Over the last few months, I've had the same conversation over and over. A former colleague searching for her next role after eight months of applications. A mentee who just left a job she loved because the pace was unsustainable. A friend at a foundation who told me, voice flat with exhaustion, "I just don't know how much longer I can do this."
Then in a recent cohort of twenty professionals I was working with, exhaustion became the hot topic. It wasn't planned on the agenda. It seemed, however, a key topic emerging. People were depleted. Burned out. Running on empty.
This isn't coincidental. The social impact sector is facing dramatic funding ruptures. Organizations are closing programs, cutting staff, completely restructuring. Major funders are pulling back or shifting priorities. The external pressures are real and intensifying.
But here's what I've been noticing: the exhaustion goes deeper than these current upheavals. The tough job market and funding cuts have made it more visible (nothing like months of rejection or watching your program shut down to strip away our professional armor), but the depletion was already there. The system has been running unsustainably for years, and now the external pressures are exposing what we've been ignoring.
We need to talk about why this is happening. More importantly, we need to talk about what has to change in how our sector operates and in how we each navigate it right now.
Why Are We All So Exhausted?
The job market is a useful lens because it reveals something we've been ignoring during the "good times": our sector has been running an unsustainable model for years, and we've been colluding with it.
When you've sent out fifty applications and gotten five rejections and forty-five silences, when you're a stellar professional with a decade of experience and can't get a callback, the exhaustion goes beyond the job search itself. You're already entering that search depleted from years of giving everything to your previous role. You're tired before you even start.
Here's what I've come to understand about why this exhaustion is so widespread:
We've tied our entire identity to our work. In the education and broader social impact sector, we have callings. Elevating normal jobs to personal missions. We're people working to end educational inequity or transform learning systems, and not simply accountants or project managers. When that work disappears or becomes unavailable, we face both financial insecurity and an identity crisis. Who are we if we're not doing this work? That question requires real work to answer, and most of us have never done it.
We're intrinsically motivated in systems that exploit that motivation. Whether you're at a foundation wanting to do more because you control the resources, or at an NGO stretching every dollar to serve more children, the result is the same: we work ourselves into the ground. We do it willingly. We do it because we care. And the sector has built its entire operating model on our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for the mission.
We live in a grind culture that treats rest as luxury. But it's worse in our sector. When you work in education or international development, you see suffering every day. You know there are children who are hungry, discriminated against, denied opportunities. How do you rest when you carry that knowledge? The pressure to never stop, never slow down, feels even more acute when the stakes are this high. Rest feels selfish. Rest feels like abandonment.
Many of us are mothers navigating systems designed for people without caregiving responsibilities. The international development world, in particular, wasn't built with parents in mind, such as the travel schedules, the time zones, the expectation of constant availability. Those of us working in education know better than anyone how important it is to be present for our children. We know what engaged parenting looks like. And yet we're operating in structures that make that nearly impossible. The dissonance is crushing.
We feel undervalued because we're only using a fraction of who we are. I'm a photographer, an artist, someone who once waited tables and played violin. But in my professional life, I was valued only for my analytical skills, my ability to facilitate strategy sessions and write reports. All those other parts of me, the creative, the embodied, the expressive parts, had no place. When you can only show up as a slice of yourself, you start to feel like that slice is all you are.
What Needs to Change: Toward Rested Leadership
This isn't sustainable. We know it isn't. And we can't wait for the sector to fix itself while we burn out one by one.
In my female leadership series, rest has emerged as a recurring theme in conversations with the various inspiring leaders. One person introduced me to her personal concept of "rested leadership," and it's been sitting with me ever since. The idea deepens something I've been observing: we talk a lot about partnership in our sector (collaborative leadership, stakeholder engagement, co-creation), but we're missing a crucial piece.
You cannot lead in true partnership when you're running on empty. Rested leadership is a prerequisite for the kind of work we say we want to do.
The leaders our sector needs right now have clear boundary skills alongside their partnership skills. They know how to rest, how to create frameworks for sustainable work, how to model what it looks like to be both effective and human.
This means change needs to happen at every level:
Funders need to lead differently. This means modeling rest in your own organizations, not just talking about it. It means building realistic timelines and budgets that don't assume your grantees are working 60-hour weeks. It means funding organizational capacity and staff wellbeing, not just program outcomes. What about a paid sabbatical or an exchange program with other grantees or funders? And it means stopping the practice of rewarding martyrdom, stop giving grants to organizations that boast about doing more with less, and start investing in those building sustainable models.
Organizations need to redesign how we work and what leadership looks like. Create roles that don't assume unlimited availability, especially for parents. Build cultures where boundaries are respected, not just tolerated. Recognize and compensate the full range of skills people bring, not just the narrow professional slice. Maybe with new job roles across the organization? Be honest in job postings about actual workload and travel expectations. Stop treating "passion for the mission" as a substitute for fair compensation and reasonable hours.
And critically: start treating rest and boundary-setting as core leadership competencies. Include them in job descriptions. Evaluate them in performance reviews. Promote people who model sustainable work practices, and not just those who produce the most output. The partnership-based, collaborative leadership we say we want requires leaders who are rested enough to actually listen, create space, and show up fully.
We as individuals need to stop colluding with exploitation. We need to share our stories of exhaustion as evidence of a broken system, not as failures. We need to support each other in setting boundaries rather than competing over who sacrifices most. And we need to recognize that when we work ourselves into depletion, we're modeling unsustainability for everyone watching rather than serving the mission better.
Where to Start Right Now
I know that calling for that deep change can feel overwhelming when you're already exhausted. So here's what I've learned about what we can each do, starting today:
Create clear boundaries and islands of rest in your daily life. Not someday when things calm down. Today. What does one hour of true rest look like for you? Claim it.
If you're job searching, focus on quality over quantity. Set specific times each day for applications, then intentionally do other things with the rest of your time. Treat the job search as part of your life, not your entire life. The exhaustion of endless applications helps no one, least of all your future employer.
Journal. Get the swirling thoughts and anxieties out of your head and onto paper. You don't need a system or a method; just write.
Practice actual self-care. Not spa days (though fine if that's your thing). I mean the basics: healthy food, movement, creativity, time with people you love. Doing this continuously, not just in one good week. These are requirements for human functioning, and shouldn't be seen as luxuries.
Find your people. Find or create communities where you can be honest about how hard this is. Where you can show up as your whole self beyond your professional self.
For me, the shift toward a portfolio career has been transformative. I can use flexible time arrangements that actually work with my life. I can bring more of my skills into my work, not just my analytical abilities, but my creativity and other capacities. I'm finding new communities outside the traditional structures. I redesigned my own work life. I know, however, that this is not for everybody.
I've been reading Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey and The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, and they've been eye-openers. These conversations about rest, creativity, and reclaiming our full selves are happening across movements and fields. We're not alone in recognizing that the old models are breaking us.
The Radical Act of Rested Leadership
Here's what I've come to believe as I've sat with this concept of rested leadership: when you set boundaries in a system designed to extract everything from you, you're engaging in resistance. You're refusing to participate in an unsustainable model. You're modeling a different kind of leadership.
The sector doesn't need more people willing to grind themselves down. We need rested, partnership-informed leaders. Leaders who can actually show up for collaborative work because they have the capacity for it. Leaders who demonstrate that boundary-setting is essential for the quality of work we aspire to do.
This is where I want to deepen the thinking on rested leadership: you cannot facilitate true partnership when you're depleted. You cannot hold space for others when you have no space for yourself. You cannot co-create with stakeholders when you're running on fumes. Rested leadership means working sustainably so we can actually deliver on the collaborative, equity-centered approaches we claim to value.
The exhaustion you're feeling is a rational response to irrational expectations. Changing it starts with each of us deciding that we deserve better and that the people we're trying to serve deserve us at our best, not our most depleted.
What would it look like if we reimagined leadership to include rest as a core skill?
What if boundary-setting was valued alongside strategic thinking?
What if we promoted people not just for what they produce, but for how sustainably they work?
That's the sector I want to help build. And it starts with each of us, right now, deciding that rested leadership is the leadership our work requires.