I had spent the last three days adventure-spelunking in Borneo, stretching and squeezing my body through narrow rock formations and intermingling with the largest crickets, snakes, and spiders I’ve ever seen. A month before, I climbed my first mountain — Mount Hallasan, a dormant volcano and the tallest peak in Jeju Island, South Korea.
During my three-month sabbatical, I had walked, flown, floated, and explored my way across Southeast Asia — far from a Wi-Fi signal and incessant work email, far from my career at a community organization in South Los Angeles.
The truth is, I really needed a break. I had started more than a decade before as an intern at Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education, or SCOPE, and moved up the ranks to CEO. During that time, I had mobilized the vote and knocked on thousands of doors, built and trained teams of organizers, and developed and led political-education programs and direct-action campaigns. I had also become a confidant to people in our community, bringing groceries to those in need, making house calls, and holding community meetings late into the evening.
After years in the trenches doing the work of community organizing, I was so disconnected from my body that I didn’t know how tired I was — until there was no denying it. I searched and applied for an opportunity to disconnect from the grind.
My sabbatical was made possible by the Durfee Foundation, which for 25 years has invested in community leaders across Los Angeles. The foundation’s sabbatical fellowship allows nonprofit leaders to unplug and also gives their organizations the resources needed during their absence. In June, Durfee awarded $50,000 to each of 13 fellows, and another $10,000 to the organizations they lead — more than doubling the number of fellows in response to extraordinary need and intersecting crises.
We need more sabbatical programs like Durfee’s, but we also need new types of funding that can fundamentally shift the culture of overwork and burnout that is so prevalent in the nonprofit world, especially in grassroots organizations led by women of color.
Multiyear general operating support can help. But more resources are needed to explicitly address the health and wellness of people doing this work. Foundations should be asking if grantees have the capacity to provide for the mental, physical, and spiritual well-being of staff so they can fulfill their missions now and in the future.
I take to heart the wise words of Victor Narro, an expert on workplace rights for immigrants and project director of the UCLA Downtown Labor Center: “As activists, our spaces for self-reflection and self-retreat become a critical part of our work for justice. Each of us needs a balance of solitude and service. We need to disconnect and enter into our own periods of self-reflection and spiritual renewal in order to have lasting meaningful impact as activists for justice.”
Many social-justice nonprofits are known for accomplishing great things with limited resources. The pressure to be scrappy — and the reality of being given scraps to work with — leads to burnout and exacerbates inequities. The pressures of Covid-19, the nation’s racial reckoning, and attacks on basic rights such as voting have further brought into focus the daily struggles facing those who help affected communities build power.
One year ago, I chose to carry the values and experiences from community organizing into a new leadership role at the Solutions Project, an organization that supports grassroots climate-justice organizations. I have a message to my peers in philanthropy: It’s not enough to do more of what we’ve been doing. We can radically improve our impact when we invest holistically in movement leaders.
Focus on the Needs of Movement Leaders
We know the arc of justice is long. So, in addition to increasing racial-justice commitments, providing money to strengthen nonprofit management, and offering general operating support, we need to ask ourselves, how can we use our resources to better support the health, well-being, and sustainability of movement leaders? They are in it for the long haul, always showing up with courage and care in their communities. They regularly demonstrate the integrity required to sustain our democracy. They deserve all that we can give them.
We need to explore ways to provide grants for resources such as staff raises and bonuses, better medical coverage, mental-health support, retirement plans, wellness programming, and, yes, sabbaticals. It’s not enough to shrug our shoulders as grant makers and say, “Well, if it’s important to them, they’ll spend their general operating dollars on it.” That attitude ignores the reality and tough choices that come from historical disinvestment and the crises that face communities nonprofits serve.
At the Solutions Project, we’re having conversations with our grantees about what it would take to build sustainable organizations that prioritize the compensation and wellness of their staff. Before the pandemic, we granted six Black and Indigenous women leaders of nonprofits working in the South $10,000 each to use at their discretion. I was inspired by their creativity. One leader purchased land for her organization to practice earth-based healing, and another took a trip for the first time to her ancestral home.
Once Covid-19 hit, our organization drew from this experience and offered wellness grants to all the nonprofits we support and virtual memberships to groups that provided a range of mindfulness practices such as meditation and yoga to support their teams through such a massive tragedy.
I’ve also come to learn during this process that many leaders of our grantee organizations lack the resources to pay themselves a living wage or offer retirement plans. Employees were working 15 years for an organization with no retirement savings. Some executive directors were taking on weekend jobs to make a decent living. This wouldn’t happen at any national nonprofit, and it certainly wouldn’t happen at a foundation, so why is it happening at the grassroots organizations we support?
How Empathy Can Guide Us
In response, we’ve become more explicit in how our values of care, compassion, and empathy guide our grant making. We are providing larger, multiyear grants that allow community organizations to decide their own programming priorities for climate-justice solutions. We are giving groups the resources they need to grow into healthy, thriving, and effective organizations.
Movement leaders should not have to choose between their long-term health and well-being and their commitment to community organizing. Philanthropy must do its part to remedy this situation.
For me, this is personal. My sabbatical helped me understand that self-care and community care go hand in hand. It changed my priorities and perspective on how to be an effective leader.
Community organizers break through seemingly insurmountable barriers every day, but negotiating a healthy and supportive work life should not have to be one of them. If those of us in philanthropy are serious about fighting for systemic change, we need to ensure grantees are no longer oppressed by those same inequitable systems. We need to stop looking at equitable compensation, retirement plans, and sabbaticals as privileges. Instead, we should view them as essential building blocks for justice.
