Stress Forces Fundraisers to Take New Approaches

Kellie Glenn is used to the sense of urgency that comes with her job leading a team that raises money to help young people who have faced significant traumas. As development director of Covenant House Georgia, the weight of that urgency has gotten heftier since the pandemic hit. A growing number of the young people the charity serves have lost jobs and housing because of the recession. And those who live in communal settings like shelters now risk Covid-19.

“When the schools closed, many of our youths lost their school housing so they had to come back to Covenant House,” Glenn says. “We had youths who were just getting on the other side of homelessness and just got their very first apartment, and then they lost their job so we had to step in and help with rental subsidies, with food, and help them apply for unemployment services and stimulus checks.”

Fundraisers like Glenn who are working to help such vulnerable populations are keenly aware of the burden they are shouldering to ensure they raise enough money to keep the young people they serve from falling further through society’s cracks.

“We’re the providers, and that’s a very heavy burden,” says Glenn. “We know it’s up to us to raise these funds so that our doors can remain open so that we can continue to serve our young people.”

Compounded Pressures

To say the pandemic has placed extraordinary burdens on nonprofit employees at all levels is an understatement and one that is especially true for fundraisers. Many have had to cope not only with the dual pressures of raising money for their organizations when funding is scarce and uncertain, but also with the personal pressures brought about by sickness and loss. Added to that is having to juggle balancing personal or family time with the weight of work, all while sequestered at home all day every day since March. And in recent weeks, many fundraisers are facing additional stress as the pain of racial injustices has deepened nationwide. Fundraisers of color say they have been especially overwhelmed, both by the wave of protests and by the greater likelihood that they know people who have suffered or died from Covid-19.

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For Glenn, the stress brought about by the responsibility she felt was made worse by her tendency to be a nonstop consumer of news and data. During normal times, Glenn says knowing what is going on in the world is energizing and fuels the fire she has for her work. Yet, as she consumed even more news about the spread of the pandemic and the effect it has been having on people and the economy, Glenn became overwhelmed with anxiety.

“Reading the worst-case scenarios that were constantly on my phone and in my social-media feed and on the television, I had to stop looking at the numbers and at all that was going on in the world both for my own personal sanity and to stay focused on the work,” Glenn says.

While the weight of crisis after crisis has taken its toll on fundraisers nationwide, the challenges have perhaps been toughest for fundraisers at human-services groups, says Alan Yu, head of development at the Committee for Hispanic Children and Families. But in some ways, that has helped him and his team rise to the many challenges such charities are facing right now.

Although the pandemic put a lot of personal and professional stress on him and his colleagues, Yu says the work his nonprofit does is so critical to the people it serves that his team became more energized and felt a greater sense of camaraderie around this being an important time “to show up for the people we serve.”

Regardless of the type of nonprofit, says Yu, all fundraisers carry the burden of needing to raise enough to support not only those their charity serves, but their colleagues as well.

The stark realization that it is largely up to the fundraisers in any nonprofit to raise enough money so the organization can continue to pay its employees’ salaries is overwhelming even in the best of times. But in this moment of unprecedented economic and social upheaval, the specter of not being able to raise enough money to keep your colleagues employed can be debilitating.

CHCF

“Knowing our job directly affects theirs and their ability to provide their services to the communities they serve, the psychological weight of that has been a lot to deal with,” Yu says.

That kind of pressure is made worse when working from home upends work-life balance, so Yu learned to set boundaries and has designated specific parts of the day to specific work tasks and self-care tasks. For example, he sets time aside most days to disconnect from his screens, turn off his phone, and get away from the news, and, instead, read or meditate. This small act, he says, has helped him take a mental break and be fully engaged once he returns to working.

Yu, who lives alone, was worried about becoming isolated at home without his usual social outlets, so he made it his top priority to stay connected with his friends, family, and church group through weekly online hangouts. He says those virtual get-togethers help him stay connected with people outside of his work world and avoid the loneliness that comes with working and living in the same space, and they are one more way to refresh so that he can be 100 percent focused on his work during office hours.

Asking for Help

Kishshana Palmer faced a host of hurdles when she came down with Covid-19 in March. A busy, preternaturally energetic fundraising and management consultant who founded the Rooted Collaborative, a network for women of color in fundraising and other nonprofit jobs, Palmer says she was seriously ill for two weeks and had ongoing symptoms for at least a month afterward.

The sickness left her with what Covid patients describe as “brain fog” and an overwhelming need to sleep throughout the day. Worse still, her beloved 86-year-old stepfather died from complications of the virus. As is the case with most terminally ill Covid patients under strict quarantine, her family could not care for him or be by his side in his last moments.

“That part made it even tougher than the fact that he had passed, and on top of all of that, I had a whole business to run,” says Palmer. “I had to talk to my clients about what I could and could not manage, I had to reassess deadlines, and I had to let some opportunities pass; I really had to dig into my bag of tools, and for me that meant slowly reshaping my calendar and asking for help.”

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Asking for help doesn’t come naturally for Palmer, but she says she realized she had to get out of her own way and stop trying to do everything on her own. To that end, she hired someone to help her improve internal operations and someone else to design the coursework for the training sessions she conducts.

She also has joined a coaching group for women entrepreneurs and has learned to create strict divisions between work time and personal time. Since both are happening in the same space, Palmer has adopted several rules for herself. She programmed her Alexa device to not only tell her when it is time to stop working each day, but to also provide a two-minute countdown. When Alexa gives the two-minute warning, Palmer powers down, closes her laptop, and most importantly, leaves it where it is instead of taking it with her as she goes about her evening.

She has also found that filling in her schedule for the whole month, rather than week by week, helps her build in blocks of space for unexpected things that may come up in her work or personal life.

Although it may seem inconsequential, Palmer says, fundraisers should not underestimate how their surroundings at home can affect their overall attitude and, therefore, their work with donors. She suggests setting up a workspace that projects joy to help stay upbeat. Donors can usually sense whether a fundraiser they are talking to is happy or in distress, and that is especially evident in a videoconference format, so creating a pleasant workspace can boost a gift officer’s attitude when interacting with donors and others.

“Even if you’re working at a little corner of the kitchen table, put out a little bouquet of flowers,” she says. “I have a funny calendar that I put up near me and a little aromatherapy candle, just to make that space my space.”

Managing Children

For fundraisers with small children at home, finding a tranquil workspace is uniquely challenging, says Glenn, of Covenant House Georgia, who has a toddler and a 6-year-old who often ambush her best-laid plans for the work day.

She says one of the lessons she has learned over the last few months is to focus on the good parts of working from home. After all, she is getting to spend more time with her children. And she is grateful to have a husband who can handle a lot of the work with their kids. She’s also learned to accept the challenging days and get used to managing the distractions.

Glenn has also created a schedule for her family to follow each day that includes hourlong chunks for academics, art projects, family walks, chores for everyone, and quiet time when her children can read, work on a puzzle, or nap. Glenn says it is important for fundraisers with small children at home during work to keep in mind that even the best efforts at organizing the day can fall apart for any number of reasons.

“Sometimes you just need to stop and take a breath and remind yourself that you need to have grace,” says Glenn. “There is no magic recipe. It’s very different from day to day.”

A silver lining, says Glenn, is that some fundraisers and donors are dealing with similar issues at home, and that has allowed her to be upfront with donors about daily kid-related mishaps and struggles and, through those shared challenges, to create a deeper relationship with some donors.

Being Cut

Although working from home has presented a variety of difficulties for many fundraisers, some have faced far worse situations: They have lost their jobs.

Nneka Allen lost her job in May after six years at a Canadian health care organization she asked the Chronicle not to name. She has two decades of experience working for nonprofits, with the bulk of that time spent with health care groups.

“With a layoff comes a tremendous amount of shock,” says Allen. “I was the only fundraiser laid off, so it’s taken a bit to process that.”

Out of a team of seven major-gifts and planned-giving officers, she was the nonprofit’s only Black fundraiser, which has been the case in all the fundraising shops she’s worked in throughout her career, and which Allen says brings its own unique pressures and scrutiny but is even more challenging in the Covid era.

Allen says the stress level for fundraisers of color carries extra dimensions. For her, the challenges increased as the toll of the pandemic rose and it was becoming clearer that people of color were catching Covid-19 and dying from it at higher numbers than other groups. Twelve people in Allen’s orbit – friends of family and friends of friends — have died from the virus, but no one she worked with at the health care organization thought to ask how she was doing, something that stung sharply.

Allen says laid-off fundraisers should feel no shame. They are among tens of millions of people in North America who have lost jobs. Instead she says, “One way to throw off shame is to be vulnerable, so I told my Black fundraisers group, and for donors close to me, I was the one who shared the news with them in a simple message that gave me a measure of control” over the situation.

Supporting One Another

The racial inequities that existed before the pandemic have been exacerbated by it, and that has been distressing to watch for many fundraisers who work at organizations like Yu’s, which serves low-income Hispanic families. That distress has intensified for many nonprofit workers since the recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other people of color.

“We want to believe that things are getting better and many of us at social-justice organizations are working to make things better, but it makes you wonder how much impact have we really made if these terrible things are still happening,” says Yu.

To help the group’s staff, many of whom are people of color, cope with the pain and suffering that has bubbled up from these events, the head of Yu’s nonprofit started holding weekly Friday meetings online so colleagues can talk about how they are coping and not face their feelings alone. With up to 50 workers participating at any given time, the group divided up into smaller teams in online breakout rooms to create a more intimate environment for talking about what was causing stress.

“Having the support of colleagues and having those kinds of meetings, where we realize that a lot of us are feeling the same way, that has helped us look at how we can channel that to better fuel the work that we do,” says Yu. “To say, ‘look, there is more we can do, and it’s important that we’re not defeated in these moments.’”