“We are in what feels like daily crisis mode. Our staff is small and overtaxed. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to run the organization, and we haven’t had the luxury of much down time.”

The sentiment above was shared by a respondent to a CEP survey of nonprofit leaders earlier this year. Leaders of nonprofit organizations across the country are making difficult trade-offs between getting critically important work done and the exhausted staff who are doing that work. A top finding in the recently-released report based on these data — State of Nonprofits 2024: What Funders Need to Know — is that there is significant concern, both ongoing and deepening, about staff and leadership burnout among nonprofit organizations.

In light of that, the Research team at CEP wanted to understand how funders are understanding, approaching, and acting on the subject of burnout, and more broadly, nonprofit staff mental health and well-being. In CEP’s newest Research Snapshot — a brief, data informed series designed to answer timely, specific questions relevant to funders — released today, we found that nonprofit leaders’ concern about burnout at their organizations is shared by leaders of foundations. More than a third of the 283 foundation leaders who responded to a CEP survey last fall indicated that they are concerned about staff burnout for most or all of the organizations they fund.

Foundation leaders also appear to see a relationship between burnout among their grantee organizations and their foundation’s ability to achieve its goals — more than 40 percent of foundation leaders said that grantee burnout has a ‘moderate’ to ‘significant’ impact on their foundation’s ability to achieve its own mission.

In addition, and perhaps unsurprisingly, funders having a greater understanding of their grantees’ well-being was related to a higher likelihood of action when it comes to supporting that well-being. While we found that the majority of funders say they have at least some degree of understanding about the current state of staff well-being within the organizations their foundation funds, about half report engaging in practices to support it. However, foundation leaders who report having a ‘deep’ understanding of the state of their grantees’ well-being are almost twice as likely to engage in practices to support well-being.

Read the full article about foundation concern about nonprofit staff burnout by Seara Grundhoefer at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.