I haven’t seen the Mary Oliver documentary yet. (I’ve added it to a list on my notes app, where it lives with things I want to watch dating back nearly a decade) But a clip from it has been making the rounds. I keep thinking about this line:
“Emptiness will never get us to get up and do anything, but ecstasy might.”
Now, I’m not trying to manufacture ecstasy for a group running on gas station coffee and grant deadlines. I’m bringing it up because it points at something I think we should notice: dread doesn’t build anything. Depletion doesn’t either. You cannot white knuckle your way into ongoing, consistently good work. You need something to run toward, not just trudge through.
I think rural nonprofit leaders need to hear this more. Someone needs to say “time to pause.” And someone needs to mean it when they say “let’s celebrate this.”
Most nonprofit professional development assumes a few things:
1. a peer down the road who already solved the thing you’re stuck on.
2. There’s a funder nearby who understands your service area without needing a map.
3. Your bench is deep enough to hand something off when the week goes sideways.
Take those away and the advice just doesn’t hold up, because it wasn’t built for you.
So, rural nonprofit leaders make it work anyway, because we’re plucky. You build the funding strategy solo because there was nobody at the next desk to ask. You sit with the hard board decision solo because the people who depend on you can’t also be your therapist. You keep meaning to start the strategic planning process, and then the furnace dies (again), and here we are.
The advice that makes this job survivable were built for places with more density than you’ve got. When you’re one of a handful of nonprofit leaders in your town, isolation is just the way the geography shakes out.
Ask any leader running a food pantry with one paid staff person, or a small arts org where the executive director is also the janitor, and you’ll hear some version of the same thing: they’re not under-resourced because they’re doing something wrong. They’re under-resourced because “backup” in a town of 900 means your neighbor with a plow truck, not a full fundraising team.
Back to the trudging: Joy isn’t optional here, and it’s not a reward for finishing everything, because you will never finish everything…that list was never designed to end.
Rest and delight aren’t the prize at the end of the grind. They’re part of what makes the work, and the life, worth having. We’ve been trained to feel virtuous about output and guilty about rest. That’s a feature of a capitalist system that profits when you don’t stop. Burnout isn’t something you fix with a bubble bath or a “wellness Tuesday.” It’s a problem that you fix with structural changes and by scheming with new friends.
That’s the whole idea behind the Rural Nonprofit Leader Summit. And while we can’t fix it all in four days, we’ll give it a hell of a shot.
Free and virtual, October 20 to 23, built for people leading rural nonprofits. Four days, 30+ speakers, organized around what rural leaders name as their sticking points:
Day one: Funding Without the Fire Drill
Day two: Connection and Collaboration
Day three: Choose Yourself Before Burnout Chooses for You
Day four: Bringing it to Life!
Virtual means no travel budget and no windshield time. Sessions stay up for 48 hours, so you’ve got time to rewatch. And the second you sign up, you’re in the private community, where nobody makes you explain what a one-person development shop is. They already know!
If you’ve been doing this with fewer people around you than the job needs, come find some. Bring snacks. Bring your scheming hat.
If before 10/1: Get on the waitlist now
If after 10/1: Get your free ticket now
Presented in partnership with Consultants for Good.