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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

How to Work for a Nonprofit and Not Be Totally Stressed Out

When you ask someone who works for a nonprofit organization, "How are you?" what answers do you hear nowadays?

  • Working on a fundraising campaign right now, since our (fill in the blank) funding got cut...
  • Well, we're short-staffed for (fill in the blank) right now...
  • (Heavy sigh) I'm stressed out.
It's not easy being in the nonprofit field in general, and today's economic conditions make it even more challenging. Nonprofit organizations are serving more people with fewer resources and facing increasing threats to their core funding. So how do you continue to work in the nonprofit field and save your sanity?

What's the problem? Take time to determine what the real issue is. Is it a problem that you can solve, or a condition that you need to work around? Is it an immediate threat, or something that you think might happen in the future? What's the true impact on your organization? Can you document it, or is it "worst case scenario" imagining?

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