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Worker well-being is more than an individual or organizational issue; it’s a systems issue. Supporting it means funding the full cost of services, allowing flexibility in how money is used, and truly recognizing workers as essential to community impact, not separate from it, according to authors of a new report from the Nonprofit Finance Fund.
It’s imperative that funders support worker wellness at nonprofits, according to the authors of “The Heart of the Nonprofit Sector.”
The challenge is that grants from funders often don’t cover the full cost to deliver services. That keeps wages low and stresses out staff members trying to make things happen. The bottom line is that nonprofit work is often undervalued – even by nonprofit foundations whose leaders should know better.
Worker well-being can mean different things to different people, depending on their experiences and the nature of their work. Across interviews, leaders described worker well-being in ways that were practical, actionable, and deeply personal, according to the authors.
There are five promising practices nonprofits are enacting that emerged in the report. While these practices might not be right for all organizations and do not come without challenges to initiate and implement, they are examples of what’s possible when nonprofits and funders: Equitable Pay; Benefits; Flexible work schedules; nonprofit staff unionization; and, collaborative leadership and decision-making.
The authors pointed out a number of other examples of relatively low-cost, high-impact tactics funders are using to help nonprofits address worker well-being, including:
* Streamlining or reducing reporting requirements, for example, by allowing grantees to only submit updated budgets in the case of grant renewals or to use reports created for other funders;
* Instituting automatic cost-of-living adjustments in grants or other across-the-board increases that address the impact of inflation;
* Providing grants to cover gaps in public funding, making workers “whole” for the work they are already delivering;
* Talking with grantees about how salaries compare to local living wages;
* Offering stipends for mental health or other wellness needs.
