Bi-Weekly Wellbeing Brief: 9/28/2026
September 28 Overview
What if burnout is telling us something about the systems people are working inside, and not just telling us what is wrong with the workforce? This week’s research and trends point to a familiar pattern: nonprofit workers are carrying growing demands while navigating funding instability, inadequate resources, rising costs, uncertainty, and moral complexity. The silver lining is that we’re also seeing organizations experiment with more collective, structural approaches to wellbeing.
🪫 The B-word: What’s happening with Burnout?
A new Fortune analysis argues that foundations have not responded proportionately to the severity of the current nonprofit crisis. The authors point to alarming burnout, layoffs, closures, and increased community need, while questioning whether foundations are using their considerable assets and long-term horizons to provide nonprofits with the support they need now.
Independent Sector’s new review of nonprofit workforce research puts burnout alongside financial insecurity, retention, compensation, benefits, external instability, and organizational culture as interconnected workforce challenges. Their review of 61 research articles, 80 policies, 64 capacity-building programs, and 50 funders reinforces something we’ve been saying for years: burnout doesn’t happen in isolation.
Reporting from United Way Centraide Canada finds that nonprofit care workers are experiencing increased burnout and mental-health challenges amid labor shortages.
An emerging concept worth paying attention to is moral injury. The Good Men Project describes how nonprofit professionals can experience deep distress when organizational decisions, funding pressures, or institutional practices conflict with the values that brought them into the work in the first place.
💭 Innovations & New Thinking
A recent grant program from the Community Foundation of Hancock County is putting resources directly toward team-building for nonprofits. This small but meaningful idea highlights that connection, trust, collaboration, and relationships are part of what makes nonprofit work sustainable.
Atlanta educators now have something called Self-Care Con, a gathering designed specifically to give teachers practical mental-health and wellness tools they can carry throughout the school year. The event goes beyond traditional “treat yourself” messaging and focuses on skills, connection, and sustainable practices. We are curious what a nonprofit-sector version would look like?
Candid is lifting up its latest Social Impact Staff Retention research, which offers a refreshingly direct intervention for the nonprofit sector: looking at workloads. Across three years of data, inequitable workloads are one of the leading reasons employees say they plan to leave. Candid recommends auditing capacity, questioning whether existing programs still make sense, and creating enough “slack” for people to think, experiment, and rest.
📍 Insights From Do Good Leadership Collective: Treat the system, not just the symptom
A lot of workplace wellbeing conversations start with the individual: How can we help people manage stress? How can we build resilience? What wellness benefit can we offer?
These questions have value, but they do not fully address the conditions that are creating stress in the first place. At Do Good Leadership Collective, we are increasingly focused on supporting organizations in looking upstream to address systems and not just symptoms.
In practice, this looks like:
Running focus groups and interviews about workplace stressors rather than running people through another resilience workshop
Reviewing policies and employee benefits before scheduling an org-wide yoga class
Considering how people and culture fit into your strategic plan
Challenging leadership practices, decision-making, role clarity, and power dynamics
Yes, we believe people deserve tools to care for themselves. We also believe that systems need to shift to make this possible. To learn more about how we help organizations integrate wellbeing into systems, get in touch.
✅ Quick Takeaways
→ Burnout is a systems issue. Funding, workload, staffing, compensation, benefits, and organizational culture all shape people’s experience of work.
→ You can’t separate wellbeing from the conditions of the work. Asking people to be more resilient while not addressing unsustainable conditions has limits.
→ Connection is part of wellbeing. Investments in team-building, peer connection, and shared spaces for reflection can strengthen the relationships that help people sustain difficult work.
→ Sometimes retention means helping people do less.
→ The goal isn't simply to help people survive the work. Instead, it’s to create conditions where people can do meaningful work without having to sacrifice themselves to do it.
Do Good Leadership Collective is a national People + Culture Partner that helps social impact professionals Do Good and Be Well.
