Since 1987, Pati Martinson has run the Taos County Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit in rural New Mexico, alongside her co-founder, Terrie Bad Hand. Now, at the age of 66 and after 40-plus years spent working at nonprofits, Ms. Martinson is getting ready to retire.
But like many nonprofit leaders on the cusp of retirement, Ms. Martinson doesn’t want to stop doing the work she loves. She does, however, want to work differently.
“Running a small community-development organization means you’re usually the first person here each morning and the last one to leave at night, and in between it’s hard to get out of the office to do actual field work,” she says.
Ms. Martinson is hoping to find a successor who can take over the administrative and fundraising aspects of her job while she pursues a reduced work week doing the direct community service she loves but is largely unable to do, given her current duties.
Many other nonprofit leaders are seeking the same kind of flexible schedule that maximizes the rewarding parts of nonprofit work while minimizing the draining ones. But those desires often go unfulfilled, according to a new study by the Building Movement Project, Civic Ventures, and Clohesy Consulting.
Financial Worries
Although Ms. Martinson is ready to change her role and even has a plan to ease herself and her organization through the transition, she is unable to do so. The organization can’t afford to hire a successor and create a new job for Ms. Martinson, and Ms. Martinson can’t afford to stop working for pay.
Due to steadily rising expenses and a budget of just $500,000 for each of the past seven years, the entire staff has been working at reduced pay since 2008. Ms. Martinson currently earns $42,000, and she won’t get any retirement aid from the charity.
“We weren’t trying to be martyrs, and it’s not that we were unaware,” she says of the decision to invest her organization’s financial resources into programs rather than pay and retirement benefits. “We just always thought we would work the money part out later. And then later never came.”
Ms. Martinson adds that, beyond their own living expenses, both she and Ms. Bad Hand have families and grandchildren they are helping to support.
Support for Transition
But even if she could afford to step down tomorrow, Ms. Martinson says, the charity would suffer.
“Many smaller organizations don’t have the money to allow a smooth transition. Your only real choice is to leave and free up the salary for your successor,” she says.
Ideally, she feels, a departing leader would be available for as long as two to three years after retiring to support the next person to sit in his or her chair. But she thinks it’s unrealistic to expect someone to stick around, unpaid, to play mentor.
Thus, Ms. Martinson and Ms. Bad Hand are seeking grants from the Kresge Foundation, among others, to support their vision of hiring a new director to run their organization while they stay on the payroll to promote entrepreneurial and agricultural economic-development opportunities in the isolated and impoverished communities of northern New Mexico.
“Our dilemma is, how do we continue our work when the people who benefit from it can’t fund it?” Ms. Martinson says.
Her hope is that the financial Catch-22 she and other retirement-age leaders of small grass-roots nonprofits find themselves in will inspire grant makers to step up. She says she envisions something like an end-of-career fellowship, where those who dedicated decades of their lives to service work for little pay would be rewarded financially for their contributions.
“Something for us to stick in the bank and be supported for a couple of years after our transitions, while we work to find our new calling,” she says. “Whether it happens to be a rocking chair or rocking the world.”
