Building a healthier nonprofit sector - Part 2
8/27/2024
““The nonprofit sector has a reputation for having unrealistic expectations of overwork, and that increasingly leads to burnout. How might we turn this around? Some of it is pretty basic - Paying people decently, providing benefits, having policies that support people taking time off when they are sick or need to care for a loved one and providing flexibility.””
In episode 105 of Nonprofit Mission: Impact, Carol Hamilton continues to celebrate her four year podiversary by reflecting on how nonprofits can create healthier and more sustainable organizational cultures.
Through a series of guest responses, the episode explores the necessity of fair compensation, flexible work environments, and the importance of mental and physical health for nonprofit staff. It also touches on the exploitation of passion in the sector, the need for diversity and inclusion on nonprofit boards, and the importance of strategic foresight in nonprofit governance.
The episode underscores the collective responsibility of nonprofit leaders to foster environments where staff and volunteers can thrive, with a focus on stewardship, progress over perfection, and creating roles that align with both organizational needs and individual aspirations.
Episode Highlights
[00:00:00] Imagining a healthier and more sustainable nonprofit sector
Carol Hamilton reflects on the four-year anniversary of Mission Impact and introduces this curated episode series, focusing on how to envision a healthier nonprofit sector. She revisits questions from past episodes, asking how nonprofits can create a more humane and sustainable work environment.
[00:04:00] The Importance of Staff Well-being
Lauren Brownstein emphasizes the need for nonprofits to prioritize the health and well-being of their staff by providing fair compensation, benefits, and flexibility. She advocates for a culture that supports mental and physical health, starting from the leadership.
[00:07:00] Passion Exploitation in Nonprofits
Beth Sperber Ritchie uses the metaphor of a campfire to describe the exploitation of passion in the nonprofit sector, particularly among young professionals. She discusses the importance of organizational systems that allow staff to step back and avoid burnout.
[00:12:00] Aligning Volunteer Roles with Mission
Patton McDowell highlights the need to align volunteer roles with the mission and impact of the organization. He also stresses the importance of recognizing and appreciating volunteers, along with providing professional development opportunities.
[00:15:00] Diversity and Inclusion on Nonprofit Boards
Sabrina Walker Hernandez and Liz Scott discuss the ongoing challenges of diversity and inclusion in nonprofit leadership, particularly on boards. They call for accountability in creating inclusive cultures and emphasize the need for boards to reflect the communities they serve.
[00:24:00] Strategic Foresight in Governance
Jeff DeCagna challenges the traditional focus on leadership, advocating instead for stewardship and collective action. He argues for a shift from individualism to a shared sense of responsibility in guiding nonprofits into the future.
[00:30:00] How to build a nonprofit sector we want
Carol Hamilton concludes the episode by encouraging listeners to take intentional steps towards creating a healthier nonprofit sector. She urges leaders to model self-care, celebrate contributions, and prioritize progress over perfection. The episode ends with a call to action for nonprofit leaders to continue asking critical questions and challenging the status quo to build a thriving future.
Important Links and Resources:
BoardSource’s Leading with Intent
Be Well, Do Good, Self Care and Renewal for Nonprofit Professionals and Other Do Gooders
Related Episodes
Episode 42: Building shared governance
Episode 55: Helping nonprofit boards move toward greater equity
Episode 62: Healthy nonprofit organizational culture highlights, part 1
Episode 63: Healthy nonprofit organizational culture highlights, part 2
Episode 72: Exploring passion exploitation in nonprofit organizations
Episode 85: Building equitable compensation frameworks for nonprofit organizations
Episode 102: Nonprofit board’s duty of foresight
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Today on Mission Impact I am continuing to celebrate my 4 year Pod-i-versary. I started the celebration last episode – with part 1 of this two part curated episode with responses from guests on how we might imagine a healthier nonprofit sector.
A couple episodes ago, I celebrated another milestone – my 100th episode. For my 100th, I looked back at what I had learned from all those conversations and reflections. Since I launched the podcast in 2020, I have been exploring how nonprofits can be more effective. With my guests, I have tackled a wide range of nonprofit leadership and management topics, including how to build organizational cultures where your work in the world is aligned with how you work together as staff, board members and volunteers.
Mission Impact is the podcast for nonprofit leaders who want to build a better world without becoming a martyr to the cause.
I’m Carol Hamilton, your podcast host and nonprofit strategic planning and evaluation design consultant.
On my 100th episode, I highlighted 10 lessons that I have learned from my four year exploration into these topics. Check out the episode to hear more about these lessons.
And I ended the episodes thinking about how we might come together to envision and create a healthier nonprofit sector – a more humane nonprofit sector. And I posed these questions for reflection:
What does a healthier nonprofit sector look like?
how might we redefine the social contract of nonprofit employment?
How might we make work work for everyone?
How might we build guardrails and model behavior that demonstrates it is ok to be human and do good work?
How might we slow down and plan for 85%. Instead of 110%?
How might we create leadership roles, volunteer roles and all the roles that people actually are excited to step into and do?
How might we say no to passion exploitation, extraction, overwork and martyrdom?
How might we favor progress over perfectionism?
How might we say yes to more play, creativity, fun, joy and thriving?
For this episode, I invited my guests to respond to one of the questions above with their thoughts and reflections on what that healthier, stronger and more human future nonprofit sector might look like.
And as part of the podiversary celebration, we have compiled all the books that have been mentioned over the course of the 100+ episodes. You can find the link to the list on Bookshop.org in the show notes for this episode.
Like the last episode, we will start at the individual and organizational level – what can organizations do to fully support their staff and create healthier organizational cultures.
When considering the question, what could a healthier nonprofit look like, I appreciate Lauren Brownstein’s focus on how the sector could take care of its people better. As was noted on the last episode, the nonprofit sector has a reputation for having unrealistic expectations, over work and increasingly burnout. How might we turn this around?
Some of it pretty basic as Lauren points out. Paying people decently, providing benefits, having policies that support people taking time off when they are sick or need to care for a loved one, providing flexibility.
[Clip 1 - lauren clip – 430 words]
My name is Lauren Brownstein. I am the president of pitch fundraising and philanthropy consulting. And I am also the author of be well do good self care and renewal for nonprofit professionals and other do gooders. There's a lot of ways to define what a healthier nonprofit sector means is that a nonprofit sector that is more financially sustainable, that can focus more on programming and client services and less on chasing dollars? Does it mean fewer nonprofits, because there are a lot of nonprofits out there on the world, and a lot of them are doing the same thing.
The thing that I'm zoning in on is the notion of a healthier nonprofit sector that is staffed by healthier nonprofit employees. That is healthier in mind, body and spirit, on the most basic level, a nonprofit sector where the staff have good health benefits, and they can do preventative care. And they can take care of themselves and have sick time when they actually are sick, etc, etc. But there are all sorts of other ways that nonprofit professionals can take micro steps to take better care of themselves. And that the sector can really focus on sustaining the mental and physical health of these dedicated people who keep the wheels of our society turning. So for example, not just what I like to call Friday yoga, which could mean yoga on Fridays, or a lot of other sort of one off wellness approaches. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think Friday yoga is great.
But building in flexibility, building in appropriate salary, so people aren't stressed about that. And if higher salaries aren't an option building in other sorts of benefits, like flexibility of time, building in a culture where it is okay to take time for yourself and that culture has to start at the top with the executive suite and with the Board of Trustees who are leading by example, building a culture where it's okay to talk about mental health or physical health. All sorts of cultural changes can take place so that individually nonprofit workers can take better care of themselves and as a collective. The sector can take better care of its people.
In thinking about what that healthier sector might look like, I loved Beth Sperber Richie’s metaphor of the camp fire to talk about the phenomenon of passion exploitation – that as she points out – often impacts the newest people to the sector, early in their careers. The fire of the camp fire burns brightly – as does the fire of our passion – yet if you get too close to the fire for too long – you get burned.
Hi, this is Beth Sperber Richie from fermata consulting. When I work with nonprofits, I see a pattern happening over and over again. The sector is unhealthy because people come in particularly young people with strong, strong passion for justice, for making the world a better place. And that is so easily exploited by extracting labor, that is under compensated. And that often means that because of fewer resources, people are working harder than they should.
I like to use the metaphor of a campfire, that our passion is like a campfire that is burning brightly. And that is a wonderful warm thing. And it's beautiful to look at. And that passion is what keeps people in this very important work. And at the same time, if you spend too much time too close to a campfire, you get burnt. So we need to move in and out. We need to approach our passion and approach the work and also step away from it. To know that, as an organization, for example, we've crossed trained in different tasks and different roles and responsibilities. So people can actually take a break and step back when they're on vacation or when they are on sick leave, and not feel that they still have to be working and keeping an eye on moving the ball forward.
So the more we can spend time developing those systems and organizations that give people the opportunity to step away from the fire to step back from the passion that will allow a Healthier Work force in the nonprofit world. It'll allow for people to sustain themselves in terms of taking care of themselves and one another to keep moving the ball forward on making this world a more just place for everyone. This can happen with managers being trained on how to manage staff, and how to check in that make sure that staff are doing okay, and looking after themselves and one another. It can happen by talking to funders and foundations and saying these grants need to be done in a way that allow us to use our staff in a healthy way that provides breaktime adequate pay benefits that include health insurance that cover both physical and mental health needs.
And a whole other list of things that we do when we know that we're dealing with folks who are maybe in their first jobs that are the most vulnerable to having that work exploited and that passion exploited by creating systems within an organization to help the career development of newer and younger employees, employees who are new to the sector and need mentoring and need support and need to learn how to balance that passion with also taking breaks and taking care. So in going back to the metaphor of the campfire, sometimes it takes a manager to say to a new employee or a relatively young employee, you're too close to the fire, you're spending too much time close to the fire step back, let someone else step in, and then be able to come back next week. Ready to go again.
Lauren and Beth focused on nonprofit staff – and yet these same patterns can easily impact our volunteers. Patton McDowell talks about how volunteer and leadership roles can be crafted so that people want to do them. At a basic level – they need to be aligned with what the organization needs AND what people want to do. And they need to be well defined.
I also appreciate Patton’s point about the need to pay attention to fully recognizing our volunteers. We could not do the work that we do without them – from board members – to those who show up and do more hands on work. Whether it is a one off contribution or something more on going – having these different roles available, clearly defined and then recognizing the contribution – builds the foundations of a successful volunteer program.
Hello, I'm Patton McDowell, host of the podcast called your path to nonprofit leadership. And I'm delighted to congratulate Carol on this wonderful milestone of 100 episodes for the mission impact podcast, and I'm honored to have been part of one of them. Number one, let's make sure we align the roles with the mission and impact that staff and volunteers and board members want to do.
Often, I do not see that alignment with organizations, we miss this opportunity, especially in the simple act of defining the role, both staff and board. The second thing I'd love to see more and I think would respond favorably to this question is more emphasis on professional development and growth opportunities, volunteers, board members, and staff, they all want to get better, they wouldn't be serving in these nonprofit leadership roles if they didn't want to get better.
So let's make sure we provide opportunities for enrichment for resource development for professional development. And organizations will indeed benefit as a result. And last but not least, the third element that I believe responds to this question is let's create a culture at our nonprofit organizations that features recognition and flexibility. People, volunteer and staff, they like to be acknowledged for the good work that they're doing. Do we recognize our volunteers? Do we recognize our board members? Do we put them in our various communication and social media media channels to help elevate their good work? And are we being flexible? In this day and age people are busy, and we've got to provide them the flexibility they need. They will get the job done if we allow them to have these arrangements, and then they can in fact enjoy their work. Enjoy these roles, and our nonprofit sector will benefit as a result. Once again, Carol, congratulations on the 100th episode, anniversary recognition and keep up the good work.
On my 10 lessons from 100 episodes, my first lesson was that In order to cultivate healthy organizational cultures, the culture has to be diverse, equitable, inclusive, welcoming by design. It has to center cultural competence and cultural humility. This is a nonnegotiable
As Liz Scott and Sabrina Walker Hernandez point out – this includes boards of directors. As BoardSource’s Leading with Intent report shows, nonprofit boards still fail to fully reflect the communities they serve and continue to lack diversity. There has been some improvement in this over the past couple years, but progress is very slow. Sabrina calls for accountability of boards for creating inclusive cultures at all levels of the organization. And for supporting and nurturing the next generation of leaders.
Imagine a nonprofit sector where every organization thrives, where inclusivity and sustainability are at the forefront, and where leadership is truly transformative. Hi, I'm Sabrina Walker Hernandez. I am the president and CEO of supporting world hope. So a healthier nonprofit sector for me, is one that thrives on inclusivity sustainability and impactful leadership. Firstly, a healthier nonprofit sector, champions Diversity, and Equity at all levels. This means that equitable board recruitment, and creating inclusive cultures where everyone feels value and heard, we must empower Employee Resource Groups driving board accountability for inclusive leadership, and inclusive excellence. by fostering an environment where diverse voices are represented and respected, we can ensure that organizations truly reflect the community we serve.
Sustainability is key. nonprofits need robust strategic planning to ensure long term success. This involves effective resource development, financial management, and communication. Impactful leadership, leadership plays a critical role and a healthier nonprofit sector. We need transformative leaders who inspire and drive growth. This involves continuous learning and embracing innovative approaches my build framework brand, unleash, inspire, leverage and discover helps leaders unlock their full potential and inspire their team teams to achieve greater impact. By focusing on personal and organizational growth, we can cultivate a new generation of leaders who are equipped to tackle the challenges of today. And tomorrow, capacity Ville building, investing and capacity building is central. This means providing training, resources and support to nonprofit leaders and staff to enhance their skills and their knowledge.
We have to do collaborations and partnerships, encouraging collaborations, and building strong partnerships within the sector and with the community can lead to greater impact. I've seen the power of partnerships and my work, where collaborations between nonprofits and community stakeholders have resulted in successful outcomes and amplified impact. embracing technology, leveraging technology to streamline operations, enhancing fundraising efforts, and improving communication is crucial in today's digital age, from utilizing CRM systems to adopting digital marketing strategies, embracing technology can significantly boost a nonprofits efficiency and reach. Together, we can build a healthier non profit sector that not only survives, but thrives, making a lasting impact for our community. Lastly, thank you for your dedication to making a difference.
I appreciate Sabrina’s reminders about building partnerships and collaborations – another of my lessons from my 100th episode – was you do not have to do it alone! And its corollary - Find your unique contribution – when you hone in on your unique strengths and competencies – you can look for those complementary skills and strengths in other organizations to build on your work.
In the matter of diversifying boards, Liz Scott addresses some of the dynamics that lead to the slow progress. She also proposes that boards shift their focus from oversight to foresight, a theme that Jeff De Cagna will build on.
Hi, this is Liz Scott CEO of brighter strategies. A healthier nonprofit sector I think starts with more inclusion and more effective Board Governance. Traditional boards often suffer from homogeneity with members being friends or colleagues or other familiar faces, which ultimately, limits diversity and innovation. To create a healthier nonprofit sector, we need to leverage organizational network theory and stakeholder mapping.
Let me start with organizational network theory is that's not a concept most people are familiar with. It's a series of tools that allows us to map and analyze relationships within and outside of an organization's network. By understanding these connections, nonprofits can identify key influencers and ensure that they are incorporating diverse perspective. From all relevant stakeholders, and organizational network theory. There are two important concepts, bonding and bridging. Bonding refers to forming connections with people who are similar to us, such as friends, family and close colleagues. While these bonds create strong supportive networks, they often lack diversity, which is an issue that we see in nonprofit governance. Bridging, on the other hand, involves forming connections with individuals who are different from us, bringing in new perspectives and ideas by encouraging bridging within boards, we can tap into a wider array of experiences and insights, fostering innovation, and more effective decision making. This shift from a bonding to a bridging approach would enhance overall board effectiveness. Instead of relying on traditional metrics that focus solely on visible attributes like gender and race, we could create more comprehensive stakeholder maps. This approach ensures that we are intentionally recruiting board members who represent a wide array of community voices and perspectives. By doing so boards could become more reflective of and more responsive to the communities that they serve.
A healthier nonprofit sector means redefining board roles to be more effective in the long run. Words could focus on strategic planning and supporting the executive director, while delegating legal and financial oversight to an executive committee or even to outside external professionals. This would allow boards to concentrate on high level decision making and strategic initiatives that are aligned to stakeholder and organizational needs. There are already some really successful examples of this work happening in our community. And for our sector. To be even better, we need to explore new ways of governing or stakeholder driven models lead the way. I think by redefining board roles and aligning board activities with organizational needs, we can create shared governance models that are not only diverse, but also deeply connected to the communities we serve. I think this shift in thinking around diversity and governance would lead to more innovative solutions, better decision making, and ultimately a greater impact on the nonprofit sector as a whole.
I am intrigued with the idea that boards might hire help in supporting them in their fiduciary responsibilities, instead of trying to recruit people with financial or legal skills on to the board. And then really shift their focus on anticipating and planning for the future. On episode 42, Marla Bobowick noted that too many boards spend their time looking backwards instead of forward. Board meetings are full of reports about what has already happened. She, Liz and Jeff De Cagna all advocate for shifting the focus to what is coming, rather than always looking in the rear view mirror.
Hi, I'm Jeff De Cagna, executive advisor for Foresight First LLC. And I'm going to take a contrarian perspective on this because I actually don't think it's about creating roles that people will be excited to step into, but rather preparing.
Our stakeholders preparing our contributors to participate in the roles that we need them to fulfill and be ready to undertake the responsibilities of those roles. I believe part of the problem that we face in the association nonprofit sector is that we expect everyone to be a leader. That is part of our orthodoxy and not everyone wants to be a leader, but they want to make a contribution.
So that's why I focus my work. In my conversations with decision makers, with boards and with senior decision makers in associations and nonprofits on stewardship, the need for people to think and act together and to recognize that their shared responsibility is to leave their organizations, leave their systems for which they are responsible better than how they found them.
And stewardship is about sharing that burden. It begins with a sense of agency that they can work together to create a better organization, a better set of systems, and that they share the responsibility for doing that. that the vulnerability that they might feel is not something they have to carry themselves.
They can share that vulnerability, that sense of, there's a lot of challenge in all this. We are facing considerable obstacles, forces beyond our control. That is something that no one person needs to carry alone. And so if we look at it through a stewardship lens, the vulnerability that often makes it hard for people to accept these kinds of roles need not be something that is entirely on them.
And then finally, this is about finding our way together. There's no playbook for the challenges that we face in the second half of this decade, which will begin in January of 2025. We have to find our way into the future, and every decision maker in associations and non profits must accept the choice of wayfinding instead of the opportunity for certainty, which is simply not available to us in this kind of dynamic environment.
So for me, the challenge ahead of us as we look toward the second half of this decade and into the 2030s. It's to help our voluntary decision makers, our boards, our committees and everyone who's working with them on the staff side to understand that we have to find ways to get away from individualism in the way that our organizations function and more towards collective action in order to ensure that we are going to be able to steward our organizations into the future.
This is a time where we need every available contributor to participate. In this very important work, and the best way for that to happen is through a collective commitment and a shared sense of stewardship in our organizations. And I think that's the way that we help people operate successfully within our roles and especially at the board level when boards see themselves.
As temporary occupants of their roles of the seats that they hold and recognize their responsibility as a long term responsibility to leave the organization better than how they found it that changed the dynamics of the conversation quite considerably. And I will close with a question that I shared in my conversation with Carol on the podcast, everyone who's serving on a board.
And really everyone who's trying to advance an association into the future should be asking themselves, what will our successors say about us at some point in the future, our choices, our actions will be evaluated by our successors. And I'm not talking about the people who will become part of our organizations or join the board the next year or two.
I'm talking about the people. Who we will never know personally will become part of our organizations as we move into the 2030s and beyond. They will look back on what we did or did not do in 2024 and 2025 and evaluate, make a judgment. About whether we were caring about what happened to them, whether we were taking appropriate steps to leave things better for them than how we found it for ourselves and having that long term view.
And that's the question that should really motivate people in thinking about their responsibilities to our organizations. What will our successors say about us? A question we should all be asking every day.
Jeff has made a career of being a contrarian – and I would answer that I don’t actually think we need to choose between creating roles that people want to do and preparing folks for what we need them to do – I would hope we would find the venn diagram of the two.
Too many volunteer roles were scoped a long time ago within a very different set of circumstances. How might we create roles that fit today’s realities of peoples’ lives, work and responsibilities? And then fully prepare them to do those roles.
I am in total agreement with Jeff about the need to focus on stewardship and a collective commitment to the future we are trying to build together.
With that I will close out with Jeff’s question – to myself and to each of you – what will our successors say about us in the future – how will they evaluate our choices and actions? Will they be able to see how our choices today created the conditions for a thriving future?
Will my future self thank me for what I put into motion today?
Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate the time you spend with me and my guests. You can find out how to connect with each of the experts who shared their thoughts today, the full transcript of our conversation, as well as any links and resources mentioned during the show in the show notes at missionimpactpodcast.com/shownotes.
I want to thank Isabelle Strauss-Riggs for her support in editing and production as well as Charde Carbonell of 100 Ninjas for her production support.
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