Two years ago, burnout in the nonprofit sector was a five-alarm fire — and it’s only spread and raged further since then. At the time, I wrote “A Call for Self-Care in Social Impact” for this publication where I pointed to troubling statistics about the rate and intensity of burnout among social impact leaders and their teams and shared how Elevate Prize is resourcing leaders to combat the root causes of burnout. I hoped to return with better news, but, sadly, the opposite is true.

Not only are we still standing at the same precarious edge, but the drop is steeper. This year, the proportion of nonprofit CEOs reporting that burnout is “very much” a concern jumped to 46%, nearly double the number who reported the same last year and the highest in three years of CEP tracking. It made me wonder: in a world determined to do more with less, is burnout a resource issue or a mindset issue?

That article described how leaders are confronting injustice, corruption, pandemics, and crumbling institutions while building solutions and full lives outside of work. The stakes were already unreasonably high, the resources already unfairly insufficient, so that “the idea of worrying about oneself seems less possible in the face of unrelenting and urgent need.” That was 2024. Today, 73% of nonprofits are seeing increased demand while facing heightened financial instability, staffing challenges, and fear. Might we consider a radically different approach to supporting leaders? When the battle changes shape, the strategy must too.

Reducing Burnout Among Nonprofit Leaders: The Strategic Impetus of Whole Leader Support

At the Elevate Prize Foundation, we have spent nearly seven years developing a new kind of support we call Whole Leader: leadership grounded in both purpose and presence, where mental, emotional, and spiritual alignment creates the inner clarity that fuels outer impact. This is not a wellness add-on. It is the philosophy underpinning everything Elevate does — our grantmaking, our counsel, our retreats, our coaching, and our team’s own culture. It begins with a simple, radical premise: supporting a leader’s inner life is not a luxury. It is the strategic impetus.

Read the full article about burnout in the nonprofit sector by Carolina García Jayaram at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.