Funders are finally noticing the flashing red lights of growing burnout across the nonprofit sector. And there’s a growing trickle of philanthropic response.

But grantmakers are missing the fundamental connections between their own funding practices, how grantees can compensate staff, why burnout is on the upswing, and how all of this damages the ability of grantors and grantees alike to achieve their shared goals.

Two new studies from the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) offer a plethora of juicy information about the crisis facing America’s nonprofit workforce — and how much funders do or do not care to address it.

I want to briefly share three reflections in response to these reports. First, burnout is extremely serious, but it is a symptom, not the problem. Second, funders must support better nonprofit wages to address nonprofit well-being. And third, funders who believe their effectiveness is not impacted by grantee burnout (which apparently is many, as you’ll see below) will hoist themselves with their own petard.

1. Burnout is the visible symptom of an invisible problem. Funding for ‘well-being’ is a band-aid. Funders need to address the underlying problem.

In the funding community, the terms “burnout” and “well-being” are being discussed as if they are the problem and the solution, respectively.

But burnout is a symptom of a larger underlying problem: a chronic deficit of investment (by foundations, government, and donors) in America’s amazing nonprofit workforce, which has been compounded by contemporary crises, most notably the nonprofit working conditions created by COVID-19 pandemic. (It sure feels good to be largely past the pandemic, but the nonprofit workforce is still reeling in the aftermath, with staff having gone through major trauma and teams still shattered by working remotely.)

Too often, funding for well-being is a band-aid that stops the bleeding after the wound has been inflicted. But it doesn’t address what is causing the wound. As scholar Dr. Christina Maslach, professor emerita of UC Berkeley has been saying for years, burnout is not only a matter of individual behavior, it’s a problem grounded in the working conditions of organizations.

While support for nonprofit well-being is being deployed largely through ‘supplementary grants,’ the primary grants they are supplementing are often part of the problem that the well-being grants are meant to address.

Read the full article about ensuring nonprofit well-being by Rusty Stahl at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.