A new donation offer to United Way topping $1 million is proving the generosity of a prominent Toronto couple — and spurring others to get in the giving spirit.

Donald Guloien, the president and CEO of Manulife Financial, and his wife, Irene Boychuk — a philanthropist and former business person — have pledged to provide up to $1.2 million to match all donations of $1,200 or more.

The couple’s “challenge grant,” part of the newly merged United Way Toronto and York Region’s unprecedented 2015 campaign goal of $100 million, will go largely to youth-focused programs.

The couple’s inspiration comes from a sense of community born of personal experience.

“We’ve been very fortunate in our business careers, both Irene’s and mine. And, I guess part of our family ethic has always been, if you’re doing well you should give back,” says Guloien.

“Looked at selfishly, it’s no fun living in a community and looking at people who are suffering or just barely making ends meet.”

Guloien has been involved with United Way since high school — “so not that long ago,” Boychuk interjects, smiling — when he led a fundraising campaign at Silverthorn Collegiate Institute in Etobicoke.

His father was diagnosed with brain cancer at the age of 63. “He’d get picked up and taken to the hospital for chemotherapy. And it turns out it was all funded by the United Way,” Guloien said.

His dad worked as an engineer but gave much of his time to ShareLife, a Catholic Church charity based in the Diocese of Toronto; his mother volunteered with United Way.

“They were people of modest means … but they contributed where they could.”

On top of larger ones, Guloien believes in smaller efforts that might otherwise get overlooked, like youth nutrition programs or women’s shelters.

“You’ve got kids sitting in class hungry, and it’s those kinds of things that don’t attract the dollars unless people know about them.”

The financial crisis prompted a drop in charitable giving, Guloien noted, making an incentive like a matching gift all the more necessary in his eyes.

The percentage of income Canadians donated to charity dropped 25 per cent to 0.6 per cent between 2006 and 2012, hitting lower levels three years ago than during the financial crisis of 2008-09, according to a 2014 study by the Fraser Institute.

“The results indicate that, in recent years, a smaller proportion of Canadians are generally giving to charity and the amount given makes up an increasingly smaller proportion of aggregate income,” the study found.

Boychuk, who worked as head of human resources at the Toronto Stock Exchange until 10 years ago, and at Apple Canada before that, focuses increasingly on philanthropy these days.

“We’ve lived in Toronto, downtown, since the start of university, and we’re staying here, we’re not going anywhere else. So it’s an opportunity to just contribute to our community to make it a better place for ourselves and everybody else as well,” she says.

“She always puts it more eloquently than I do,” Guloien adds.

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The challenge grant seems to be working. Joseph Silva, a 34-year-old who works as the York Region finance commissioner’s head of policy, was inspired to up his donation in the light of the couple’s matching offer.

“Being a finance person, I know that my dollar can go a long way to dispatching opportunity,” he says.

Silva immigrated with his family to Canada from the Philippines in the early 1990s, “so I recognize the value of giving and how small donations count and really impact our communities.”

Social capital counts too, which United Way subsidizes through “that network, that community” that its agencies offer.

Silva saw firsthand the impact NGOs can have as a teenager working summers at the United Way-funded Learning Disabilities Association. He went on to volunteer as the fundraising organizer for all 4,000 York Region employees.

Municipal workers and police have raised $3 million over the past two decades.

Silva sees parallels between his workplace goals and United Way’s mission: “Helping people move from poverty to a better life — those are things that we at the municipality want to achieve, too — creating strong, safe communities.”

Julia Gorman, United Way’s local chief development officer, says the couple’s outsized challenge grant is, “frankly, quite rare,” and speaks to the “foresight in their philanthropy … It’s more powerful than just a personal gift.”

About $1 million of the couple’s $1.2-million matching gift will go toward programs helping disadvantaged youth and young people facing barriers, from counselling to employment and career assistance, Gorman said. Much of the rest will help homeless people and vulnerable seniors.

The regional programs fed by the grant — and the individual donations it inspires — are run by 25,000 volunteers in more than 760 workplaces across the GTA and slightly beyond.

Distributed to at least 220 agencies across 10 municipalities from — Toronto in the south to Georgina in the north — donations for the 2015 campaign will come from 164,000 contributors this year, United Way expects.