It’s a deeply unsettled time in the nonprofit world. Federal grants and contracts, once a source of stable funding, are disappearing with no notice. Needs in many communities are skyrocketing, and it is impossible to predict what is coming next. Nonprofit leaders are overworked and overwhelmed and face what feel like insurmountable odds. Sarah Jaquette Ray, chair of the Environmental Studies Department at Cal Poly Humboldt, can relate — and she can help. Ray has spent her career teaching students about the formidable challenge of climate change. And she has lessons to share on how to keep going when an issue seems too daunting to tackle.
Ray‘s research into preventing burnout and regaining motivation grew out of her experience in the classroom. As she taught students about the ravages of climate change, the complicity of wealthy Americans as its worst offenders, and the deeply rooted inequities driving the crisis, she was surprised by their reactions. They did not respond with a fiery need to challenge these big, powerful forces. Instead, many of them buckled under the overwhelming weight of the problem. Students were skipping class or leaving the major.
She was concerned, not just for the individual students but also for the issues she cares deeply about. Engaged young people are critical to help solve the global climate crisis. So she began researching. The resulting book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet, is loaded with tips that can help anyone struggling to work effectively in an age when everyone is overwhelmed.
Ray draws from social science and psychological research, decades of wisdom gained from veterans of social justice movements, and religion. In her quest to help her students develop the practices and mindset necessary to face climate change with the resilience needed to work day in and out on such a daunting problem, Ray has discovered approaches to work and life that can help every nonprofit leader who faces overwhelming odds with dwindling resources.
In a conversation with the Chronicle, Ray opened up about the ways that everyone can find the mindset necessary to achieve under duress. In some cases, it may mean offloading your savior complex or reminding yourself that no one is alone, that everyone is working in larger ecosystems of activists and professionals who can take up the burden when someone else needs a break. Lean into joy and focus on the good stuff, she advises. Above all else, she says, finding community is the “holy grail.”
You talk about burnout a lot in your book, and that is something I often hear about in my conversations with nonprofit leaders. Everyone is feeling overwhelmed trying to keep their organizations afloat, meet the waves of need, and keep pace with the constantly changing environments. How can people address burnout?
It breaks my heart when I think of the amount of burnout there is while so much of the work of nonprofits is being targeted by the federal government. We’re also living in a story of being the underdog. So that adds another layer to it. I’m in that boat, and my students are in that boat, and we’re all swimming around trying to figure out how to make sense of this moment. But the same things from a decade ago apply. In some key ways, in terms of how it determines what we do every day, things are not any different. That helps remove me from the whiplash-like effect of what’s happening: Just keep doing the work.
The people who have inspired me the most are the people from the more radical Black Lives Matter movement and the Indigenous sovereignty movement. These folks are not counting on the government. They have never been counting on the government to give them what they need. And so, in some ways, who is in office and what the funding streams are or are not doesn’t affect them.
What about when the issues you work on feel overwhelming?
People see problems that are really big and really urgent, and they think, ‘I’m too small to fix them myself, and I’ll never get them done in time.’ That’s absolutely true. And that creates all the conditions for burnout.
I’m not denying those things. But we have to hold that truth — and also understand that the implications of that are that we won’t do anything at all. We actually need to embrace the idea that nothing we do really matters. And then also recognize that, at the same time, it’s all that matters. I can’t be the savior. And the work is too big, and we need to do it by yesterday. On the other hand, does that mean that I’m just going to give up? That’s not an option, either.
So how do you keep going?
I am turning away from thinking at the global scale or the national scale, and instead I am thinking local, to the point of even the scale of your own family, community, neighborhood. The most important thing is that this approach actually creates community.
I often tell people if they’re feeling burnout and despair, they’re suffering from individualism. And individualism is the water we’re all swimming in. It is enforced by educational systems, it’s enforced by capitalism, it’s enforced by social media. There are so many places where individualism is glorified. It takes work to counter that, it takes active daily practices to counter that.
Oftentimes the despair we feel makes us want to do more things that promote our individualism like dissociating, isolating ourselves, hunkering down, and watching our Netflix alone. All of these things are legitimate responses to the moment we’re in for sure.
I’m not saying we should put aside our despair. But the answer to the despair, the answer to the environmental problems we face, the answer to the democracy problems we face, the answer to our loneliness epidemic is all the same: We should just put all our eggs in the basket of building communities.
What are the benefits on focusing on community?
There is really cool social psychology research that basically says that when we’re in community, that’s when we get our sense of purpose, that’s where we get our happiness, that’s why we get up in the morning. I see it with my students. When my students are not doing well in my classes and they are embarrassed to see me, they still show up because they want to be in community with each other. I have been trying to make that happen for years, and I finally did it. If you can get to that point where you’re showing up to work because of community, then that’s the antidote to burnout.
How can those working for social change better tap into that sense of community?
One of the symptoms of individualism is that we don’t see the work that’s happening around us. The positive feelings of knowing you’re not alone actually make you get up and do work, whereas the negative feelings of, “This is terrible, so I have to do something” only changes behavior for a short period of time. We need sustained, long-term, marathon behavior change. We need to motivate people for the long haul against this burnout. The emotion of knowing you’re not alone, knowing that you’re part of this huge movement, the psychology research on this shows that that’s the holy grail.
Why are desire, humor, and optimism so important? How can you access those feelings when the situations for so many are so dire?
Right now there is a kind of overwhelming fire-hose assault, and that is causing the deflation and fatalism that we feel. Finding pockets of joy, pleasure, delight, and humor are ways that we can tap the emotional and chemical spaces in our bodies that we need to keep doing the work. We have to find some kind of pleasure and fulfillment, and that usually involves being a collective. Psychologically speaking, that is usually a precondition for joy.
There is a Black radical tradition of thought that also says things like, “Don’t let the devil steal your joy.” The world that you want, the world that you’re fighting for is one where people feel pleasure and joy, and we’re not going to wait until the revolution has succeeded before we feel pleasure, relief, rest, joy.
Can tapping those emotions also help recruit others to a cause?
Yes. This can be a sideways invitation to other people to join the movement. It can be a persuasion strategy rather than just a survival strategy. If we want other people to join our movement, if we want people to get involved, it’s going to need to be pleasurable. The author and former nonprofit leader Adrienne Maree Brown says we have to make obtaining justice the most pleasurable thing we can imagine so that people join because we are pleasure-seeking machines. We want the dopamine hit.
How do you find the positive emotions that keep you going?
The rubber hit the road for me during COVID. I was researching and writing all this stuff for my students and thinking, “I don’t need this. This is not for me. I’m not in despair.” And then COVID happened, and I had two little kids, and I was trying to chair a department and teach my classes. All of a sudden I was like, wait, I just researched this book. I have all these practices. I wrote a list of things to do every day and put them on my fridge. I have a lot of bad practices. I read the news in the morning, and I probably have a bad relationship with the news. I also get distracted on social media. Now I’m more aware of when I’m doing it.
Mindfulness has been a major part of my life since COVID — mindfulness around how I’m living my daily life, how things around me are making me feel, and whether I can control those conditions.
What do you do when the despair creeps in?
When I feel myself tipping over into despair or self-doubt, I put my attention on the stuff that I love. Then that stuff gets bigger. It doesn’t just get bigger in my mind, it actually gets bigger in reality. If we nurture the part of the garden that we want to grow, that stuff grows. If there’s some weeds and bramble in our garden, if we deny that stuff sunlight, fertilizer, good soil, water, that stuff will die. I’m constantly looking around in the dark corners for where the roses are growing out of the concrete and putting the sunlight on that, that’s my daily practice.
I also think of community as resistance. I think of joy as resistance, I think of these things as the fuel that keeps me going. The activist movements have long known all of this. This is not new to anyone who’s been working on social justice in their community for centuries.
We’re trying to build community. Why is that? Because it solves our loneliness epidemic. It solves our civics problem. It solves our democracy problem. It is an inoculation against authoritarianism. The solution to the problem is us.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
