The Middle of the Spectrum, Between Nonprofit Burnout and Value

Dispatch Series Overview

Series Title: You Are the Correction, Not the Problem

This three-part Dispatch series explores the systemic dissonance between personal leadership growth and institutional resistance to valuing that growth, especially for women in mission-driven work. Each piece bridges the gap between macro-level nonprofit dysfunction and the deeply personal experience of navigating roles, recognition, and authority within it.

We are caught between two mental models that shape much of the nonprofit burnout experience:

• “Starvation Cycles” , the industry-wide pressure to do more with less (Stanford Social Innovation Review)

• “You’re Not Having Imposter Syndrome, You Are an Imposter” (By Esther Saehyun Lee, Community-Centric Fundraising Global Council Member, Self-Proclaimed Imposter, and Consultant), the painful truth of navigating systems never meant to support your kind of leadership

This Dispatch holds space for the in-between: the lived experience of carrying personal leadership in a structurally under-resourced field. You’re not a fraud. You’re building infrastructure with no blueprint and fewer materials than you need. You’re not underperforming. You’re doing high-level strategy in a field that doesn’t pay for strategy.

This is the spectrum between burnout and breakthrough. And many of us have been living there for years.

Scarcity Culture Isn’t Just Financial

We talk a lot about underfunding in the nonprofit sector, but we rarely name the emotional and intellectual scarcity it creates. When an organization can’t afford infrastructure, it starts cutting other corners: boundaries, communication, leadership development. And those costs get passed down to the people , especially the ones doing the invisible labor to hold it all together.

You grow by doing, but the system doesn’t compensate in order to accommodate or provide for that growth. You build skills under pressure, you gain insight from trial and error, you develop strategy by necessity. But when the budget comes in, there’s no line item for that kind of wisdom. By nature, trial and error will involve errors, and the system is completely unforgiving of learning curves, calling them failures. They’re not. 

You’ve earned more than you’re being offered, and you know it.

Burnout as a Systemic Outcome of Nonprofit Burnout

Personal burnout isn’t a failure of self-care. It’s a symptom of an industry built on martyrdom, where working under capacity is normalized and where asking for more is treated as a betrayal of the mission. The truth is, burnout often happens right at the moment when your skills are expanding , but the system can’t stretch with you.

You’re not underqualified. The system is under-resourced.

And if you feel like you’re breaking, it might just be because you’ve outgrown the box you were forced into.

And Another Thing

You’re not aspiring to these roles, you’re finally asking to be recognized for the level you’re already performing at.

The title, the salary, the leadership seat, those aren’t stretch goals. They’re long-overdue corrections for labor and strategy you’ve already been contributing.

You weren’t an imposter. You were underpaid executive leadership.

Now you’re not asking for permission, you’re setting terms.