A sabbatical can be more than just a time for rest, reflection, and regeneration. As I’ve observed through engagement with hundreds of other founders in social entrepreneurship communities over the past decade, most founders end up doing one of three things: burning out and leaving by around the decade mark, adapting and evolving to set a healthy stage for their departure, or—in the worst case scenario, a symptom of founder’s syndrome—staying on while continuing patterns that don’t keep pace with organizational needs. As I’ve learned from my own experience, sabbaticals can have a catalytic role in serving as an organizational reset and time to allow founders and their teams to see what’s required for them to successfully adapt and evolve to a place where the founder role is sustainably replaceable. The founder sabbatical can spark evaluation of organizational systems, exploration of how power is used, and can show what organizational changes are required to achieve equity now and in the future. Indeed, organizations' health and long-term stability may depend on them. But to work, founders, boards, and teams need to:

  1. Set a sabbatical policy early on, plan for it, resource it, and expect it;
  2. Use sabbaticals to foster sustainability through indispensable, independent space for founders and teams; and
  3. Build systems that don’t require sabbaticals simply to recharge, recognizing that wellness takes daily intention and prioritization.

The word “sabbatical” may provoke the reaction that they are a luxury, open only to well-resourced organizations, alongside race, class, and sector-based privilege to rightfully explore. There are intense and unique barriers to capital for founders of color, and sabbaticals require resources. Zooming out from social enterprise, for the vast majority of work done by the vast majority of the world’s workers, a sabbatical is an impossibility. But rather than accepting a race to the bottom of standards, we need to collectively shift towards a mindset where time off for basic care is possible. Indeed, founders—and the funders who resource them— have a responsibility to use their power to create work cultures with an equity mindset, rejecting the trope of the underpaid, overworked, mission-driven worker, and correcting for the resource divide between white-led organizations with easier access to capital than Black and Indigenous counterparts. Our understanding of a healthy workplace must mirror the advocacy that we and our allies are doing to advance rights and benefits for low-wage workers and workers of color worldwide. Choices are a privilege: We all need to start where we have the choice to start.

Read the full article about organizational sabbaticals by Natalie Bridgeman Fields at Stanford Social Innovation Review.