What Funders Can Do to Fight the Nonprofit Worker Burnout Crisis
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The nonprofit sector’s workers are not OK. Decades of inadequate pay, overwork and little respect for their needs, compounded by COVID and other crises, are leading the nonprofit workforce to turn to unions and even leave the sector altogether, as Inside Philanthropy, the National Council of Nonprofits and other publications have all reported. At this point, anyone in the philanthrosphere who doesn’t know that nonprofit workers are suffering is probably not paying attention.
But while there’s a lot of information out there about the scope and reasons for this crisis, there hasn’t been a single source for funders and nonprofits to learn specific, actionable steps they can take to create the kind of sustainable, living-wage jobs that will allow nonprofits to most effectively serve their missions over the long term. That situation changed earlier this month, when All Due Respect and Staffing the Mission published “Sustainable Jobs for Organizers: A Toolkit for a Stronger Movement,” a 35-page action plan for nonprofits and funders alike. Don’t let the title fool you: While All Due Respect’s efforts are focused on nonprofit organizers, and the toolkit itself uses the language of organizing, the toolkit is a valuable guide for nonprofits and funders pretty much across the board.
The bulk of the toolkit is dedicated to what nonprofits can do, and details 10 key areas they need to address to create a sustainable workplace. That includes obvious factors like compensation, insurance and work hours, but also covers less tangible — though equally important — issues like the quality of supervision and “caring workplace conditions.”
Of course, without sufficient funding, nonprofits can’t address many of the roadblocks standing between sector jobs as they exist today and the better, more sustainable jobs they may truly want to create. The toolkit addresses those roadblocks directly in its final section, which consists of a discussion guide and specific recommendations for funders centered on two key areas: full cost funding and open communication.
Most of the recommendations listed under full cost funding will be familiar to anyone following the growing chorus of voices calling for an end to restrictive grantmaking. Specifically, the toolkit calls for funders to take actions like evaluating nonprofits by their success with their stated goals and impact instead of the money they spend on overhead, increasing grant amounts to cover costs like staff raises and benefits, and offering grantees the ability to shift the way they spend grant funds as their needs change.
None of that should come as news. Nor should it be surprising that the report suggests that funders cover these increased costs by expanding payout and eliminating waste and redundancy in their own budgets to free up more money for nonprofits.
But where the toolkit really shines is in the page on open communication, which attempts to bridge the ever-present power imbalance between funders and grantees by offering ways for nonprofits to communicate their actual needs without fear. For instance, the toolkit suggests that grantmakers openly ask about the full cost of running the entire nonprofit, and simplify their application forms and processes. But the toolkit’s most powerful recommendation regarding communication is also its simplest to implement: Funders should put a clear statement on their websites, applications and grant award letters stating that they want to support good jobs with benefits.
Funders who want to take that communication a step further are encouraged to “consider adding questions to application forms about pay levels, benefits and internal pay ratio, in a non-threatening, supportive tone to show that the foundation wants to help support good jobs.”
“A virtuous cycle” of communication between funders and grantees
The Sustainable Jobs toolkit is the result of a collaboration between All Due Respect, an organization founded in 2020 to set new labor standards for community organizers, and Staffing the Mission, a project of Class Action that seeks to provide funders and nonprofits with ways to improve the lives of nonprofit employees. Most of the data the toolkit draws upon comes from research All Due Respect conducted in partnership with the Ford Foundation starting in 2020, during which the organization surveyed and interviewed more than 200 organizers, executive directors and funders. Staffing the Mission provided additional data from a survey it administered for its 2020 “Staffing the Mission” report.
All Due Respect and Staffing the Mission are among a number of organizations, including Fund the People and the Wellbeing Project, that are taking overlapping approaches to improving the lives of the nonprofit workforce. On the funding side, the Wellbeing Project’s Funders & Wellbeing Group is on the case, as are individual funders like the Durfee Foundation and others that are providing additional stipends to boost the wellbeing of nonprofit workers. The Nonprofit Finance Fund also put out a call for full cost funding; as previously noted, there have been too many calls on funders to loosen their restrictions and purse strings to sum up adequately in this space — calls that, for the most part, aren’t yet being heeded. What sets the Sustainable Jobs toolkit apart is that it’s the first document we’ve seen that attacks the nonprofit starvation cycle with recommendations for both nonprofits and funders.
That approach is no accident. According to Alicia Jay, co-director of All Due Respect, the toolkit reflects her organization’s theory of change. “It really requires all three of our key audiences, directors, organizers and funders, to actually make substantive change for organizers,” she said.
Betsy Leondar-Wright, Staffing the Mission’s coordinator, said that nonprofits share some responsibility because they “do not tell the truth about what’s going on” in their organizations. “They want to sound really healthy,” rather than risk punitive actions from funders, she said. In place of that, Leondar-Wright went on, the goal of the toolkit is to help both sides create “a virtuous cycle, an upward spiral” of communication — a cycle that has to start where the power lies, which is why the toolkit urges funders to communicate their desire to fund good, sustainable jobs frequently and consistently. “Right now, everybody in the nonprofit world assumes that funders want an organization to be able to accomplish this huge, unrealistic amount with an unrealistically small amount of money,” she said. Funders who clearly communicate otherwise could help shift that status quo.
“They’re the ones who don’t get it yet”
The toolkit is still very new, but Leondar-Wright told IP that she has received an enthusiastic response at one presentation she’s led that featured the toolkit, and All Due Respect’s Jay said that so far, “the people that have been most hungry and relieved and have appreciated the work are burnt-out organizers.” Additionally, Jay said, her impression is that nonprofit directors have been really grateful that third parties — a pair of organizations that don’t have grants on the line — are talking clearly about philanthropy’s responsibility to heal the nonprofit starvation cycle.
Where the metaphorical rubber will really hit the road, though, is in the reception the toolkit and its recommendations receive from top decision-makers at funders themselves. Organizers, other nonprofit workers, nonprofit executive directors and even individual foundation program officers may all be grateful for the toolkit and want to make its recommendations a reality. But as Leondar-Wright has been hearing from program officers and nonprofit staff alike, the people who really need to see the toolkit are foundation board members. “They’re the ones who don’t get it yet,” she said.
Eventually, though, funding leaders, including boards, are going to have to answer a simple question, even if only to themselves: How can a foundation claim it wants to pursue lofty goals like alleviating poverty, ending systemic racism and creating a better world for all people, when its funding practices are actually making the world worse for the workers tasked with making those goals a reality?
