Purpose Driven: Community as Healing
Leadership roles in the non-profit sector are both exciting and challenging at the same time. The excitement flows from having a clear sense of purpose and the knowledge that you are part of something bigger than yourself. In the best moments, non-profit leaders feel a sense of positive impact, connection with a community of people with shared values and passion, and they experience the exciting roller coaster of commitment in action.
But these roles also come with deep challenges that are rarely about the individuals occupying the Executive Director, Co-Director, or CEO role. The context within which non-profit organizations are striving to make change, serve marginalized communities, create art, and/or transform systems is the main contributor to the burnout and the serious health impacts that many people in the sector experience. And this impact is growing as the world engages in upheavals that place us all in a state of anxiety, and sometimes danger—upheavals in which the solutions are not yet clear. And our sector is all about solutions.
I have played a leadership role in many non-profits over the years, and I see that there are new realities at play, compressing what was – even 30 years ago – a very stressful ecosystem in which to function within. The contextual factors haven’t changed, but have compounded, and emerging leaders are eyeing these roles and organizations, with healthy scepticism. Over the years that I have been an Executive Director, an Interim ED, a board member, or an external advisor to non-profit leaders, I have watched the pressures build, hitting their peak during the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic global meltdown. The result is a sector with much higher demand, navigating increased mental health challenges, and struggling to keep programs in place.
And yet, in my years in the sector I have also seen remarkable, healthier, and beautiful ways that communities push back against that darkness. I say ‘community’ purposefully because at the core of all truly thriving non-profits is a community. In fact, to combat the forces at play, building community is a central strategy.
Context: Corporate and colonial systems dominate society’s ideas about what success looks like. Our Canadian economic and social systems are framed by colonial government and corporate power. We live in a world in which growth, profit, and productivity define what success looks like. Our structures are designed to protect the extraction and hoarding of wealth. The legal structure of our governance openly mirrors corporate structures and, because the decision-makers don’t know any other way, there are deeply embedded assumptions and myths about ownership, subjectivity, leadership, and financial benefits ingrained in how our organizations are designed.
Solution: Purpose-driven governance. There is no ‘best’ practice in governance no matter what the ‘experts’ say. Don’t fall for it! There is a wide range of possibilities when it comes to designing how an organization makes decisions for itself in fact; we have more control over how our Board of Directors functions than we think. Delegating decision-making to communities served, staff and teams, and others is possible.
Entry points into change: Ensure the organization’s purpose is front and centre at all board meetings, team gatherings, community, and committee meetings. Make time to discuss and explore the purpose, what it means, who it impacts. Have fun creating infographics and various expressions of that core purpose. It is inspiring and builds alignment and shared vision.
Context: At a meta-level, the leadership that non-profit organizations provide to communities, towns, and the province is mostly under the radar. Some people assume the beloved services they access are provided by the government, others call every entity a ‘company’. At a micro-level, the role of the ED/CEO is not visible to anyone but the ED themselves. It has unique pressures and accountabilities with a board of volunteers applying corporate performance review approaches, a staff frustrated by lack of clarity, funders and donors with significant reporting expectations, and community ‘partners’ in competition mode. Both the meta and the micro levels mean that EDs are in a constant state of translation and editing. Non-profits are constantly explaining themselves and their value, which is disheartening and can undermine well-being.
Solution: Shared leadership, pride and myth-busting. Sharing leadership is key to thriving non-profits. Whether it is through having co-leadership roles, building a culture of mutual respect with boards, or unmasking the challenges and sharing the pressure with staff and volunteers more effectively, empowering leadership in others ought to be the central focus of non-profit management. In my experience, there are many examples from 2SLGBTQ+ communities in which pride is used for a tool for healing including celebrating differences, finding joy in community, and refusing to be invisible.
Entry points into change: The ‘Sharing the Executive Director Role’ graphic shows the roles and responsibilities we expect EDs to take on. The job involves expertise in too many areas. Taking some time with the board and staff to really understand these areas of leadership is the first step of any change. Acknowledging the truth is the first step in any meaningful change process. Trying co-leadership and exploring organizational structure options are important steps to take. Another entry point is to explore power together and build shared values around how power structures ought to align with what you are trying to achieve.
Context: Unlike for-profit organizations, non-profits are not encouraged to invest in themselves. When your purpose is to make a profit, it is not difficult to make the case for investing in administrative and infrastructure needs. No pizza restaurant needs to justify spending money on pizza boxes because it is seen as necessary to make a profit. Sadly, non-profits are bombarded with a range of confusing messages about the importance of spending revenue directly on programs and services. The resulting financial dance creates a powerful and deeply held culture of scarcity in the sector. Staff pay the price through lower wages, old tech, and unhealthy facilities. Leadership in the sector experience similar damaging impacts compounded by scrambling to fill in administrative gaps personally.
Solution: Pride comes to mind again, but one thing the non-profit sector has been good at, the thing that we have lost as we build structures and cultures that mirror corporate ones, is our community development skills.
The four principles of community development are:
- Inform – give people information and support their understanding so they can be active participants in decisions affecting their community.
- Consult – create spaces and conversations that result in meaningful community insights, insights that shape and transform the journey forward
- Collaborate – working together around a shared purpose doesn’t always require full partnership, but success is achieved when people come together around agreement instead of conflict.
- Empower leadership – leadership isn’t about roles, but about creating pathways for others to succeed. Leadership is the strategic application of wisdom, not authority and control – and it shows up everywhere if we create the conditions for it to blossom.
Entry points: Build a culture of abundance by investing in and recognizing the strengths of people. Money is the tool, not the objective. Introduce Appreciative Inquiry approaches to everything from performance reviews to strategic planning to board meeting agendas. Engage in uncovering what is working, where the strengths are, and define what is needed to build on your current awesomeness. People like to fund awesome.
Context: The window of public support for decolonization, equity, and inclusion initiatives is closing rapidly. There was a moment in which DEI was understood in North America as a positive goal to work toward across sectors and institutions. The stress of watching it slam shut in the United States and creak slowly downward in Canada is heartbreaking for most of us in community-based work. The reality of past, present, and future discrimination and the emotional toll of being racialized, tokenized, and/or oppressed is exhausting at the very least, and frighteningly dangerous for many in its emerging forms.
Solution: Community in action is the key, but non-profit leaders, when isolated within dominant organizational and social cultures, can’t solve this one alone. The best we can do is seek peer support, empower others to challenge assumed norms, and model what equity in action looks like. And take care of ourselves by setting boundaries and accessing supports outside of the organization.
Entry points: In the moments that people around us inflict lateral and direct microaggressions, we don’t always know how to respond in the moment on how to shut it down. It takes practice and the building of safe connections. We can also return to these moments later to communicate the impact when you know you have allies.
In non-profit work, our purposes may be directly serving people with specific needs, or we may be working at the systemic level seeking changes to the causes of those needs. Or both. My observations suggest that burnout in the sector is – in part – a result of the division between these two. Being on the frontlines, seeing the same challenges, the same barriers, and the same tragic outcomes of our social, political, and economic systems is exhausting to say the least. Trying to communicate the stories and realities we see to anyone who has power to make a difference feels virtually impossible. Even if the organizational leaders are actively pursuing systemic change, they often aren’t making themselves accountable to frontline staff in that work.
As the organization grows, applying more and more corporate systems to manage the under-resourced administrative infrastructure (usually on the advice of Board members), non-profit leaders can create more distance between direct service and systemic change, a distance that is unhealthy and soul-crushing for everyone.
Solution: Build links and communication systems that ensure everyone knows how the day-to-day work is contributing to efforts for systemic change. From my perspective we need to draw on community development principles and learnings from Indigenous and queer communities about how to centre joy and pride and the healing nature of connection.
Entry points: Microaggressions, direct racism, and discrimination are challenging things to confront and exhausting when you are isolated or without affinity connections. If we are in leadership roles, we can practice confronting these things in the moment and building affinity and connection within the group. Sometimes that means leaving the negative words or actions on the table, taking some time, and addressing them when we have the words and strength to do so. Community care takes time.
In summary, leadership roles in non-profits come with power, and there are opportunities for all of us to do it differently by sharing that power, insisting on community-based systems, and building visibility across the organization and out into the world. But the power we see and feel is also impacted by contexts beyond our control, making the roles more isolating than most people understand. This isolation impacts our health and the health of the team. We can shift the dial by confronting those contexts together, in, with, and for the communities we care about.