Nonprofit Workers Are Burned Out. Here’s How Funders Make it Worse — and How They Can Help

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This article originally published on September 28, 2022.

Stress and burnout among nonprofit workers is hardly a new phenomenon. Back in 2009, Stanford Social Innovation Review reported on the “nonprofit starvation cycle” — a deadly ouroboros wherein, to satisfy funders’ never-ending demand for low overhead, organizations cut salaries and underreport their actual overhead in an attempt to meet unrealistic expectations. “Underfunding overhead can have disastrous effects,” the article warned.

Now, after more than two years of a global pandemic, along with layered economic, political and environmental crises, those disastrous effects have come home to roost at many nonprofits. Nonprofit staff and experts report surging stress and burnout, a staffing crisis, a sense of “desperation” among many workers, and a sector that is frequently unable to meet the multiple demands that our country’s frayed social safety net has created.

Late last year, the National Council of Nonprofits reported that of the majority of nonprofits it surveyed, 76%, had vacancy rates of 10% or more; 55% reported vacancy rates of 20% or more, and 16% reported that more than 30% of their positions were going unfilled. 

Alison Green, author of the Ask A Manager blog and a nonprofit manager and consultant with nearly 20 years of experience, said that she’s seeing “almost a desperation” in her letters from nonprofit employees “that I wasn’t seeing as frequently before the pandemic, from people who are just exhausted and burned out and want to leave, but feel guilty about leaving.” 

In conversations with Green and others who are currently in the nonprofit trenches, along with past reporting on the topic, a few things have become abundantly clear: Nonprofit workers are suffering. The philanthrosphere as a whole often contributes to that suffering. And if we want nonprofits not just to recover from the pandemic, but in many cases, carry out their core missions at all, business as usual isn’t going to cut it anymore. 

In fact, pay is so low in the sector, and many of the jobs are so stressful, that one nonprofit in Massachusetts told the National Council of Nonprofits that competition from the retail sector — known for its low-wage jobs and poor working conditions — is making it hard to fill the organization’s open jobs. 

To put it another way: Without people, there will be no programs. Many of the people who make those programs possible have given all they have to give, and they’re in need of far more support. 

No staff = no services

The National Council of Nonprofits’ December 2021 report makes it clear that communities suffer when nonprofits can’t hire or retain employees. Twenty-six percent of the survey’s responding organizations reported that their waiting list for services was more than a month long. Some groups said that people in need are waiting more than a year for help — if they get it at all. “Some organizations said they’d gotten rid of their waiting list, because it was giving people a false hope,” says National Council of Nonprofits Chief Communications Officer Rick Cohen. 

“We have had a revolving door of staff as of late, and have lessened access to our constituents, volunteers and programming,” said Madin Lopez, founder and executive director of Project Q, a California community center for LGBTQ+ youth. “It just feels like everyone has given all that they can, and are working on their reserve tank.” 

Lopez is one of the nonprofit leaders featured in a recent “Battling Burnout” video produced by the Durfee Foundation. “Asking to be treated as well as a car might seem hyperbolic, but in reality, our organizations are often given even less consideration,” she said.

The pandemic, Green of Ask A Manager said, has “mainly exacerbated pressures that have always been there” for nonprofit workers. “The root causes are the same thing. It’s overwork and lack of resources and the emotional pressure that people put on themselves… because of the nature of the work.”

Granted, direct services make up only one segment of the overall nonprofit sector, but it’s a segment at particular risk of worker burnout even before the added stresses of the past few years. Doctors, teachers, therapists and caregivers have all been similarly pushed to their limits. 

More broadly, the fact is that most Americans are struggling right now. In its March report on Stress in America, the American Psychological Association found that close to two-thirds of adults reported their life has been “forever changed” by the pandemic alone. According to the report, Americans are experiencing “widespread grief and sense of loss, continued hardships for vulnerable populations, concerns for children’s development among parents, and entrenched, unhealthy coping habits. Money stress registered at the highest recorded level since 2015.” It’s important to note that most of the survey questions went out before Russia invaded Ukraine, and before inflation meant that already underpaid nonprofit staff started effectively taking pay cuts.

Even nonprofit workers who are not providing direct services are often confronting profound problems like climate change and threats to democracy and human rights that feel as though they are boiling over. Speaking specifically of the nonprofit sector and its workers, particularly BIPOC movement leaders, Community Resource Exchange CEO Tiloma Jayasinghe wrote in July, “At some point, being asked to fix problems without being provided the tools or support to truly dismantle enormous systems of oppression — racism, patriarchy, xenophobia — exacts a high cost upon those doing the work.” 

Or, as one Vermont human service provider reported to the National Council of Nonprofits, “We are overworked, underpaid, and see no relief in sight. At this point, we’re just hoping to survive.”

“I know you’re stressed. Anyway, can you get me this proposal by tomorrow?”

Clearly, foundations and other private funders don’t deserve all of the blame for either the high levels of burnout faced by nonprofit workers or the high nonprofit vacancy rate. The National Council of Nonprofits report cites additional factors, including government contracts that both underpay nonprofits and often arrive late. 

Private funders are also not responsible for the pandemic or inflation, and overall, foundations and donors dramatically increased giving during 2020 and to a lesser extent in 2021, leading to a (much needed) windfall for many nonprofits. A lot of funders also relaxed grant restrictions and application and reporting requirements, something nonprofits had been calling on for years. But whether those changes become permanent and widespread remains to be seen, and they definitely did not erase funding and power imbalances in the sector. In other words, many funders are contributing to the problem. 

“A funder can say, ‘Hey, Dawn, I want to get you $50,000 for your program. I know it’s such a tough time for you right now... anyway, can you get me this proposal by tomorrow?” said Rudy Espinoza, executive director at Inclusive Action for the City in Los Angeles. “It’s almost like they’re going through the motions [of acknowledging] we’re dealing with a lot of crises in our communities. But at the end of the day, they’re still not really reforming their systems.” Inclusive Action was one of the recipients during the pilot program of what became Durfee Foundation’s Lark Awards, which provide money for “the collective care and renewal” of nonprofit staff members.

Project Q’s Lopez said that “most funders are blind to the actual struggles of direct service leaders. It keeps us in a dynamic with the funders that is practically inhumane.” 

While some funders showed what he called “a high level of humanity” during the pandemic, LA Compost Executive Director Michael Martinez said that others were “still very much transactional,” requiring the same old forms and reports.

“They were still very much like, ‘We recognize that there’s a lot going on, but these things still need to be submitted.’” LA Compost was another Lark Award pilot program awardee, and Martinez sat on the panel that reviewed applications for the first awards. 

Overworked staff at grantees and funders alike

One person we spoke with has a unique dual perspective, as the current vice president of a nonprofit and former foundation grants manager. This source asked to remain anonymous as she didn’t have permission from her employer to speak on the record. The change of positions, she said, has given her insight into a “kind of a spectrum of responsiveness and accountability.” 

On the foundation side, she said, “there is a lot of boundary setting and expectation setting” for grantees, “hoops that they need to jump through.” When she moved to her current job, she said, the level of responsiveness required of her nonprofit is “almost to the detriment of our internal functions.” Jumping whenever a funder says “jump” keeps the organization “responsive and reactive instead of planful, and setting boundaries and being more thoughtful about our approaches.” 

Working as a program officer at a funder, though, brought its own challenges. While the person told me she was aware of her privilege as someone who could work from home during the worst of the pandemic, “I started to realize that I had less sense of what it was like to be a front-line worker who had to go out and engage.” She began to reflect on how difficult it must be, especially for senior leadership, “who earn exponentially more and are even more removed,” to really understand a community’s needs. “There’s a disconnect that’s really hard to overcome unless you actually speak to the people on the ground.” 

In addition to being removed from the organizations they’re trying to serve, she said, staff who manage grants for funders are themselves also overworked. They also frequently lack the freedom, as well as the time, to make real person-to-person connections with nonprofit leaders. Instead of constraining program staff to administrative roles serving an ever-constant “box-checking churn,” deploying them as relationship builders could make a significant, positive difference in their ability to truly see and serve nonprofits’ needs.

Solving the problem

Addressing the burnout and vacancies at nonprofits is going to take the kind of creative, multipronged approach that a number of funders deployed during the worst of the COVID pandemic. 

Effective strategies will start at simply opening the purse strings: with multi-year, unrestricted support, and additional funding for employee wellness, as Durfee and some other funders already offer. Grantmakers need to commit to investing in essential overhead that allows living wages, health insurance and paid time off for nonprofit staff. 

This doesn’t require reinventing the wheel. There are already grantmaking programs out there that are giving staff more room to breathe, and nonprofits with sufficient funding to provide things like competitive salaries, sabbaticals, or even reduction in the length of the work week. There just aren’t that many of them. 

Progress will also mean, once and for all, breaking away from old tendencies in the nonprofit sector to view impact as separate from the people who make it possible. Or the assumption that working all hours for peanuts is just part of a job in the sector, a necessary means to an end. 

As valuable as those moves would be, they won’t address the deeper issues that contribute to the underpayment, overwork and burnout of nonprofit employees. At the core of the philanthropic model itself, huge power imbalances between nonprofits and the entities that fund them will always put workers at a disadvantage.

In defense of their ability to maintain and control massive amounts of wealth, funders argue that they are using that wealth to create a better world, alleviating poverty and providing more equality of opportunity. Too often, though, the very policies and procedures created by these funders have created a less equal, more impoverished world for those tasked with doing the actual work of social change. The bottom line is that, if the philanthrosphere as a whole truly wants to support a thriving nonprofit sector, it’s way past time to allow people on the ground to steer where, how, when and how much money should move. Some foundations are beginning to make this change in order to improve programmatic decisions, but efforts to democratize philanthropy could also go a long way toward ensuring the resilience of the sector.

The ultimate point is that “we need philanthropy, but they also need us,” as Inclusive Action’s Espinoza told IP. Or, as one Washington State nonprofit told the National Council of Nonprofits, funders need to “pay for administrative infrastructure, or there will not be staff to do the programs they want to support.”

Nonprofits aren’t asking to be held less accountable for the money that’s entrusted to them. The nonprofit sector should be held to a higher standard, said Cohen of the National Council of Nonprofits, because “people are trusting us with their hard-earned dollars, and we get this tax exemption. But sometimes, that standard is too high, and it’s really harming the people who deliver those services — and making them more likely to look [for work] elsewhere, which makes it even more difficult to deliver services.” 

Beyond the ability to deliver services, though, don’t the workers on the front lines of creating the less impoverished, more equal society envisioned by funders also deserve to benefit from that vision? 

As one nonprofit leader succinctly put it, “Quit making us do trauma porn for funding. It’s the oldest profession, and I quit.”