Organizers Are Burned Out. New Research Shows How Funders Can Improve Labor Standards

Our organizations, All Due Respect and the Ford Foundation, partnered on a recent research project about labor practices among grassroots organizing groups, based on a shared intuition — that there is something in the relationship between funders and organizations that is out of step with the needs of organizers themselves.

We’ve each been there: conferences where a host or a panelist exhorted those listening to “thank an organizer” or declared that “organizers do the real work and we should celebrate them.” We’ve been to funder convenings where the emphasis is all about theory of change, metrics and outcomes.

Sentiments are nice, and funding strategies are important, but they both miss a very real fact, an open secret that All Due Respect’s research has made plain: The front-line workers who make organizing groups work are burned out, underpaid and under-appreciated. And that comes from two places: the management practices within organizing groups, and, crucially, the practices of funders.

All too often, funders, driven by the outcomes they’re pursuing, focus on the programmatic outputs that a grantee partner can deliver. But we forget to consider the organizational structure that is necessary for that to happen. When the Ford Foundation’s BUILD initiative reviewed more than 100 organizational assessments that grantee partners conducted, we heard that the No. 1 and No. 2 priorities that emerge when you ask all staff in an organization what most needs strengthening are not the traditional capacity-building priorities of fundraising, strategic planning and board development, but organizational culture and HR. Front-line staff in our partner organizations are crying out for better management and more supportive cultures. But are funders prepared to hear that? And if so, what can they do about it?

Building sustainable organizations

That’s one of the things All Due Respect’s research set out to explore in early 2022. One of the key takeaways is that organizers are asking for a fairly reasonable set of structural changes in terms of fair pay, fair working hours, and a set of benefits that allow them to access needed healthcare services. These are very standard workplace protections. Organizers who participated in the research also asked for increased transparency around decision-making within the organizations, and a role to play in helping set the strategic direction of the work. There are necessary limits to what this could entail, but we should encourage organizations to understand this desire as an expression of organizers’ commitment not just to the cause, but to building sustainable and democratic organizations.

Another required shift is around organizational culture — even as organizations move away from some of the explicit “pay your dues” attitude toward new hires, there is a pervasive belief that organizers are asking for more than their predecessors would ever have dreamed. Many more experienced organizers have a difficult time imagining their younger selves asking for some of the workplace adjustments that are growing in popularity. While it can be tempting to fall into a mindset that “today’s organizers don’t know how good they have it,” a more thoughtful and generative position is to examine the ways that the culture in which organizing has been taught limited who could get in, and who could stay in, the work.

What we really need is a set of structural and sectoral changes within the movement to increase the sustainability of organizing jobs to ensure that the front-line workers in justice work enjoy the same wages, benefits and protections their organizations demand from corporations that they target. Hiring managers need to know if their pay scales are meeting industry standards, organizers looking for jobs need to know what they should be asking for, and organizational managers should feel pressure to recruit, train and retain their organizing staff.

Philanthropy’s role in ensuring fair labor standards

This doesn’t mean that every organization needs to, or even should, adopt a set of expensive and seismic HR shifts tomorrow; nor does it mean that some practices (like four-day work weeks) are feasible or recommended for every organization. While we generally eschew one-size-fits-all thinking, we do think that, at minimum, social and economic justice organizations should be resourced so they can compensate workers at least a living wage, and include healthcare, vacation and paid leave policies that allow organizers to imagine an organizing job becoming a long-term career. Staffers need to know how to report issues of discrimination and harassment without fear of judgment or retaliation. And these policies and practices must be accompanied by thoughtful, ongoing and structured reflection of how dynamics of power and privilege are experienced by all staff members.

And we think that philanthropic institutions that support organizing work have a responsibility to ensure that the internal practices of their grantees live up to their external values. Perhaps ironically, this starts by exerting less control. Concerned with delivering on their own internal accountability, funders often impose certain kinds of metrics and outcome thinking on their nonprofit partners that emphasize funders’ goals. But organizational culture requires greater flexibility, including room to experiment, fail and improve. That can’t happen in the short-term timeframes many funders use.

That includes the Ford Foundation — one of the reasons we launched the BUILD initiative in 2016 is that in response to grantee-partner feedback, we realized that close to 80% of our grants were one-year project grants. The road to social justice is not paved with those! We needed to make a change to provide support that was different in three ways: (1) long-term, (2) flexible, and (3) focused on organizational strengthening, not just delivering on programs. Implementing BUILD over the last six years has been a journey of learning, humility and improvement, and it’s led to grantee partners reporting meaningful improvements in their resiliency and adaptability, including in organizational culture.

These are the kind of funder relationships that are needed to permit organizing groups to overcome inherited cultures of “pay your dues” and create workplace protections that reduce burnout, increase retention, better align our walk with our talk, and ultimately achieve greater impact.

The goal of All Due Respect’s research is not simply to make things easier for organizers. In fact, we don’t think making organizing “easy” is a realistic goal — when done well, organizing is always a difficult, demanding job, particularly when the health and safety of our communities relies upon our ability to organize. In order to enable this, what we want is for organizers to be treated like the skilled workers they are, and for those organizers to be a part of durable, strategic organizations, with support from funders that is sufficiently flexible, long-term, and attentive to organizational strengthening. If organizers turn over every 18 months and organizations are constantly training new staff and running campaigns with inexperienced teams, our ability to succeed in the places that really matter will continue to be limited. And the threats to our democracy that grow by the day will be that much harder to push back against.

Kevin Simowitz is co-director of All Due Respect, and Chris Cardona is senior program officer, philanthropy at the Ford Foundation.

Featured