Most plans for nonprofit resilience focus on what fits on a balance sheet: money and assets. We spent the last two issues there. This issue is about the resource that never shows up as an asset and is hardest to replace: the people.
You can have diversified revenue and a building you own outright and still lose the mission — because the development director who knew every major donor by name burns out and leaves, or the founder hits the wall after fifteen years of doing three jobs for one salary. Ninety-five percent of nonprofit leaders say they worry about staff burnout, and three-quarters say it is already affecting their ability to deliver the mission. Those statistics show that this talent crisis is not "coming"; it's been here for a long time, and it's getting worse.
Here is what most boards get wrong when trying to address the issue. You do not keep good people by asking them to care more or hold on longer — nonprofit staff already care more than almost anyone in any sector, which is why they are exhausted. You keep them by changing the structure of the work: the schedule, the shape of the top job, and the right to step away and recover.
The three organizations in this issue did exactly that. One rebuilt the workweek for its whole staff. One stopped asking a single leader to carry the entire load. One sends its leaders away for a season and pays to cover the gap.
Three different moves, one idea: the most durable thing you can do for your mission is to keep the people it runs on.
A portion of what you pay for this subscription goes to Rooted, a Madison-based nonprofit whose work depends — like yours — on keeping good people in hard, important jobs for the long haul. Thank you for making it possible.
A Montana Nonprofit Association Moved Its Whole Staff to a Four-Day Week — And Membership Went Up 30%
The Montana Nonprofit Association, based in Helena, did what most nonprofits assume they cannot afford. In April 2022 it joined a North American pilot of the four-day workweek — 32 hours, no cut in pay — and when the pilot ended, staff, management, and board made the shorter week permanent.
The fear is that the work stops getting done. It didn't. Membership rose 30 percent, revenue climbed while expenses dipped, and staff took fewer sick and vacation days, not more; training registrations grew 15 percent with satisfaction steady. Recruiting told the clearest story: the office-manager role that drew three applicants in 2020 drew more than 50 qualified applicants in two weeks once the same job, at the same pay, carried a four-day week.
This is not some "Big Sky Country" fluke. A 2025 study in Nature Human Behaviour tracked nearly 2,900 workers across 141 organizations in six countries through a six-month trial; burnout fell, job satisfaction and mental and physical health rose, and about 90 percent of the organizations kept the model. Nonprofits compete for talent against employers who can simply pay more, and a four-day week is one of the few benefits a cash-strapped mission can offer that competes with a bigger paycheck.
What makes it replicable: treat it as a redesign of the work, not just a shorter week (the hours come from cutting low-value meetings and work that isn't earning its place, not from cramming forty hours into thirty-two); pilot and measure before you commit, so the board decides on evidence; and advertise the shorter week as the recruiting and retention asset it is. Start with a one-quarter pilot, name three or four metrics to watch, and run a "stop doing" audit first.
If a four-day week is genuinely impossible for your operation, the insight still holds: you can compete on terms other than money, and for stretched-thin people, time and control over their own schedule matter most. But I honestly believe that moving to a four-day work week at the same salary should be strongly considered at most nonprofits.
Sources: Montana Nonprofit Association — MNA Pilots a Four-Day Work Week; National Council of Nonprofits — "The Four-Day Work Week: One Nonprofit's Positive Experience"; SUCCESS — "The 4-Day Work Week: What the Research Actually Shows".
More Than 10,000 Nonprofits Have Stopped Betting Everything on a Single Leader
The default nonprofit org chart puts one person at the top and asks them to carry fundraising, operations, HR, the board relationship, and often a piece of the program too. It is a job designed to produce burnout, and when that person breaks or leaves, the whole organization wobbles.
A growing number have stopped accepting that trade. When Candid reviewed its database in 2023, about one in five public charities — more than 10,000 organizations — were running some form of co-leadership: two or more people sharing the chief-executive role.
East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, in Los Angeles, has been co-led since its founding in 2001. ProInspire moved to co-leadership during a succession, after one incoming leader said she wanted "a more humane and caring leadership experience — to be a leader and have a life outside of work — than I had experienced in executive leadership before."
The usual design splits the role along a natural seam — one leader runs the internal world (operations, finance, staff, systems), the other the external one (fundraising, partnerships, the public face), the way arts groups pair an artistic director with a managing director — so the two divide the work instead of duplicating it.
With 95 percent of nonprofit leaders worried about burnout, the fix for a job too big for one person is to stop making it one person's job: co-leadership cuts the isolation that grinds solo executives down, doubles the judgment on hard calls, and makes succession survivable. Candid's data shows a bonus — co-led organizations are more diverse at the top, with at least 43 percent reporting one or more leaders of color.
It fails when the split is vague: one person becomes the "real" leader and the other a chief executive in name only, and decisions turn slow and political when no one knows who has the final call. So make it specific — divide by distinct domains and skills, put decision rights in writing (which decisions each leader owns alone, and which require both), and have the board govern the two as one office held to one shared set of goals.
The opening comes at your next leadership transition, when the seat is empty: before you repost the old job description, ask whether it is one job or two skill sets jammed into one salary. Even if you keep a single executive, writing down who owns which decisions relieves more pressure than another late night ever will.
Sources: Candid — "Co-leadership: A Path to More Diverse, Sustainable Nonprofits?"; Bridgespan — "Three Nonprofits Share Their Approaches to Co-Leadership"; Stanford Social Innovation Review — "A Reality Check for Nonprofit Co-Leadership".
A Growing Number of Funders Are Paying Nonprofit Leaders to Disappear for Three Months — And Their Organizations Come Back Stronger
It sounds backward. The Rasmuson Foundation in Alaska gives up to eight nonprofit and tribal leaders a year a $50,000 award whose purpose is to get them to leave — 90 to 120 continuous days, fully unplugged. The grant covers the leader's salary and the interim team, paired with free interim-leadership support from The Foraker Group so the organization keeps running while the leader is gone. The Durfee Foundation has run one for Los Angeles nonprofit leaders for more than two decades.
These programs exist because long-tenured executives, especially founders, burn out and leave, and replacing a leader of that depth can take a year and cost dearly. The surprise is what happens while the leader is away. A multi-year study of five sabbatical programs found organizations did not merely survive the absence — they came back stronger. With the executive genuinely unreachable, the second-in-command stepped up and found capacity no one knew was there, the board got a live rehearsal of succession without the emergency, and delegation that should have happened years earlier finally did.
Losing and replacing a senior leader is one of the most expensive events a small nonprofit can face — in dollars, relationships, and momentum. A planned, structured sabbatical is cheap insurance against an unplanned, chaotic departure, and you do not need $50,000 to start. Give your most critical leader two fully unplugged weeks, with a named interim and a written coverage plan, and watch: what breaks is your real succession risk, surfaced cheaply; what doesn't is capacity you didn't know you had. Structure it as a real handoff, treat it as a succession test while the founder is still there to debrief, and frame it as an investment in the organization, not a perk. Every task only one person can do is a single point of failure, and a planned absence is the cheapest way to find those points before an unplanned one does.
Sources: Rasmuson Foundation — Sabbatical Program; The Durfee Foundation — Sabbatical; Stanford Social Innovation Review — "Trust-Based Philanthropy: Funding Nonprofit Leader Sabbatical Grants".
Calculate the Real Cost of Your Last Staff Departure
Most nonprofits treat turnover as sad but free. The first may be right, but not the second — the empty seat, the scramble to cover, the search, the ramp-up months, and the knowledge that walked out the door all cost real money you never added up.
Action: Take your most recent departure of someone who mattered and total five things: the work that didn't happen while the seat sat empty; staff hours spent covering and recruiting; direct search costs; the ramp time before the replacement hit full speed (rarely under three to six months for a senior hire); and one honest line for lost relationships and knowledge. Common estimates put the cost of replacing a professional at half to twice their annual salary. Put the total in front of your board, next to your retention budget — probably zero.
ROI: If that one departure cost $40,000 to $80,000, a few thousand spent on retention — a raise, a stipend, a schedule change, a real conversation — is the highest-return spending you have.
Time: 45 minutes to estimate. 15 to present.
Write a One-Page Onboarding Checklist Before Your Next Hire
Most small nonprofits onboard by improvising — a desk, a login if someone remembers, and "let us know if you have questions." The new hire spends their first weeks guessing how the place works, at the exact moment their decision to stay is most fragile, and turnover is highest in the first year.
Action: Before your next hire starts, write a one-page checklist for their first day, week, and month: account and system access; a written who-does-what and who-to-ask list; the three documents they must read; a one-on-one with their manager inside week one; and a coffee or lunch with a colleague so they meet a human, not just a task list. Assign an owner to each item and reuse it for every hire.
ROI: A structured first 30 days improves both retention and time-to-productivity. One hour on a reusable checklist protects a hire who would cost tens of thousands to replace — and signals, on day one, that they joined an organization with its act together.
Time: 60 minutes to build the first version. Reusable after that.
Reconcile Your Donor Database Against Your Accounting Records
In most nonprofits, the development team's donor total and the finance team's revenue total don't match, and no one reconciles them until the auditor forces the issue. The gaps hide real problems: a gift entered in one system and not the other, a restricted grant miscoded as unrestricted, a lapsed major donor finance noticed and development never did.
Action: Pick one month or quarter. Pull total contributions from your donor database and total contribution revenue from accounting for the same period, compare them, and chase every discrepancy back to its cause. Then set a standing monthly or quarterly reconciliation between your development lead and your bookkeeper.
ROI: It catches lost and misallocated gifts, prevents the embarrassment of thanking a donor for the wrong amount, gives your board numbers it can trust, and makes the annual audit faster and cheaper.
Time: 90 minutes the first time. About 20 minutes a month after.
Build a Delegation Map for an Overloaded Executive Director
Small-nonprofit executives do three jobs for one salary, and the organization arranges itself around the assumption that the ED will absorb whatever falls. That is how good leaders burn out and how single points of failure form — and working harder does not fix it; deciding what only the ED can do, and moving the rest, does. Run this before you are underwater, while you still have the clarity to hand things off well.
Act as a senior nonprofit operations and leadership coach with 20+ years of experience helping overstretched executive directors of small to mid-size US nonprofits build sustainable roles. I am the ED of [describe your organization — mission, number of staff, annual budget]. Here is everything currently on my plate: [paste a list of your recurring responsibilities and roughly how many hours each takes in a typical week]. Sort every item into four buckets: (1) only I can do this — true ED-level work such as the board relationship, major donors, strategy, and key external partnerships; (2) someone else on staff could do this with training or clearer authority; (3) this could be outsourced or automated; (4) this should stop entirely. For each item in buckets 2, 3, and 4, name the most likely owner or tool and the first step to hand it off. Then tell me the three tasks I am holding that pose the biggest risk to the organization if I am the only person who can do them, and give me a 90-day plan to build a backup for each. End with the one thing I do that I should protect at all costs, because it is genuinely only mine to do.
Create a First-90-Days Guide for a Newly Promoted Manager
Nonprofits promote the best caseworker to supervisor and the best fundraiser to development director, then hand them a team with no training in how to lead one. The new manager flounders, the team feels it, and a strong individual contributor becomes a struggling boss — often out the door within a year. Run this the moment you decide on the promotion, so the new manager starts with a plan instead of improvising under pressure.
Act as a nonprofit leadership-development coach with 20+ years of experience helping small to mid-size US nonprofits grow first-time managers. Someone on my team is being promoted into their first management role: [describe the role, who they will manage, their strengths, and where they are untested]. Build a practical first-90-days guide that includes: (1) the three things this new manager must do in their first week to set clear expectations with their team; (2) a simple structure for weekly one-on-ones, including the specific questions that surface problems early; (3) the two most common mistakes new nonprofit managers make — such as staying stuck in the individual-contributor role or avoiding hard feedback — and exactly how to avoid each; (4) a 30-, 60-, and 90-day set of milestones, one set for the manager and one for me as their supervisor; and (5) the single most important conversation I should have with them now to set them up to succeed. Keep everything realistic for someone managing two to six people with no formal management training and little time.
Build a Compensation Benchmarking Brief for One Hard-to-Fill Role
Nonprofits lose people to salaries they tell themselves they cannot match — often without knowing the market number, so they guess low and lose. You cannot fix every salary at once, but you can stop flying blind on the one role that keeps turning over. Run this when a role has become a revolving door, or before you post it again and want to price it right the first time.
Act as a nonprofit compensation and HR advisor with 20+ years of experience helping small to mid-size US nonprofits pay competitively on tight budgets. I am trying to fill or retain this role: [title, core responsibilities, required experience, our location, and our organization's budget size]. I plan to gather real salary data from sources such as state nonprofit association salary surveys, published nonprofit compensation reports, comparable current job postings, and the Form 990s of peer organizations. First, tell me exactly which free or low-cost sources to use for a nonprofit my size in my region, and the specific search terms that will get me usable numbers. Then give me a one-page brief template I can bring to my board that lays out: the market salary range for this role, where our current pay sits within that range, the documented cost of the turnover we have already had in this role, and three options for closing the gap — a full market match, a partial match paired with non-cash benefits, or a defined multi-year raise schedule. End with the single strongest argument for investing in this role's pay, framed for a board that worries about its overhead ratio.
The Sustainable-Leadership Check — A 30-Minute Board Exercise to Find Out Whether Your ED's Job Is Actually Doable
What makes it worth trying: Most boards spend their energy evaluating whether the executive director is doing the job well. Almost none ask whether the job is humanly possible. So the board is blindsided when its committed, capable leader burns out and resigns, taking relationships, knowledge, and momentum out the door. This exercise changes the question from "is our ED performing?" to "is our ED's role survivable, and what are we doing to keep them in it?" — while there is still time to act on the answer.
It works because it is concrete and a little uncomfortable. The board stops assuming the leader is fine because they have not complained — committed people are the last to complain — and looks honestly at the load, the support, and the exits.
How to run it (30 minutes):
- Setup (before the meeting, by the board chair — not the ED): On one page, list the ED's major areas of responsibility and, honestly, the realistic weekly hours each takes. Add three facts: when the ED last took a real, fully unplugged week off; who covers if the ED is out for a month; and whether anyone could step in for even 90 days.
- Round 1 — name the load (10 minutes): The board reviews the responsibility list and answers one question together: if we were hiring for this exact job today, at this pay and these hours, would we honestly call it one job or two? Discuss candidly. If more candor would come without the ED in the room for this part, do it that way and have the chair debrief the ED afterward.
- Round 2 — find the single points of failure (10 minutes): Identify the things only the ED can do that no one else could pick up next month. Each one is both a source of burnout and a continuity risk. Choose the top two.
- Round 3 — commit (10 minutes): For the top one or two, assign a specific structural step with an owner and a date. Fund a sabbatical or a genuine two-week unplugged break with a named interim. Move a defined chunk of work to a new hire or a contractor. Document a critical knowledge area. Or commit to exploring a co-leadership split at the next transition. Not "we should support our ED more." A named action with a date.
In-person: A printout of the responsibility-and-hours list and the four diagnostic questions. The chair facilitates and writes commitments on a flip chart.
Virtual: A shared document with the responsibility list. Each member privately notes "one job or two?" and their top single-point-of-failure before the group discusses, so the first read is not anchored by whoever speaks first.
Watch out for: The board that turns this into a performance review of the ED. It is the opposite — a review of whether the board has built a survivable job. Watch, too, for the ED who insists everything is fine. The most dedicated leaders are the least likely to ask for help, which is exactly why the board has to ask on their behalf. (Readers of Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience will recognize this as applying the risk cycle to the organization's most concentrated dependency — identify, prioritize, respond.)
You'll know it worked when: Within 90 days, the board has taken one concrete step that reduces either the load on or the dependency on its top leader — a funded break, a real delegation, a documented process, or a serious conversation about co-leadership or succession. The deeper signal is whether "is this job survivable?" becomes a standing board question rather than a post-mortem held after the resignation letter arrives.
There is a pattern in the nonprofits whose best people stay through the hard years. Their leaders did not ask the staff to care more or last longer. They changed the structure of the work, so that caring about the mission did not have to cost the person everything they had.
Which person does your mission quietly depend on — and what have you actually changed this year to keep them?
See you next week.
— Ted
P.S. Thanks again for supporting Rooted with your subscription.
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Founder and CEO Risk Alternatives, LLC 202.758.7572 (cell)
Website
Author of Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience
I help nonprofits thrive by providing practical tools and support to address uncertainty and improve resilience.
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