The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s annual State of Nonprofits report is out, and its findings were not a major surprise: nonprofit leaders are increasingly burned out at the exact moment philanthropy is asking them to take on more complex systems-level collaboration like shared advocacy campaigns, shared services, or coordinated data collection.
That tension deserves more attention.
The report highlighted worsening CEO burnout, increased difficulty securing foundation funding, and nonprofits continuing to pivot in order to stay afloat. Leaders reporting that their burnout is “very much” a concern jumped to 46% in 2026, up from just under 30% in 2025. Meanwhile, 60% of nonprofit CEOs say that, since January 2025, it has become harder to secure foundation grants relative to the past.
Nonprofits exist because there are deep community needs that are not adequately supported by public institutions. Of course, organizations are going to do everything they can to keep programs running because, often, lives quite literally depend on it. But at some point, nonprofit leaders work themselves to exhaustion, and that is clearly happening at a much higher rate now, arguably at the exact moment we need their skills, relationships, and passion the most.
At the same time, there is growing interest across philanthropy in systems-level solutions. Funders are increasingly encouraging nonprofits to collaborate more deeply, share infrastructure, coordinate strategy, and build ecosystem-level responses to community challenges. In many ways, that shift makes sense. Some problems are simply too large and interconnected for organizations to solve alone.
The interest in ecosystem-level work is not coming from nowhere. Many funders are responding to a real problem: fragmented systems, duplicated efforts, and organizations competing for limited resources while trying to address interconnected challenges. A single grant to a single organization often cannot solve issues that are structural in nature. Collaboration, shared advocacy, pooled resources, and coordinated strategy can absolutely create stronger outcomes.
But there is a tension in these two realities that I do not think we are talking about enough.
What often goes unseen is the enormous amount of emotional and operational labor required to sustain collaboration over time. Coalitions do not move at the speed of a single organization. Decisions require consensus-building. Convening organizations with different histories, priorities, capacities, and leadership styles takes time, coordination, facilitation, trust-building, conflict navigation, and ongoing relationship management. Organizations may enter conversations with vastly different levels of funding, staffing, influence, urgency, and lived experience. Someone has to hold all of that complexity while continuing to move the work forward.
In many cases, third-party facilitators or intermediary organizations are uniquely positioned to hold this work because they are able to operate outside the day-to-day survival pressures facing individual nonprofits. They can dedicate sustained time to coordination, maintain neutrality across organizations, facilitate difficult conversations, and continue moving long-term systems work forward even when participating organizations are forced to focus on immediate operational crises.
Since 2023, I have had the honor of facilitating Arts Capital | Atlanta, a collaborative of arts nonprofits, funders, advocates, and community leaders working together to address systemic challenges facing the arts sector in metro Atlanta. One of the clearest lessons from that experience is that meaningful collaboration requires dedicated capacity.
Not just goodwill. Not just alignment. Capacity.
Arts Capital | Atlanta emerged from ongoing conversations among nonprofit arts leaders during and after the pandemic, as organizations across the region faced increasing financial instability, staffing strain, rising operating costs, and historically low levels of public investment in the arts. For the first two years of its existence, our steering committee met weekly on Zoom to define priorities, build trust, and determine what collaborative action realistically looked like.
This process required facilitation, research, communications systems, one-on-one relationship building, public convenings, and ongoing administration. The only reason I was able to help hold that work was because local family foundations and my employer, Purpose Possible, helped subsidize the time and capacity required to do it. After three years we still have a mountain of work ahead for us, but without this dedicated labor, it’s doubtful we would be where we are today.
Another important lesson from this work is that funders themselves benefit from participating in collaborative ecosystems, not just funding them from a distance. In Arts Capital | Atlanta, funders sit alongside nonprofit leaders, advocates, and community stakeholders in ongoing conversations about shared challenges and priorities. That proximity creates deeper understanding, stronger relationships, and more informed decision-making. It also helps reduce the dynamic where nonprofits are expected to somehow solve systems-level issues while funders remain outside the systems conversations themselves.
When nonprofit leaders are already stretched thin trying to sustain their own organizations, expecting them to also hold the operational and emotional labor of sector-wide coordination becomes incredibly difficult. When collaboration itself requires significant unpaid labor, larger organizations with more staff capacity are more equipped to participate, while small nonprofits end up being unintentionally excluded from the conversation. Even when there is enthusiasm for collaboration, someone still has to schedule the meetings, facilitate difficult conversations, synthesize competing priorities, manage communications, build trust over time, and keep momentum moving between convenings.
Third-party facilitators, backbone organizations, intermediaries, and ecosystem coordinators are sometimes viewed as administrative overhead or unnecessary layers between funders and direct service work. But increasingly, I believe they are essential infrastructure for systems change efforts.
If philanthropy believes systems change requires collaboration, then collaboration itself must be treated as infrastructure worthy of investment. This means funding the labor required to coordinate and sustain ecosystems work, but also recognizing that funders themselves have a role to play inside collaborative movements. That role should not just be as evaluators or grantors, but as participants willing to listen, build relationships, and better understand the realities nonprofit leaders are facing.
We cannot continue asking exhausted nonprofit leaders to simultaneously run their organizations, respond to growing community needs, and hold the labor of ecosystem coordination without materially investing in the people and infrastructure required to support the work. Collaboration becomes far more sustainable when responsibility for the work of building the collaborative ecosystem is shared.
Laura Hennighausen is director of strategic philanthropy at Purpose Possible and facilitator at Arts Capital | Atlanta.
