned as well—through a matching program or through increasing the donation tax credit, we'd be in favour of that to help Canadians be more generous.
Third, we see that there could potentially be a carve-out of the overall stabilization fund that could support health charities specifically. In particular, our Health Charities Coalition is seeking direct investments of up to $28 million per month, representing the revenues lost of the entire coalition each month since March 2020. This investment would allow our staff to continue to support patients, to look at restarting our fundraising and to protect our gains in research. This support would allow our organizations to recover and to be a health and economic success story.
Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to the discussion.