On Burning Out
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I sweat slightly more than normal. This, I believe, is the main reason that I came to work in the not-for-profit sector. In the summer of 2005 I moved to
I already had a job working at a big financial corporate office, but only because a friend was in charge of their temp hiring. She was able to look past the fact that I showed up to the interview glistening more than is strictly desirable and take into account my decent knowledge of Excel and freakishly fast typing.
I spent a soul-crushing six weeks working in the Human Resources department at this big corporate financial firm, doing data entry while wearing high heels and pantyhose. I made quite a lot of money that I spent on expensive coffee and even more expensive happy hours and recreational drugs, because the office was in midtown, land of the crappy $12 margarita, and my job was so horrible that self-medication was completely necessary. I have actually spent time using a pencil and ruler to draw lines across spreadsheets printed out of some database program and then re-entered the numbers on those spreadsheets into other database programs. I did this, let me emphasize, while wearing pantyhose. The only silver lining was that the office was so forcibly air-conditioned that even I, in my dark winter suits and stockings, was comfortable. During my lunch breaks I went on interviews for other jobs, at magazines and publishing houses and law firms, where I handed over my damp, salty résumé and met people who never became my future supervisors.
And then one day I stumbled across the job listing of my dreams. “Social Service Agency seeks Development Writer.” Social services sounded nice. It seemed like I might have coworkers who would be kind, interesting people instead of pompous suits whose lives, from what I could tell, revolved around expensive restaurants, expensive shoes, and talking about expensive restaurants and expensive shoes. I was not sure what a development writer was, but I was sure I could be one.
I was right. When my future boss offered me the job and warned me that the salary was very low, I foolishly quipped, “That’s ok, it’s easy to make money, it’s hard finding something you love to do.” Spoken like someone who has not yet been sued for eviction. A few weeks later I started at a New York City Social Service Agency Which Shall Remain Nameless for reasons that will later become clear. The Agency was a wonderful organization. They ran homeless shelters and substance abuse treatment clinics and mobile primary care units and job training programs for the drug addicted and insane. Their office was a pastiche of cheap art prints and photos of clients; cubicle walls were decorated with miniature toy collections and plants; coworkers were friendly to one another. And everyone was wearing the most casual of business casual.
My cubicle was tiny, almost as tiny as my salary, but both minor inconveniences were well worth the sacrifice of space and money because I got to feel self-righteous all the time. The best part about being poor is getting to complain about it, and if you are doing it at all voluntarily—for the sake of art, or the pursuit of a dream, or working at a not-for-profit agency—you get to feel incredibly self-righteous and talk smugly about not “selling out,” which, for a while, is almost as fun as not being poor. There were whispers of something called “nonprofit burnout,” but I couldn’t fathom a time when I would not be completely enamored with my workplace. We were helping people! Ending homelessness in
I had a fantastic coworker who had been a Development Writer for a year. We talked about how much we loved writing, and how much we loved homeless people, and how much we loved our flexible hours and casual dress code. She slept at her desk for at least an hour every day, even after we had moved into a temporary office space with very low cubicle walls where everyone could see her blatant napping. This went on for several nervous months before it became clear that there was never going to be a consequence for her sleeping. This gets at the heart of the nonprofit industry: it is poorly managed. Any place where an entry level employee can sleep out in the open without fear of repercussions could do with a little dose of corporate consultation.
I am about to launch into some pretty serious maligning of my coworkers, and so I feel it’s important to introduce a bit of a disclaimer at this point. Yes, my office is full of people who are lazy enough to sleep at their desks, and others who are so incompetent that a nap would actually be a kindness because it would spare the rest of us a few hours of dealing with their idiocy. These people are here because nonprofits pay poorly, and much as it pains me to say it, most of the time you actually do get what you pay for. But there also people at my office who possess unsurpassed dedication, competence, humor, and compassion, and have somehow managed not to let the Agency’s truly oppressive lack of office supplies turn them into cynical, derisive brutes. These folks are an inspiration, and they made it bearable to work in a poorly organized, underpaid, pen-free work environment. But let’s not waste our time talking about them.
I have worked with administrators who are responsible for creating multi-million dollar program budgets and are mystified by Excel formulas. I once went to a meeting about HIV testing where a program director talked for a full ten minutes about “smoking dope” and how, no matter what we tell our clients, we all have unsafe sex from time to time. There are old, well-meaning ladies who dodder around wondering what that noise is (it’s the shredder), senior staff members who (literally) do not know how to open their office email accounts, and one particularly bovine colleague who, after several lengthy meetings with me over the course of a month, denied that we had ever had a meeting and forgot my name. This is what I mean about my sweatiness guiding me into the industry: they will hire anyone, no matter how perspiring or ineffectual.
Eventually my lovely, napping work friend quit, and she was replaced by a girl who not only did not talk to me about how much she loved writing and homeless people, but actively talked trash about our office and everyone in it, all the time. We huddled outside the building in the winter smoking cigarettes. We hated the weather, the hot dry recycled air in the building, the overpriced coffee for sale in the office building’s lobby café. All of these things seemed to be the fault of The Agency.
When organizational psychologists and human resources specialists talk about nonprofit burnout, they cite the inexperience of young staff members, the low wages, the “trial by fire work environment,” the constant deadlines, chronic underfunding, employee guilt about asking for appropriate raises and time off because this will be perceived as lack of “oneness with the cause,” and the inevitable Sisyphean feeling that comes with trying to “save the environment” or otherwise change the world (incidentally, for those readers outside the five boroughs, I feel obligated to tell you that during my two years at The Agency, despite some pretty great development writing, we did not succeed in Ending Homelessness In New York City).
These are all valid, but I would like to propose another major factor that seriously contributes to nonprofit burnout: credit cards. People mostly get credit cards right around the end of college/beginning of real life. This is right about the time that these same starry-eyed idealists are wandering into nonprofit agencies and signing up to work for salaries which sound like a lot of money because up until this point they have been working part time jobs that paid $8.50 an hour, which, incidentally, is not much less than entry-level nonprofit jobs pay. They start working. They get a credit card. They love their jobs, they love the cause. Their paychecks are small but manageable, because of their card. They get another one. They run out of pens and notebooks at work, and buy some more on their credit card because their paycheck is too small. A year later, they still love the cause, but they have spent $55 on pens in the last twelve months, which would be fine, except there doesn’t seem to be any reduction in the number of homeless people on the block where they live (and they live in a part of town where there are plenty of homeless people). They work late and do not get paid overtime. All of a sudden, their friends are sick of hearing the smug self-righteous talk about selling out. Also, these friends have moved into really nice apartments. Then, when both credit cards are maxed out, they have to consider the money management program offered by The Agency for homeless drug addicts who never learned how to balance a check book. This, gentle readers, is nonprofit burnout.
Don’t worry about me, friends. When I maxed out my credit cards I decided to go back to school. I’ll still be poor, but at least I’ll be buying pens for personal use.
—RMR