Bi-Weekly Wellbeing Brief: 9/14/2026
September 14 Overview
After a two-month summer pause, the Bi-Weekly Wellbeing Brief is back! We revamped our branding for a fresher look, and added a new section with our own personal insights on what we’re seeing in our work as Organizational Wellbeing Strategists and People + Culture Partners.
The summer brought plenty of evidence that nonprofit burnout isn’t going away. However, we’re continuing to see more recognition that addressing burnout isn’t simply about individual resilience or having good wellness benefits. Instead, it is very much about how workplaces are funded, designed, staffed, and led.
🪫 The B-word: What’s happening with Burnout?
This article from Nonprofit Quarterly traces burnout directly to the sector’s reliance on short-term, project-based funding. This funding often doesn’t cover the full cost of staffing, supervision, administration, or professional development. Meanwhile, Candid reports that financial instability, staff cuts, growing community demand, and burnout are colliding in organizations across the nonprofit sector.
A recent study from the United Way of Central Iowa found that health and human service nonprofits are experiencing increased demand alongside their own workforce challenges.
The The Southern Maryland Chronicle shared that Fido & Friends closed its pet assistance program after citing volunteer burnout–bringing attention to how burnout can impact nonprofit supporters and not just paid workers.
The Nonprofit Times argues that the broader workforce strategy in the United States has overlooked the social sector, despite the fact that social-sector instability affects the communities and systems that everyone depends on. Burnout and workforce challenges in the social sector have an impact across entire ecosystems.
Newsweek is helping to make the connection between how low pay impacts burnout and staff turnover–both of which impede an organization’s ability to fight social inequities in their communities.
💭 Innovations & New Thinking
Nonprofit Finance Fund has released a series of informative videos on why Nonprofit Worker Well-being Is Community Well-being--pointing to the possibilities that come with nonprofit workforce investments,
In this article, Candid highlights flexible work, wellness programs, and connection to mission as part of a whole-person approach.
InsuranceNewsNet points to a growing trend and need to improve access to healthcare benefits for nonprofit employees—an important reminder that wellbeing includes the things people need to live well in their day-to-day lives, and not just the things organizations can offer during the workday.
There are growing conversations about burnout prevention moving into leadership practice. An article from Streamline encourages leaders to initiate quarterly conversations about burnout risk as a key leadership practice.
A research-based resilience program from Indraloka demonstrates the power of using evidence-informed programming to actively reduce burnout rather than waiting for people to reach a breaking point.
Candid uplifted the work of the David Rockefeller Fund and their approach to investing in the people doing the work, including investments in capacity building and direct funding for wellbeing support.
Our friends at R&R: The Rest Of Our Lives continue to make the case for something nonprofits have historically struggled to treat as an organizational investment: rest. Their most recent report examines decades of philanthropic investment in nonprofit leadership sabbaticals and the growing recognition that rest can be infrastructure. Join them again next month to continue the conversation.
📍 Insights From Do Good Leadership Collective: Wellbeing Needs A Home
One of the most encouraging shifts we’re seeing in our own work is the emergence of wellness and culture committees inside nonprofits. These groups help to distribute responsibility–as wellbeing initiatives often fall on the desks of HR Teams, Executive Directors, or random team members who find themselves voluntold to lead people and culture initiatives although it does not fit within their job description.
We have seen firsthand success in organizational wellbeing initiatives when staff of all backgrounds and experience have a formal system to:
Safely surface the stressors they’re experiencing at work
Voice their recommendations for what needs to change
Influence organizational decisions with wellbeing in mind
Help keep wellbeing on the agendas throughout the organization
This is a large part of what Do Good Leadership Collective has been exploring with our partners this year: moving wellbeing from a ‘thing’ people can participate in, to an organizational practice that shapes how decisions get made. To learn more about how we help organizations integrate wellbeing into systems, get in touch.
✅ Quick Takeaways
→ Burnout is often a capacity problem, not a problem of people’s commitment to or passion for a mission
→ Resilience cannot compensate for chronically unsustainable working conditions
→ Benefits, compensation, staffing, workload, funding, autonomy, and rest are all wellbeing issues
→ Funders can play an important role in creating the conditions for people to thrive.
→ The most sustainable wellbeing strategies are embedded into organizational infrastructure
Do Good Leadership Collective is a national People + Culture Partner that helps social impact professionals Do Good and Be Well.
