By Elizaphan Ogechi, Nguzo Africa Community Foundation, Kenya, and
Eme Iniekung, GivingTuesday, Nigeria
In one of the reflection sessions, the 2022 #ShiftThePower fellows were paired to share the essence of self-care and solidarity in their work. Most of these reflections focussed on the degenerative behaviour of non profit workers who often became unbearably busy, stressed and burnt out. Many non profit workers and leaders ignore these red flags saying their work is a lifestyle, often propelled by passion and doing good for humanity.
"We are often trying to do so many things until we forget ourselves. We are really underfunded on staff salaries and welfare. Struggling to balance between work and self-care is a major challenge. Funders to consider the state of those involved in their projects. Doing good sometimes can be a lonely undertaking," said Eme Iniekung, GivingTuesday, Nigeria.
"How can we guard against burnout and keep our organisations afloat? Donor funding is often skewed towards activities, completely ignoring staff welfare, health and support. There is need for non profit solidarity to address this critical issue," said Elizaphan Ogechi , Nguzo Africa, Kenya.
In a blog post at #ShiftThePower TreeHouse, Mariane Maier Nunes, had an interesting view on this issue. She said that during her first year as an Executive Director of Community Foundation in Brazil, work was intense.
Through support of organisation development consultant, she started listing all her roles the community foundation had and listed them on small pieces of paper (projects, services, calls for proposals, institutional tasks, important spaces they were participating, etc). These classification of roles helped her to have big picture of immense tasks she had and it was clear that, she needed a clear structure and dedicated teams to support in achieving of organisation results.
"Sometimes you fall into places of blindness and you don't know how you ended up there. You can become inert with all of the overwhelming responsibility and pressure that comes along with taking care of so many different aspects of the organization at the same time," said Mariane.
Often, you find yourself doing more, more, more, often with fewer and fewer resources. Your passion for people you serve pushes you further to the extent of ignoring and forgetting yourself.
Due to sporadic short-term funding , you often find yourself in the grant funding starvation cycle of writing proposals, jumping from meetings to meetings, writing reports, in field travels and undertaking organisation operations and governance demands. When this is repeated year after-year, there comes a breaking point where passion dwindles under the weight of pressure, and the mission suffers as a result.
This pressure is higher, in small non-profits who have limited resources to hire and sustain talents because the nature of short-term project funding.
Self-care as defined by Hannah Massarella team at Bird is: establishing and prioritising a routine of self support that promotes better health and wellbeing and leads to more creativity, improved productivity and stronger relationships.
Self-care is always something you should prioritize to maintain stability and a positive mindset.
In the book, The Happy, Healthy Nonprofit: Strategies for Impact without Burnout, Beth Kanter and Aliza Sherman says that employee wellbeing takes a front seat next to organizational performance, with clear guidance on establishing optimal systems and processes that bring about better results while allowing a healthier work-life balance. By improving attitudes and personal habits at all levels, you'll implement a positive cultural change with sustainable impact.
Lessons from Kenya
Non profits leaders and workers for national and community organisations are often forgotten in development funding. With an average funding duration of 2 years, many non-profit workers often sign one to two year short-term contracts. Their job security and staff wellbeing is hardly factored in project planning, because most the developing funding goes to activities. To survive, many nonprofits worker are restless, often on the job seeking mode, because they are not sure what will happen to them when the year ends.
Others are on constant proposal writing cycles to ensure that the salary pots are full.
Interestingly, there is hardly active employee and employer unions that brings together workers and leaders in this sector. In such situation, the issues of staff welfare and staff rights are often ignored. You get hired for 3 years, get paid and pap, you hit back to streets of joblessness.
The inherent non-profit organizational culture often promote burnout. The more you work, the more likely you will be retained if new opportunities emerges. In most cases, funders promote this by limiting administrative and personnel funding to less than 15%.
Appreciating these challenges, many non-profits in Kenya are moving towards establishing social enterprises to cushion their staff from job cut pains. Building of organisation assets and infrastructure for growth is now being prominent consideration by many local non profits.
Lessons from Nigeria
The importance and place of self care tends to get lost in development work, especially when nuances like competition, funding scarcity and project-to- project cycles are considered. This is pointedly true in the Nigeria development system.
The average nonprofits staff is overworked - being both project manager, relations personnel, communications officer, monitoring and evaluation personnel, fundraiser, donor relations officer, and community engagement specialist, HR.. and more. It’s no wonder that social impact work is likened to being ‘thankless’ as ‘passion’ is seen as both a drive, motivator and just reward.
Political, social and economic realities silhouette development professionals in Nigeria, especially in relation to expats, and non-indigent staff. Because cost and quality of living are abyssmally, even those who are to be ‘helpers’ and ‘saviours’ have a difficult time considering their mental health or wellbeing.
Calls are being made by local nonprofits and national networks across the country to increase self-regulation policies and be better positioned for granting. Alternative resource mobilisation systems are being explored, especially with younger nonprofits. Collaboration and co-creation are becoming more accepted and actively sought out.
While conversations and shifting frameworks around equity, diversity and inclusion are ongoing, shifts in self-care and solidarity must begin too.
While non profit managers must begin to question the fairness of placing the burden of several different roles on staff, and the burden of running operations on skeletal staff.
In a bid to build trust and a semblance of fairness, funders must begin to redefine relations with implementing partners (especially locally/), to ones that are more equitable and take local realities into consideration. Project and administration overhead must be implemented into grant calls.
Way forward
Given the immense value that self-care contribute to organisation growth and achievement of mission outcomes, it is important to consider the following at individual, organisational and funders levels. We should amplify our attention and discussion around the importance of good mental health and wellbeing in the non-profit workplace.
Individual levels - Local NGO Staff and their leader s
- Your are encouraged to invest on your self-care. You should simple adopt self care tips such as exercising, doing less, taking breaks, provide flexible working and seeking professional support.
- You should save cushion yourself when your project/programme contract ends.
Invest on your professional development by growing your skills and expertise. - Build solidarity to champion for establishment among the non profit workers -learn from each, connect and build personal growth networks.
- Have strong support system that l helps you have a good work-life balance. Sometimes let go the pressures and stress of life. Go party, Go on holiday. Take a hike! Let's go!z
Organisation level - Local/Community Non profits
- Put staff welfare at the front. Local and community non profits should develop and implement social welfare policies and strategies to make NGO workplace conducive. The strategy will help leaders examine their existing organization, identify trouble spots, and resolve issues with attention to all aspects of operations and culture. It shall help to establish systems and processes that enable sustainable change.
- Allocate funds for self-care services and events such as have professional psychologists to talk with staff. Support holding team building and staff retreat activities. Have well thought annual mentorship programs for staff and non profit leaders.
- Establish social enterprises to cushion staff redundancies when their project contract ends.
- Organizations must attempt to educate their donors. “Donors don’t want to pay for an organization’s rent, or phone bill, or stamps,” notes Paul, “but those are essential components of everyday work. You can’t run a high-performing organization from your car. And there are many ways to explain these types of expenses to donors.”
- Adopt digital transformation strategies to do more with less.
Funders level
- Provide dedicated funds for nonprofit leadership development to enhance mentorship, coaching, capacity build and growing of non profit leaders.
- Funding to stop funding starvation cycles for small nonprofits by increasing funding period and set at least 30% of programme budgets to cover for administrative and staff welfare.
- Provide unrestricted funds to community organisations to growth their infrastructure and staff welfare. Local organisations should be given opportunity to define their staff, administrative and operations costs.
- Have greater understanding of the leadership gap and how to solve so that propellers of social sector building durable organisations offering innovations and scaling social-services delivery initiatives.
The authors are the 2022 #ShiftThePower Fellows.