I remember one of my first days walking into the organization and deciding I was just going to pay attention. Not come in with a plan. Not start rearranging things. Just listen.
On paper, everything looked solid. Strong mission. Good reputation. People who genuinely cared about the families and survivors they were serving.
But within a few conversations, I kept hearing the same thing:
"Oh, she used to handle that." "We lost that when he left." "I think that process changed… but I'm not sure."
It wasn't dramatic. No one was spiraling. It was just… constant.
Seventy-one percent staff turnover was part of the landscape. That number stopped me. Until I learned it wasn't unusual. The nonprofit sector averages 19-21% annual turnover, already 58% higher than for-profit industries. In social and human services, where the people being served are often in crisis themselves, it runs even higher. Some organizations never see it because it's always been this way. The number stops shocking people. That might be the most alarming part.
At that level, that's not an HR issue. That's not "we need better recruiting." That's not "this generation doesn't want to work." That's a mission crisis.
Because when someone leaves, you don't just lose a position. You lose context. You lose history. You lose the informal knowledge that makes everything actually function. The people who stay take on more. They plug gaps. They carry institutional memory in their heads because it's not written anywhere else. And replacing a single employee costs between 50 and 200% of their annual salary. At 71% turnover, you're not losing people. You're burning the mission budget on a revolving door.
And when the people being served are already in crisis, turnover isn’t neutral. It destabilizes. It forces people to start from scratch. Again. And again.
That's when I knew the problem wasn't just money. It wasn't that people didn't care. They cared deeply. It was structural.
I sat in meetings where program staff, the people in it every day, talked about duplicate reporting, clunky systems, workarounds that had become permanent. Then decisions about vendors or tools would come up, and the people who would actually have to use those systems weren't really shaping the choice.
No one was trying to exclude them. It just wasn't how decisions were being made.
But when the people closest to the work aren't shaping the systems around the work, friction builds. Friction turns into exhaustion. Exhaustion turns into turnover. And in 2024, 67% of nonprofit employees said they were actively looking for a new job or would be within a year. Not 67% of unhappy employees. 67% of the sector.
I remember sitting in an executive leadership team meeting where we were discussing how to improve communication with directors. The proposal on the table was to bring directors in twice a month so they could hear directly from us about decisions being made at the top.
I pushed back. Not on the frequency. On the entire direction of it.
I said: we should be going to them. We should be bringing frontline staff and directors into our meetings and asking them what they need, what's broken, what we can solve together. It shouldn't be leadership pushing information down. It should be the people closest to the work bringing the challenges up.
That idea was scoffed at.
And it wasn't an isolated moment. I kept bringing the challenges forward, broken systems, workarounds that had become permanent, employee frustrations that were showing up in the data. Each time, I was told it wasn't a real problem. That I was being dramatic. At one point I was told directly that the way my team felt didn't actually matter.
A few months later, I was pushed out.
The organization didn't have a communication problem. It had a power problem. And the structure was working exactly as designed, to keep information moving in one direction.
But I've seen it work differently. A few years earlier, at a different organization, I had just taken on responsibility for our CACFP food program, a reimbursement-based federal grant that funded meals for preschoolers and after-school programming across nine Seattle public schools.
My director's instinct was to figure it out at the top and tell staff what to do. I asked if I could try something different.
I brought the program directors and the staff who were actually running the meals to the table. I asked them what was working, what was broken, and what would make their jobs easier. Then I made it my job to remove the friction, explaining the rules they had to work within, coaching them on compliance, and building their buy-in through relationships rather than mandates.
Within a year, we had transformed canned fruit and animal cracker snacks into a partnership with the City of Seattle to bring farm-to-table, culturally relevant, freshly prepared food to kids living in food deserts. Chefs at each program. Fresh fruits and vegetables every day.
The director of finance pulled me aside and asked if there was an error in the numbers. Reimbursements were up 76% year over year.
There was no error.
And in this case, preschoolers learned to love fresh food instead of us trying to fix our eating habits as adults.
I didn't invent anything. I just asked the people who already knew the answers.
Boards, executive directors, funders, consultants, the whole infrastructure of nonprofit leadership is built on the assumption that the people setting strategy are qualified to also design operations. And most of them have never actually done the frontline work.
The funding structure makes it worse. Funders talk to EDs. EDs talk to boards. Program staff talk to nobody with decision-making power. And the people who know exactly why the intake process is broken, why the database is a disaster, why staff keep leaving, they're filing TPS reports while leadership is at a conference talking about capacity building.
A lot of nonprofit leaders genuinely believe they are people-centered and participatory. They do staff surveys. They have all-hands meetings. But there's a difference between listening to your staff and actually giving them authority over how the work gets done. Most orgs do the former and call it the latter.
And sometimes the resistance to bringing workers to the table isn't accidental. It's protective. Because if the people doing the work designed the systems, some leadership decisions would look very different. Some leadership positions would look very different.
The sector calls it capacity building. It calls it strategic planning. It calls it listening.
But you can't listen your way out of a power structure you built to protect yourself.
And while leadership is deciding how often to share information downward, the clients, the survivors, the kids, the families in crisis, are absorbing every bit of the instability that structure creates. Only 32% of nonprofit workers plan to definitively stay in the sector. That's not a staffing problem. That's a crisis of belief that this can be fixed.
They're the ones who pay. They always are.
The nonprofit sector doesn't have a passion problem. It doesn't have a caring problem. It doesn't even have a funding problem, not at its core.
It has a boring shit problem.
And it's killing the mission.
The unglamorous work, the broken SharePoint nobody fixed, the onboarding that amounts to here's your laptop good luck, the database workaround that became permanent because nobody had time to solve the actual problem, that's the foundation everything else sits on. And we keep skipping it because it doesn't make a good grant report and it doesn't land well at a conference.
So we train on fundraising. We talk about strategic planning. We hire consultants to facilitate vision sessions with leadership while the people doing the actual work are one bad week away from walking out the door.
If you are a nonprofit leader reading this and you genuinely believe in your mission, and I think you do, I need you to sit with one question: when did you last ask the people doing the work what they need? Not in a survey that disappears into a spreadsheet. Not in an all-hands where the unspoken rule is that everything is basically fine. In a real conversation where their answer could actually change something.
Because most leaders are asking. That's not the problem.
The problem is what happens after.
When nothing changes, people stop telling the truth. When someone speaks up and gets managed out for it, everyone else goes quiet. When the survey results get sanitized before they reach the board, the feedback loop breaks permanently. And leadership wonders why nobody seems engaged anymore.
Say what you do. Do what you say. That's it. That's the whole thing.
The people doing the work aren't cynical because they don't care. They're cynical because they cared enough to say something and learned it didn't matter.
Do the boring shit. Set the foundation. Take care of the people taking care of everyone else.
The clients are counting on it. They always were.