Two years ago, burnout in the nonprofit sector was a five-alarm fire — and it’s only spread and raged further since then. At the time, I wrote “A Call for Self-Care in Social Impact” for this publication where I pointed to troubling statistics about the rate and intensity of burnout among social impact leaders and their teams and shared how Elevate Prize is resourcing leaders to combat the root causes of burnout. I hoped to return with better news, but, sadly, the opposite is true.
Not only are we still standing at the same precarious edge, but the drop is steeper. This year, the proportion of nonprofit CEOs reporting that burnout is “very much” a concern jumped to 46%, nearly double the number who reported the same last year and the highest in three years of CEP tracking. It made me wonder: in a world determined to do more with less, is burnout a resource issue or a mindset issue?
That article described how leaders are confronting injustice, corruption, pandemics, and crumbling institutions while building solutions and full lives outside of work. The stakes were already unreasonably high, the resources already unfairly insufficient, so that “the idea of worrying about oneself seems less possible in the face of unrelenting and urgent need.” That was 2024. Today, 73% of nonprofits are seeing increased demand while facing heightened financial instability, staffing challenges, and fear. Might we consider a radically different approach to supporting leaders? When the battle changes shape, the strategy must too.
The Strategic Impetus of Whole Leader Support
At the Elevate Prize Foundation, we have spent nearly seven years developing a new kind of support we call Whole Leader: leadership grounded in both purpose and presence, where mental, emotional, and spiritual alignment creates the inner clarity that fuels outer impact. This is not a wellness add-on. It is the philosophy underpinning everything Elevate does — our grantmaking, our counsel, our retreats, our coaching, and our team’s own culture. It begins with a simple, radical premise: supporting a leader’s inner life is not a luxury. It is the strategic impetus.
We arrived here through close listening. Over years of working with Elevate Prize winners, we opened our practice beyond the grant payment to ask what supporting a leader could truly mean, prioritizing real relationships and listening deeply to leaders’ challenges. We created conditions for truth to emerge, trust to build, and friendships to form. What we learned, and what our data confirms, is that rest and self-care fuel the work: they strengthen our collective ability to remain grounded in the present, where we are more likely to connect meaningfully with others and seek creative solutions.
The Elevate Prize is structured to make this philosophy concrete from day one. Of the $300,000 unrestricted award, $50,000 goes directly to the individual leader and $250,000 to their organization. That $50,000 addresses the invisible pressures that never appear in grant reports: personal debt, family obligations, deferred care, accumulated stress. Some leaders have used it for therapy; others made life-changing moves, or opened their first savings account. The entire prize is unrestricted — an intentional gesture of trust.
Looking Beyond Capital
Capital, important as it is, is not where the real transformation happens. The most powerful force in philanthropy isn’t money — it’s relationships, not just between Elevate and our winners, but between the winners themselves. This matters especially now, as leaders face heightened challenges. Authentic, reliable, joyful relationships are a health intervention — and is one that we have started tracking.
In 2024, we introduced a convening model that brings winners together at the start of their two years, engaging in ways of connecting and learning with practitioners from across healing traditions teaching breathwork, mindfulness, meditation, and somatic movement. The alliances our winners build with one another have proven to be among the most sustaining and generative outcomes of the program.
The results are measurable. Leaders build inner reserves — the focus, resilience, and perspective that allow them to lead from steadiness rather than urgency. Prize winners report healthier team cultures and stronger staff retention as Whole Leader practices spread into their own organizations. Since we began tracking, Elevate Prize winners have experienced approximately 70% average growth in fundraising capacity. Compare that to the CEP finding that 56% of nonprofit leaders are managing their organizations in an atmosphere of fear and stress. Elevate’s data points in the opposite direction — and we don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Returning to a ‘Beginner’s Mind’
So why isn’t the sector moving faster?
The instinct is to frame burnout as a resource problem: more funding, less burnout. The CEP data seems to confirm it: organizations are stretched thin, demand is surging, and government and foundation funding have pulled back simultaneously. Resources matter enormously, but resource scarcity is an accelerant, not the root cause.
The root cause is a culture that has long treated leaders as instruments rather than whole human beings. We have built an entire sector on the premise that mission justifies sacrifice — that the work is sacred enough to warrant the depletion of the people doing it, that the most committed leaders are the ones who give the most of their time, their health, and their sense of self, without ever asking what it costs them. More funding injected into that culture will produce better-resourced burnout, not transformation.
This is what Whole Leader is here to address: tools for thought that matters. Not just recovery from burnout — though that work is urgent — but something deeper. Whole Leader exists to help leaders return, again and again, to the wholeness that made their original vision possible in the first place, to the beginner’s mind: that same undefended encounter with what is real and what is needed. That is where leaders access their deepest wisdom, and it’s what keeps generating what our sector needs most: new seeing, whether that means deepening a solution already underway or arriving at something none of us have imagined yet.
This generative capacity lives in the whole person; research shows that even brief mindfulness practice measurably improves emotional regulation and activates the prefrontal cortex, allowing for new levels of clarity and creativity. It can’t be accessed from depletion, sustained by sacrifice, or recovered by simply adding resources to a system designed to consume it.
Beginner’s mind is also the antidote to the sector’s current panic. We are trying to solve 2026 problems with the emergency posture of 2020, the accumulated wounds of underinvestment, and the anxiety of an unknowable future. Beginner’s mind asks: What is true right now? What is needed right now? What do you actually have to work with? Met with steadiness, the answers are almost always more generative than the spiral.
What’s Needed From Funders
With that reframing in place, the ask to funders shifts: not simply to give more but to give differently. That means funding the person alongside the program, because the $50,000, or any sum, to a leader isn’t a bonus — it’s the intervention. It means creating time and space with no deliverables attached, because the most sustaining gift a funder can offer is permission to breathe. And it means trusting inner work as strategy: coaching, contemplative practice, peer connection as the infrastructure of durable leadership. When funders treat them as optional, leaders do too.
The world needs changemakers who can remain steady amid complexity and lead from coherence rather than chronic urgency. That future begins by recognizing leaders not simply as conduits for impact, but as its source. Investing in the whole person is not a detour from mission — it is the most direct route to it.
Carolina García Jayaram is the CEO at the Elevate Prize Foundation. Find her on LinkedIn.
