When we talked with Durfee Foundation Executive Director Claire Peeps for our July report on the funder’s new Lark Awards for nonprofit staff wellbeing, she had some further good news to share — other funders, hearing about Durfee’s move to provide wellness funding for staff members, were contacting her office to learn more.
This made us wonder how many other funders are demonstrating their appreciation — with their pocketbooks — for the front-line nonprofit employees who are doing the sometimes brutally hard work of keeping their organizations running.
The answer is a huge disappointment. Although it’s good to hear funders are calling Durfee to learn what they can do for nonprofit staff in the future, IP was only able to identify a handful of U.S.-based funders that have already moved money specifically for this purpose. Out of these, one launched a pair of one-and-done programs with no current plans to do so again. Another, the Groundswell Fund, has created special “Healing Justice” grants as a follow-up to a one-time pilot program it initiated in 2017.
Other foundations have also created ongoing programs, or at least made an effort to alleviate the nonprofit starvation cycle by moving wellness stipends to nonprofit staff. That includes two that started providing staff support long before the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to ignore the long-documented fact that many nonprofit staff are overworked, underpaid and burnt out.
While this list is a short one, nonprofits that want to encourage their own funders to adopt a program like Durfee’s Lark Awards can do so knowing that Durfee isn’t alone.
Imago Dei Fund: For over five years, Imago Dei’s Keep the Spark Alive Fund (also known as the KSA) has moved an additional $2,000 to each of the funder’s grantee partners “to support and nurture the inner lives of their staff, and therefore, enhance the organization as a whole,” according to a synopsis of the program provided for a PEAK Grantmaking event held this April on nonprofit staff wellness grants. The KSA “makes the organizations we support feel valued,” said Emily Nielsen Jones, Imago Dei’s co-founder and president, in an interview with IP. Imago Dei grantees have used their KSA stipends for purposes including individual and group retreats. Nielsen Jones said that the KSA program has been “very well received,” in part because it gives grantee partners the ability to assess the overall wellness of their teams.
General Service Foundation (GSF): Like Imago Dei, GSF started moving money to support nonprofit staff before the pandemic. In GSF’s case, the funder began an effort to fund “resilience, safety and joy” in 2018 in response to “the relentless attack” upon social justice leaders and organizations following the 2016 presidential election. GSF provides $10,000 per organization, in addition to general operating support, and has moved $351,000 via more than 44 stipends since beginning the program.
“GSF grantees have used the stipends for a wide range of supports including a shared mental health fund, security cameras and self-defense trainings for activists facing security threats, and a series of ‘joy’ interventions like a dinner on the beach for staff navigating vicarious trauma from their efforts to reunite families separated by the Trump administration,” said Dimple Abichandani, GSF’s executive director. “Grantees say that the power of the wellness stipends is that [they invite] a conversation about what staff need to feel well and whole, and to identify needs that may not have been known or understood before.”
Luminate: Luminate, which is part of The Omidyar Group, launched its wellness stipends for nonprofit staff in 2020. The funder moved more than $380,000 across 71 separate awards in 2020 and 2021 combined, according to information provided before the PEAK Grantmaking event. The stipends were among the first efforts undertaken at Luminate by its director of partner support, Laura Bacon. Now that the initial pilot program has been successful, Bacon said, “all of our program officers are welcome to [provide staff wellness stipends] anytime they want, and they have the infrastructure for it,” though Bacon said that Luminate will probably provide fewer stipends than it did during the pilot years.
A January 2021 blog post by Bacon says that The Omidyar Group’s Rights & Dignity Working Group moved “several” wellness stipends in 2019. The Omidyar Group shared before the PEAK Grantmaking event that two of its organizations (one of which is Luminate) provided wellness funding to grantees in 2020 and 2021.
Rocky Mountain Health Foundation: Rocky Mountain began its wellness stipend program in 2021, moving more than $160,000 that year to roughly 85 organizations. The effort was inspired by a conversation between the foundation’s executive director, Michaelle Smith, and a leader of one of her organization’s grantee partners. “They said to me, ‘We’re exhausted. We’re not sure we can continue. We’ve been asked to go the extra mile, and we feel like we’ve gone mile after mile after mile,’” Smith said.
The wellness stipend “was the biggest ask we had ever made to our board,” Smith said, “but we went to them saying that if the staff goes down, then nobody’s going to get any services.” According to Smith, the stipend recipients used the extra money to provide staff with perks including a sledding party and special dinners. One grantee created a brand new facility just for staff: a wellness room with an exercise ball, yoga mats, soft music and comfortable chairs.
The response to the new program has been “amazing,” Smith said, though the CEO of one nonprofit hospital had to be convinced that the award was real and not some kind of hoax. Smith shared that the CEO told Rocky Mountain, “I’ve been in the hospital administrative field for 20 years, and not once ever has anyone told me to do something for myself.” Smith told IP that the foundation’s board is committed to the wellness stipends and that it will “absolutely” continue offering them.
Groundswell Fund: Groundswell launched a one-time Wellness Fund in 2017 to support front-line racial justice leaders who were burning out and experiencing health crises due to the social and political climate. Wen Brovold, Groundswell’s director of communications and donor organizing, said that the funder moved nearly $10,000 to existing grantees that engaged in wellness activities, organizational development work, and efforts to support individual leaders. “During the process, we learned a lot of valuable information, including not to make wellness funding an open-call competitive process, because we received three times the volume of requests that we could fund,” Brovold said. “Also, we question the ethics of funders making decisions about organizations’ wellness needs.”
As a result of what it learned in 2017, Groundswell launched its own Healing Justice initiative in 2020. Since then, the funder has awarded roughly $100,000 in general operating money to support grantees’ healing justice practices and organizational development priorities, Brovold said.
Allegany Franciscan Ministries: Allegany participated in two separate wellness grant collaboratives, one in Palm Beach, Florida, and one in Miami, which together moved roughly $950,000. Both were one-time programs.
Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice: Astraea also has a healing justice grants program, but its description of the program is unclear about whether, or how, grantees are able to use the money to directly support staff needs. Astraea hasn’t gotten back to IP following our requests for more information.
Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights (UAF): UAF has moved money for what it calls “healing justice and holistic security.” Pilot programs funded work including a collective approach for security for a Pakistan-based grantee working with feminist bloggers on cyber harassment issues. Another sponsored a retreat for U.S.-based Muslim activists who were burnt out following repeat anti-Muslim federal policy actions during the last Republican administration.
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The majority of nonprofit staff aren’t in need of the kind of life-or-death security protection that UAF’s pilot programs provide. What is equally true, though, is that the workers and leaders of a wide swath of nonprofit organizations, particularly in the United States, have endured a decades-long cycle of virtual starvation requiring them to do more and more while funders — public and private — have fixated on programs while forgetting that, without people, those programs won’t exist.
Programs like Durfee’s Lark Awards and the support outlined above aren’t the final answer to this problem. But they are a start. In an upcoming follow-up on this topic, IP will take a deeper look at burnout among nonprofit staff — and how funders are both contributing to it, and (sometimes) helping to alleviate it.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect the correct name of Luminate and the fact that Luminate is part of The Omidyar Group, and not part of Omidyar Network.