There is a period of Becky Endicott’s life that she refers to as “the time when I lost my marbles” — her euphemism for a mental-health crisis she experienced four years ago.
Endicott is a former fundraiser and co-founder of We Are for Good, a company that produces a podcast and offers professional development resources for nonprofit workers. She made that career change after a nervous breakdown she blames on “almost two decades of burnout and grind.” Her health crisis pushed her to take 12 weeks of medical leave in 2019 — pressing pause for the first time in her career and transforming her outlook on the nonprofit sector.
Like so many fundraisers, Endicott felt guilty about putting her own health needs ahead of both her professional responsibilities and a nonprofit mission she was passionate about.
“When we’re tied to what we do professionally, and that’s what people know us for — being a strong employee or a productive employee — to ask for help is really hard,” says Ian Adair, director of leadership development and credentialing at the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
Fundraisers who work on small teams are especially hesitant to ask for support, Adair says. When you know your colleagues are also overextended, asking them to help you can feel like adding one more task to their already overfilled plate.
There is no simple solution to a problem as endemic as burnout is to the nonprofit sector. But leaders, fundraisers, and experts say there is a common cause: exhaustion. Unfamiliarity with the physical signs of stress and burnout can prevent fundraisers from taking the breaks they need to recover. Deep personal ties to the mission and leaders who minimize the need for rest can push nonprofit professionals to work more than is healthy. And there are logistical roadblocks to rest, too. When the work is always urgent, how can employees take time off? It takes leadership and culture change to shield employees from burnout, but experts say the future of the nonprofit sector depends on it.
Recognizing Burnout
For many fundraisers, burning out is like the myth of boiling a frog — the stress rises so incrementally that they don’t notice it until they’re overwhelmed.
“The misconception about stress is that it’s an emotional experience,” says Madison Gonzalez, executive director of Morning Light, an Indianapolis hospice for low-income patients. In reality, stress takes a physical toll. Fundraisers should take notice if they experience the following symptoms: poor sleep, lost appetite, tense muscles, and stomach issues.
Endicott didn’t know those physical signs of stress when she hit her breaking point 16 years into her nonprofit career.
Then a major-gifts fundraiser for the Oklahoma-based Integris Health Foundation, Endicott was leading a $46 million campaign to establish a mental-health and addiction-recovery center. The irony that she was working to promote others’ mental health at the cost of her own is not lost on Endicott. Outside of work, she was studying to earn an advanced fundraising credential and raising her two young daughters with her husband.
She was overextended, but, like many who work at nonprofits, that felt normal to her; she describes herself as Type A and a multitasker.
In 2018, Endicott’s polished façade began to crack. It started small: minor physical discomfort she couldn’t explain. At the time, Endicott told her doctor, “When I lay down in bed at night, I feel like I’ve had 50 cups of espresso. I’m still, but I feel this energy charging specifically through my legs.”
One Sunday morning, during a study session for her upcoming certification exam, the hairline cracks in Endicott’s façade deepened. Nothing felt right. Her muscles were tense all over, her body shook, and she cried without stopping. It was her first panic attack, though she didn’t know it then. When the symptoms subsided, she wrote it off as pre-exam stress.
Five days later — after she’d taken and passed the exam — the façade shattered. Panic and adrenaline flooded her body for 18 hours. This time Endicott understood something was seriously wrong, and it pushed her to do something she hadn’t done before: take a break.
The physical signs she’d noticed months before were the rush of adrenaline from years working a job that locked her in fight-or-flight mode around the clock. That high-stress environment followed her home, where Endicott continued fielding texts and emails after work hours. It took a nervous breakdown for her to realize her always-on approach to work was chipping away at her health.
As she’s recovered, Endicott has offered herself as a resource and cheerleader for other fundraisers who feel they’re at the end of their rope. Every two weeks, she says, she hears from a new one.
The Road to Burnout
Like Endicott, many fundraisers are so committed to their organization’s mission that the long hours feel worth it. But there’s a fine line between finding your work fulfilling and caring about it so much that it drains you, says Robbie Waters Robichau, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University who studies nonprofit employees’ desire for meaningful work. A fundraiser may see the difference their work makes, Robichau says, while also realizing, “I don’t have any more to give, and I don’t have anyone else to share that burden with.” That’s when burnout kicks in.
Women — who make up 70 percent of the nonprofit work force — and people of color feel this pinch most acutely, research suggests. (While much data has been collected on the share of nonprofit leaders who are people of color, there is little similar data on the share of overall nonprofit workers.) Women and people of color who work at organizations whose missions directly address their identities — such as nonprofits that promote racial equity or women’s health — can develop profound, personal ties to their work.
“That’s both a good thing, and it’s also a huge source of stress,” says Billie Sandberg, an associate professor at Portland State University who studies meaningful work with Robichau. Their commitment to the mission is personal, and that means they can never really turn it off, Sandberg says.
If organizations want to keep meeting their missions over time, they need to take a hard look at whether they’re setting sustainable expectations for their employees and empowering them to get the rest and care that they need to keep going. “You can’t help anybody if you’re in breakdown mode,” says Gonzalez, the hospice executive director. “For the sustainability of service, you need to take care of yourself first.”
The trouble is, fundraisers are notoriously bad at caring for themselves — a standard that is often set from the top down. Endicott, for example, ditched her maternity leave to work her charity’s gala four weeks after giving birth. “I felt the expectation was there,” she says. “Nobody asked me, but I did have my CEO say, ‘Oh, gosh, Becky, are you going to be there? I don’t know who else can write my comments.’”
Remarks like this — even in jest — can make overwork the norm and rest an anomaly. “Workplace culture is the underpinning of whether or not well-being practice is effective or embraced,” says Mandy Sharp Eizinger, program manager at the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy, a Michigan nonprofit that produces research and professional development tools for the sector.
If leaders take simple measures — such as scheduling emails written during time off to send once they’re back in the office — they can demonstrate to their employees that they respect and value rest.
“Leaders must really model what it means to take time off,” Eizinger says. When an employee sees their manager or chief executive resting, they’re more likely to take a break, too, she adds.
Remove Roadblocks to Rest
Even when nonprofit employees realize they’re burning out, it can be hard for them to take the rest they need to recover. Policies that normalize paid rest can help fundraisers take a break without worrying their absence is overburdening their colleagues or failing the communities they serve.
New Profit co-chief executive Tulaine Montgomery understood the importance — and complexity — of rest for the staff at her venture-philanthropy group. When she set out to implement a policy that provided rest, she knew that meant not only changing the organization’s culture but challenging the mind-set of philanthropy more broadly. It meant pushing back against a culture that, Montgomery has written, values “toiling as the standard of leadership.”
The first step was persuading the board to approve a rest period. The nonprofit’s leaders grounded their pitch in neuroscience. New Profit could only meet its mission, they argued, if staff were able to be creative, intellectual, and high-functioning. Rest ensured that they would be.
“Having a group of people operating on fight-flight, with elevated cortisol, taking shallow breaths, and asking them to invent a new world and build a system that can sustain it is actually foolish,” Montgomery says. “It actually doesn’t make any sense to say, ‘We’re going to do the most complex, challenging, and important work imaginable, and we’re going to bring our most depleted, least-resourced selves to the task.’”
Equity was the cornerstone of Montgomery’s rest policy. With the board’s approval, she formed a steering committee to determine how to allow the entire organization to take a break from work without anyone feeling like they had to skip the break and pick up the slack. The committee included workers across the organization — representing different roles, departments, identities, and levels of seniority. It surveyed staff and reviewed project deadlines and event schedules to make a plan that would allow everyone to take a break for seven business days in late summer.
Some employees felt unworthy of or uncomfortable with that time off. An employee whose ancestors were enslaved, Montgomery says, has an entrenched tie to the idea that the value of their labor is the only thing keeping them alive. That makes it harder for that employee to feel secure enough to rest.
Recognizing this nuance, Montgomery says the seven-day break needed to be “as user-friendly as possible.” To that end, the communications department and other stakeholders drafted language for staff to use in their out-of-office replies to inform external stakeholders of the organizationwide break.
All that advance work paid off. During the break, urgent matters were directed toward the co-chief executives, but neither received a single call. Montgomery says she spent most of that time resting, daydreaming, and writing. New Profit now orchestrates twice-yearly shut-downs: one around the Christmas holiday and another during the summer. The practice has encouraged New Profit employees to recognize that everything doesn’t fall on their individual shoulders and focus more on collective responsibility, Montgomery says.
Now employees are asking themselves, “What would it look like for all of us to take responsibility for this organization — for the culture of the organization and for the results of the organization? What does it look like for me to understand what I need in order to do my best?”
