When the Ground Shifts Beneath Us

Finding Our Footing in a Season of Nonprofit Grief

Finding Our Footing in a Season of Nonprofit Grief

Let me start by saying what I think many of us are afraid to say out loud:

This is one of the hardest seasons I have ever witnessed in the nonprofit sector. And I know I am not alone in feeling that.

Whether you are an executive director staring at a budget shortfall that arrived overnight, a program manager watching services you built over years quietly disappear, a United Way professional fielding impossible calls from partner agencies, or a faculty member watching your college’s nonprofit management program face the ax — this post is for you. You are allowed to grieve what is happening.

And you are allowed to feel the weight of it.

But you also need to keep going. Our communities are counting on us. So let’s talk about both of those things honestly.

The Scale of What We Are Losing

The data is staggering — and the data doesn’t capture the human cost.

According to a nationally representative survey conducted by the Urban Institute and Indiana University researchers, one in three U.S. nonprofits experienced some form of government funding disruption in just the first six months of 2025. Of those affected:

• 21% lost at least some government funding outright

• 27% faced delays, pauses, or freezes in funding

• 6% received stop-work orders, halting programs entirely

Source: Urban Institute, “How Government Funding Disruptions Affected Nonprofits in Early 2025,” October 2025

And the cuts are not small. For nonprofits directly hit, government funding made up an average of 42% of their total revenue. United Way Worldwide has reported that the Trump administration canceled or froze roughly $425 billion in federal funds across health care, arts, education and other sectors since January 2025 — more than half of the entire nonprofit sector’s estimated payroll.

Source: United Way Worldwide, “Nonprofit Face Double Crunch As Shutdown Follows Severe Funding Cuts,” 2025

That $425 billion is not an abstraction. It is the after-school program that helped a child in rural Montana learn to read. It is the food pantry in Cincinnati that stocked its shelves every Thursday. It is the AmeriCorps volunteer coordinator at your local United Way who recruited and trained the volunteers that held your community together.

United Way of King County in Washington State has said sustaining vital programs — from food delivery to shelter services — will be a “struggle.” United Way of Greater Cincinnati surveyed 109 local organizations and found that two-thirds said they would face service reductions or closures within six months of funding disruption. One organization said it would be forced to close immediately.

Source: United Way of Greater Cincinnati survey, April 2025

And it’s not just nonprofits. At least 16 nonprofit colleges and universities closed in 2025 due to enrollment and financial challenges — closing the doors on students, faculty, and in many cases, the very programs that trained the next generation of nonprofit leaders. Credit rating agencies have already issued unfavorable outlooks for 2026.

Source: Inside Higher Ed, “The Colleges That Couldn’t Survive 2025,” December 2025

As Angela Williams, President and CEO of United Way Worldwide, put it plainly: “Uncertainty, stress, and disruptions to vital services that occur as a result of a federal government shutdown exacerbate existing inequities. For low-income families, even a short disruption in SNAP or rent support can trigger spirals of housing instability, job loss, or health decline. Unfortunately, so many of our systems are not designed for resilience. They’re brittle.”

Source: Angela Williams, United Way Worldwide, 2025

The Grief Is Real — And It Has a Name

What many of us are feeling right now is not weakness. It is not pessimism. It is grief — and it is layered.

There is grief for the organizations closing. For the colleagues being laid off. For the communities losing services that took decades to build. For the students whose college programs are disappearing. For the clients who will go without.

There is also something our sector has a clinical name for: compassion fatigue. The Nonprofit Leadership Center of Tampa Bay describes it as distinct from ordinary burnout in that it can arrive rapidly and intensely, eroding your ability to feel and care for others precisely because you have cared so deeply for so long.

Psychologist Herbert Freudenberger defined burnout by three components: emotional exhaustion — the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long; depersonalization — the depletion of empathy and compassion; and a decreased sense of accomplishment — an unconquerable sense of futility, feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.

Does any part of that resonate right now? I suspect it does for more of us than will admit it.

The numbers back this up. As of 2025, 95% of nonprofit leaders have cited burnout as a major challenge. Nearly 7 in 10 nonprofit employees have indicated they would be looking for a new job within the year. Among fundraisers specifically, average job tenure has hovered around 18 months.

Sources: Center for Effective Philanthropy, State of Nonprofits 2024; Givebutter Nonprofit Burnout Statistics, 2025

We have been operating in crisis mode for years — through the pandemic, through economic uncertainty, through a dramatic reshaping of the philanthropic landscape. What is happening in 2025 and into 2026 is not a new crisis layered on top of a recovered sector. It is a new crisis layered on top of an already exhausted one.

One small nonprofit leader captured it precisely in the Urban Institute’s research: “Funding uncertainties make it extremely difficult to plan short term and certainly for the long term. We are trying to hold off on laying off or cutting hours, but not sure how much longer we can wait without some certainty going forward.”

Source: Urban Institute, “How Government Funding Disruptions Affected Nonprofits in Early 2025,” 2025

Permission to Feel This

Before we talk about what to do, I want to give you something that our sector’s culture does not often offer enough of:

Permission to feel this. Permission to not be okay right now. Permission to grieve before you pivot.

The nonprofit sector runs on passion and purpose. It also runs on a quietly dangerous cultural norm that tells us we are not allowed to fall apart — because if we do, who will be there for the people who need us? That logic, while coming from a genuinely good place, is exactly how compassion fatigue eats people alive.

You can grieve the organization that closed on your watch — even if you did everything right and the funding still disappeared. You can feel rage at systems that are failing people who had nowhere else to turn. You can feel deep, bone-tired sadness watching colleagues you respect and admire lose positions they built their careers around. You can feel scared about whether your own organization will survive.

Mandy Cloninger, a nonprofit leader who has written openly about her own journey through compassion fatigue, put it beautifully: “Our bodies often speak before we do. When stress and emotions go unprocessed, they can manifest physically as pain, illness or persistent fatigue.” She developed a personal safety plan for when she felt overwhelmed. I’d invite you to do the same.

Source: Nonprofit Leadership Center of Tampa Bay, 2025

So How Do We Keep Moving Forward?

Here is the harder truth, and the one I want to hold alongside the grief: our sector has always been built on stubborn hope. And stubborn hope requires a practice, not just a feeling.

1. Name What You’re Feeling — With Your Team

Normalize conversations about the emotional reality your team is living. If you are a leader, your silence on the human cost of these closures and cuts will be read as indifference. It is not indifference — but name what you are carrying. Give your team language for what they are experiencing. Create space for peer debriefing, not just operational problem-solving.

The Arizona State University Lodestar Center has been clear on this: “Nonprofit leaders, employees and stakeholders must prioritize mental health and well-being as a critical component of their missions.” That starts with leadership modeling it.

Source: ASU Lodestar Center, 2024

2. Go Back to Your Why

Not the strategic plan. Not the budget spreadsheet. The story. The person whose life was different because of your work. The moment that made you choose this field. When everything external is in chaos, your internal mission anchor is what keeps you oriented. Write it down. Post it somewhere visible. Share it with a colleague who is also struggling.

3. Build Your Personal Safety Plan

Borrowed from trauma-informed care, a personal safety plan is simply a list of what you will do when you feel overwhelmed. Specific, concrete, and yours. It might include:

• A ten-minute walk outside before making a hard decision

• Three names you can call when you need to be heard by someone who understands

• A physical boundary — work ends at a specific time and the laptop closes

• A weekly ritual that has nothing to do with the mission

• Access to an Employee Assistance Program or therapist, even just checking in quarterly

Sustainability — not perfection — is the goal. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and that truth has never been more urgent than it is right now.

4. Find Your People — and Lean In

This is not the season to white-knuckle it alone. Connect with your peer network. Call the United Way professional in the next county over. Reach out to the former board member who gets it. Join or form a peer cohort of executive directors who can share both strategy and the emotional weight.

Research from the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s fall 2025 report found that nonprofits are increasingly engaging in creative collaboration and exercising collective power through advocacy. The sector’s resilience is happening in community, not in isolation.

Source: Center for Effective Philanthropy, “A Sector in Crisis,” fall 2025

5. Separate What You Can Control From What You Cannot

You cannot single-handedly reverse federal funding decisions. You cannot bring back an organization that has already closed. You cannot protect every colleague from every cut. Holding yourself responsible for those things will break you.

What you can control: how you show up for your team today, what you advocate for in the next legislative conversation, how you document and tell the stories of impact that are being lost, how you care for yourself so you can still be standing when the landscape shifts again.

6. Tell the Stories That Are Being Lost

One of the most powerful things you can do right now is refuse to let the closures and cuts become statistics. Write the story of the program that closed. Share the face behind the service reduction. Speak at city council. Write the op-ed. Talk to the local journalist. The sector’s greatest advocacy asset right now is not data — it is narrative. And you are holding the narratives.

7. Stay in the Room

This one is for the colleagues who are thinking about leaving — the ones in their second or third year who are wondering if the personal cost is worth it. I hear you. I am not going to tell you the answer, because only you know it.

But I will say this: the people who stay in this sector through its hardest seasons — who do the grief work and come back to the table — are the ones who redefine what comes next. The sector needs your experience, your relationships, and yes, your heartbreak. That heartbreak means you still care. And caring, even when it hurts, is what this work is made of.

A Word to Those Watching Organizations Close

If you have experienced the loss of a program, a United Way chapter, a state college nonprofit program, or an organization you spent years building — please hear this:

The closure is not a verdict on your worth, your leadership, or the importance of the work. It is the consequence of a broken and brittle funding system meeting an unprecedented moment of political disruption. Those are two very different things.

The Urban Institute’s research found that even nonprofits that did not directly lose government funding felt the ripple effects — because the broader pullback in federal funding caused foundations and individual donors to shift resources toward larger organizations, leaving smaller nonprofits increasingly vulnerable. The system failed. Not you.

And what you built — the relationships, the trust, the institutional knowledge, the networks of care — those do not disappear when an organization closes. They live in the people who were there. They live in you.

The Longer View

United Way Worldwide wrote something in their 2025 reporting that has stayed with me: “What began as a fiscal crisis has become a leadership crucible that is revealing how far ingenuity and stubborn hope can go in keeping the country’s social fabric together, one nonprofit organization at a time.”

Source: United Way Worldwide, 2025

Leadership crucible. I think that is exactly right. A crucible is not a comfortable place. It is a vessel in which things are refined under extreme heat. What is being asked of nonprofit leaders right now is not comfortable. But sectors, like people, are sometimes defined not by their easy seasons but by who they were and what they chose in their hardest ones.

The demand for nonprofit services is not going down. Two in three nonprofits anticipate that demand for their programs will increase in the next twelve months, even as their capacity to meet it shrinks. The communities we serve are not going to need us less. They are going to need us more.

That is not a reason to ignore your grief. It is a reason to do the grief work honestly, so that you can bring your whole self back to the table.

You Are Not Alone in This

To every nonprofit professional reading this who is struggling right now — who drove past a building that used to be a program you loved, who attended a colleague’s goodbye party that felt more like a funeral, who is quietly wondering if the work is still sustainable:

You are not alone. What you are feeling is appropriate. The sadness is proportional to how much you cared. And the fact that you still care — enough to feel this, enough to keep showing up — is itself a form of hope.

We did not choose this work because it was easy. We chose it because it matters. And it still does. Even now. Especially now.

Grieve what needs to be grieved. Rest when your body asks you to. Lean on your people. Tell the stories. Stay in the room.

The mission still needs you. And so do we.

With you in this season,

Trudy, -Your Mission Maven

yourmissionmaven.com

SOURCES REFERENCED

• Urban Institute. “How Government Funding Disruptions Affected Nonprofits in Early 2025.” October 2025. urban.org

• United Way Worldwide. “Nonprofit Face Double Crunch As Shutdown Follows Severe Funding Cuts.” 2025. unitedway.org

• United Way of Greater Cincinnati. Federal Funding Survey Report. April 2025. uwgc.org

• South Seattle Emerald. “After Federal Funding Cuts, United Way of King County Says Sustaining Programs Will Be a ‘Struggle.’” May 2025.

• The Conversation / Indiana University & Urban Institute. “1 in 3 US Nonprofits That Serve Communities Lost Government Funding in Early 2025.” October 2025.

• Center for Effective Philanthropy. “A Sector in Crisis: How U.S. Nonprofits and Foundations Are Responding to Threats.” Fall 2025. cep.org

• Inside Higher Ed. “The Colleges That Couldn’t Survive 2025.” December 2025. insidehighered.com

• Nonprofit Leadership Center of Tampa Bay. “How Nonprofit Leaders Can Recognize and Recover from Compassion Fatigue.” 2025. nlctb.org

• ASU Lodestar Center. “Burnout and Compassion Fatigue in the Nonprofit Sector.” 2024. lodestar.asu.edu

• Givebutter. “Nonprofit Burnout: Top Statistics & Tips.” 2025. givebutter.com

• The Nonprofit Alliance. “Why This Government Shutdown Matters to the Nonprofit Sector.” 2025. tnpa.org