During the height of the pandemic, the need for housing and services for victims of domestic violence grew so fast that the New Life Center in Arizona could barely keep up. It expanded to help victims of human trafficking and sexual violence, eventually doubling the number of people it served. But the organization could never find enough staff to keep pace.
“We had no fundraising staff. We had no community-development staff. We were seeing shortages through every pressure point of the agency,” says Myriah Mhoon, the group’s CEO. She and other leaders of the group worked the night shift, did kitchen duty, and generally filled in wherever they were needed. “We truly did not have a lot of support at every level.”
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During the height of the pandemic, the need for housing and services for victims of domestic violence grew so fast that the New Life Center in Arizona could barely keep up. It expanded to help victims of human trafficking and sexual violence, eventually doubling the number of people it served. But the organization could never find enough staff to keep pace.
“We had no fundraising staff. We had no community-development staff. We were seeing shortages through every pressure point of the agency,” says Myriah Mhoon, the group’s CEO. She and other leaders of the group worked the night shift, did kitchen duty, and generally filled in wherever they were needed. “We truly did not have a lot of support at every level.”
Pay was a big reason the group was losing staff. Mhoon did salary assessments across the organization and raised pay by about 10 percent for most positions. But hiring for executive positions proved much harder than she’d expected.
For a year, Mhoon did all the fundraising work herself in addition to her job as CEO. She eventually found a contractor to take on the role for another year while the group continued its search. Although she didn’t plan to, Mhoon was able to persuade the contractor to stay on as a full-time staff member.
Mhoon thought she was offering competitive wages, but the market for top talent is so tight that she says she has to pay 30 to 40 percent more than she’d initially planned to fill top positions. She is now looking for a CFO and steeling herself for a long and arduous process.
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“It will be another really aggressive compensation structure that is even beyond our posted range,” she says. “We know that is what is needed for us to sustain the build-out of New Life Center.”
It’s been a challenge for nonprofits to retain and recruit staff at all levels since the height of the pandemic. CEOs are turning over at rates experts have never seen before. Inflation, high private-sector wages, and stubbornly high housing costs have made it harder to hang on to and attract entry-level and direct-service employees. Now senior-level staff members are leaving, too — and when nonprofits try to fill those roles, qualified people are hard to find.
Nonprofit executives, burned out from the overwhelming workloads of the pandemic, are choosing to leave full-time work, according to nonprofit leaders, recruiters, and consulting firms. They are no longer willing to put up with the long hours, stress, and overwork that are common at many organizations. C-suite executives are re-prioritizing flexibility and their own quality of life. Many are choosing to consult as a way to stay engaged with the mission-driven work rather than sign on full-time with another organization.
Recruiters report being busier than they have been in the past five years or more, particularly with a demand for senior executives. Mendi Neiters, a senior adviser at Armstrong McGuire, a firm that consults for nonprofits and conducts searches for talent, says that when she started in 2017, the search business was about 10 percent of the firm’s work. Demand has increased so much, that share is now 60 percent.
Organizations are getting creative as they try to lure top talent. Many are increasing salaries, often much more than they thought they would. They are using consultants to fill the gaps while they search, and they are offering more flexible schedules. Some groups are closing down for a week or two a year, says consultant David La Piana. He says one organization is closing down for a whole month each year.
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Steps like these are helping nonprofits court talented executives, but the competition is fierce, says Adam Fazio, a senior consultant with the Benefactor Group who recruits development staff. “There is absolutely a disconnect between the needs of organizations and talent,” he says. “We are seeing a real lack of available candidates.”
Leap to Consulting
Many mid- and top-level executives are not leaving the nonprofit world entirely but instead are consulting. It allows them to use their skills to help organizations do important and meaningful work without the commitment and stress of a full-time job.
María Fernández built a career in nonprofits, starting at small youth-development groups and later moving to national organizations. When the travel got to be too much, forcing her to leave her children for long stretches, she took a job at a foundation in San Antonio that required less time away from home.
During the racial reckoning of 2020, the grant maker began to look at its own diversity and equity practices. Fernández was one of two Latinos in senior leadership. When they returned to the office, she was confronted with how few people of color were in top positions. Being back in the office full-time was a challenge with children at home. Stress about the organization’s internal diversity efforts and being back in the office grew.
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“I was exhausted,” she says. “I’m worrying about my kids having Covid and what am I going to do because I can’t work from home.”
Eventually she gave notice and left the foundation. She applied for jobs and at the same time met with consultants to learn about the business. She teamed up with a friend who is a community organizer to find consulting work together. After six months of interviewing for jobs and trying to start a consulting business at the same time, she was burned out again.
Fernández felt that she was always just short of landing the top job at a nonprofit no matter what she did.
“Over 20 years I’ve faced a bit of a glass ceiling where I’m the informal adviser to the CEO. I became the second person responsible — but being able to be the senior leader, it’s just never happened,” she says. But as a consultant, she felt that she could use her skills to achieve meaningful goals and do the work she enjoyed without the same career frustration. “I like supporting people, I like helping others, and I don’t need to have the particular title of being at the top of the pyramid to be able to do that work.”
She decided to try consulting full-time.
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The first six months were hard. She and her friend didn’t get as much work as they wanted. Fernández went into debt. But since then, business has been strong. She has already recouped what she lost in her first six months. The pair help groups with leadership development, community engagement, advocacy, and community organizing as well as executive coaching.
She says other consultants, rather than being competitors, are a network for referrals.
Like Fernández, a growing number of nonprofit executives are leaving their jobs to consult. At the same time, more consultants — of varying skill levels and experience — are making themselves available for contract jobs. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. As more nonprofit executives leave to consult, there are fewer people to take the jobs they leave behind. And there are more consultants looking to help out on a temporary basis.
Companies that provide consulting services for nonprofits — often by hiring former nonprofit professionals — are having trouble keeping full-time staff, too. Kathy Swayze, president of Impact Communications, which advises nonprofits about communications strategy, has lost several high-level employees who left to consult on their own. She’s had to boost salaries by 25 percent and is still having trouble finding people. Swayze has been forced to hire contractors who want to work only 25 hours a week.
“I can’t find the people I need full-time,” she says. “It’s that whole gig economy thing.”
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‘What Do You Think?’
Many nonprofit executives got a taste of flexibility and autonomy when they worked from home during the worst days of Covid — and they liked it.
In many cases, executives’ workloads increased, sometimes significantly, but they relished having more control of their time. After nonprofit employers called staff back to the office, employees missed the flexibility. Increasing numbers of nonprofit executives are willing to walk away from demanding positions and take the risk of consulting on their own to try to achieve a more balanced life. Consultants, when they’re successful, can pick and choose which groups to work with, when they do and don’t work, and even what projects they take on.
“People are less willing to go back into the office or put up with a compensation package they don’t think is attractive,” says consultant and recruiter Ify Walker. “They could consult for a time and wait it out a little bit to find something better.”
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By 2022, Jill Kunishima, a fundraiser at a small journalism organization, was feeling overwhelmed. The work was getting harder and more intense. She started during the pandemic and was never able to build the relationships she needed with big donors because everything was remote. She struggled to balance her child’s online kindergarten with the demands of fundraising.
“After trying my best to get through the pandemic, and doing this very high-pressure job, I was exhausted. I think I was more burnt out than I even realized,” she says. “At least while my kid is young and is so reliant on me, I need this flexibility, at least for a little while. Flexibility over everything was the mantra.”
So in April 2022, she quit her job. At first, she applied for full-time jobs but turned them down because they were likely to leave her burned out again. She also tried consulting. Kunishima says she signed her first client in September 2022 and by the end of the month had a full slate of clients.
Fundraisers were already starting to abandon their jobs before the pandemic, says Tawnia Wise, a former development director at several nonprofits who now runs her own consulting firm. Covid just gave them an additional push. “In the world of fundraising, the goals are often unrealistic. There’s high pressure,” she says. “The fundraisers are expected to be these single-person crusaders to financially save the organization. It’s just miserable.”
There’s just so much burnout that there’s this desire to just reclaim a work-life balance.
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Wise sees fundraising professionals leaving permanent positions who aren’t even willing to consult full-time. Instead, they are looking for part-time work, project by project. “There’s just so much burnout that there’s this desire to just reclaim a work-life balance,” she says.
One surprising difference Kunishima has noticed is that she’s often treated far better as a consultant than she was when she was on development staff. In recent positions, boards and executive staff often set unrealistic fundraising goals.
Now she is viewed as the outside expert. “I could be talking to the same group of people, but now they’re asking me, ‘What do you think?’” says Kunishima, who is Asian American. “As a BIPOC woman, that is a big shift in how you are viewed in the world.”
Always on Call
Of course, consulting is not all beach vacations and short days to attend kids’ soccer games. If they don’t secure clients, they don’t get paid.
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Over the past 15 years, Christina Lisi, who consults for nonprofits on communications strategy, has come to accept that consulting, too, can be a grind. She has to develop new business and secure clients at the same time she is working for others. “I’m on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I’m always accessible,” she says. “People say all the time, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky. Wow, you’re so flexible.’” Not so, she says ruefully. When a client calls her at 10 p.m. on a Sunday, she picks up. “The flexibility thing is not real.”
Wise says friends who follow her on social media think she travels all the time for fun, but she’s actually traveling for work. “I’m working nonstop. That’s how you build a consultancy,” she says. She knows she needs to put in the time to make her business successful — and the stakes are high. But like everyone else, she needs to make time for other things in her life. It takes conscious effort to make sure she away from work.
Nonprofits need to adjust to the increasing dearth of people willing to take high-level full-time jobs and the new bounty of consultants, says Mandi Stewart, a public-administration professor at North Carolina State University. But they should also think about why this is happening in the first place.
“How will nonprofits update themselves to account for that?” she asks. “There should be also a little soul-searching: Where are we not meeting that need? Where should we revise?”
Outdated Expectations
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Nonprofits need to shed long-held expectations about how organizations should work and what the staff should do, says Pratichi Shah, CEO of the consultancy Flourish.
Shah began working at nonprofits in 2007 and has been consulting for more than a decade. What she learned in mentoring programs a little more than a decade ago already feels out of date. The emphasis was on appearance and decorum, what you can and can’t say — formalities that are less important in today’s work environment. Long hours in the office were rewarded. Leaders were expected to do anything and everything that was needed in an organization. “If something needs to be done, just do it” was the message, she says. “Even if it’s clearing a table or ordering the coffee or whatever because you want to be seen as a team player.”
Leaders should instead focus on performance outcomes rather than appearance or how long someone spent — or didn’t spend — in front of a computer, Shah says. They need to be flexible about bringing people on as advisers or finding other ways to fill needs within an organization other than full-time employment. People are more interested in their day-to-day work and the meaning they derive from it than a specific title, she says.
Focusing on how employees are treated and how they feel about the organization can go a long way toward improving retention. That, in turn, means groups aren’t always on the hunt for new senior leaders.
Sometimes that means giving employees a break. In 2021, Beloved Community, a nonprofit that helps other organizations become more equitable by providing audits, work plans, and other services, began giving its employees the month of February off so they could rest. “It is an opportunity for us to try to sustain this work for the long term,” says Rhonda Broussard, the group’s CEO. She says she often fields questions about the program from other leaders. “Our peers are all trying to figure out if we can get a sabbatical, too. Can we get a rest?”
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Sometimes something as simple as giving senior managers contracts for one or more years, ensuring that if they are let go, they will be paid for the duration of the contract, can make a big difference. It gives them some sense of job security, says James Abruzzo, managing partner of the global nonprofit practice at DHR Global. He says that only about 40 percent of nonprofit CEOs and 10 percent of the C-suite executives he works with have contracts.
Ulterior Motives
Organizations can do their best to create an attractive workplace, and searches for senior leaders can still be long and frustrating. CEOs need to be patient — and sometimes a little crafty.
Over the past few years, Envision Education, which supports charter schools across the country and manages some in the San Francisco Bay Area, has had to fill several senior leadership positions. Jillian Juman, the group’s CEO, has been surprised at how long it takes. The group did a salary study to make sure it was paying staff enough — and, for the most part, it was. Juman says the group has always attracted curious, thoughtful, and diverse candidates, in part because it is pro-Black, antiracist, and focused on creating equity for all people, and it prides itself on its sense of community, she says.
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“Envision is a very special place. We have a lot of joy. We work hard and we play hard, and we’re a community that way,” she says. “That’s what I lean on. When I bring folks in, they are kind of like, ‘Can I stay in some way?’”
But that doesn’t always mean people are willing to take full-time jobs, or even work right away. Juman has several people in mind for open positions, some of whom used to work for her, but many of them have no interest in going back to full-time work.
They tell her they want to work for her sometime, just not now. One person came in and offered to work part-time — but not on a permanent basis. “It was absolutely maddening and so frustrating,” Juman says. “I have at least six people in my pocket that I would love to bring aboard. I’m just waiting for them to get tired of not having a commitment. It’s just like dating, right? I’m waiting for someone to want to marry us.”
One of the most important positions — chief of staff, a new role — was languishing unfilled.
Juman decided that she would try a consultant. She found one she really liked through a referral and brought her on in June for a project. But Juman had an ulterior motive — she wanted the consultant to eventually take the role full-time. She started by giving the consultant a title rather than calling her a consultant or contractor. Giving the consultant a title helped the staff see her as part of the team, not just an outside person who would be quickly replaced, Juman says. That also helped the contractor have a better work experience. Within two months, the consultant agreed to work part-time for the group as its chief operations officer, a slightly different role that includes some responsibility for strategy.
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In the past, Juman says, consultants have not developed relationships with the community the group serves but instead dipped in and out of projects. Juman handled this situation differently. She prioritized introducing the consultant to the people the organization serves. “I just built it into our time so that she was actually seen as part of the community and started to feel like part of the community,” Juman says.
Juman is thrilled. “She just naturally sees problems and wants to solve them,” Juman says. “It is a combination of a strategy and just her brilliance.”
Jim Rendon is senior editor and fellowship director who covers nonprofit leadership, climate change, and philanthropic outcomes for the Chronicle. Email Jim or follow him on Twitter @RendonJim.