Why is healing from the nonprofit sector necessary?
How does the sector hurt us?
The sector hurts us by:
1. By normalizing poverty wages and working for free, and wage theft.
2. By taking your revolutionary energy and trapping it in an ineffective work loop,
3. Keeping you too exhausted to question the system
4. By replicating authoritarian and nondemocratic work environments where workers have all of the responsibility and consequences and little power, and the board has most of the power and no consequences
5. The gaslighting mindset- “You want more money? Don’t you BELIEVE IN THE MISSION?” trying to shame you when you ask for more
6. The trauma bonding that makes you grateful for scraps
7. By keeping us stuck, for years, in a dead end of endless demands and no time to rest or breathe
8. Sometimes we are primed to enter these toxic nonprofit environments because of our families. You have to unlearn what seems normal.
Mazarine, people are dying, why this book? why NOW?
Because I’ve learned in the last 7 years that if we don’t heal- PERSONALLY, and understand systems of oppression that hold us all back- then wea re just going to keep recreating those systems.
We need strong movements, now more than ever.
But we can’t have that if we keep:
- Being silent about the genocide in Gaza and the ICE raids in our streets
- Not understanding how we recreate white supremacy in our workplaces
- Reproducing ableism through not acknowledging the ongoing pandemic and not masking
- Pretending our feelings don’t matter
This book will help you name and claim what’s going on. And step forward authentically.
Whether that means advocating for a union, more democratic workplace structures
Acknowledging the Gaza and Sudan genocides, the pandemic that’s continuing, the climate crisis in your communications,
Or stopping overgiving and self abandoning at your work,
Or even leaving the sector entirely
You’ll be able to NAME what feels wrong and make a more informed choice about what to do next.
It’s ok if you feel isolated, numb, powerless, despairing. It’s ok if you feel rage, fear, and everything in between. We have to acknowledge all the feelings, even the hard ones, to come out on the other side.
You may have heard of PTSD, but have you heard of Post traumatic growth? This too is a reframe, a bit of narrative therapy.
But we can’t move forward until we first look at the story we swallowed that is making us sick, vomit it up and swallow a new story.
How do you heal?
What does healing look like?
- Feeling your feelings
- Studying history and systems of oppression
- Asking why does our cause exist? What’s upstream and why aren’t we working on that instead?
- Doing less or the bare minimum
- Integrating your shadow- anger, sadness, rage
- Resisting work- not monetizing your hobbies as an example
- Unlearning white supremacy culture and implementing the antidotes
- Calling out WS culture when you see it
- Getting paid better some other way
- Resisting shame and guilt
- Unlearning internalized oppression
- Developing better boundaries, saying no, stopping self abandonment
- Standing up at work for more democratic structures, like coops, and unionizing
Benefits of the book
Why read this book?
– You’ll learn what world systems make our sector toxic
– How the sector is dying, – Why the sector sprang up in the first place – What comes next
– You’ll see what systems inside the sector keep us stuck and unquestioning and
– You’ll understand how to start to heal from the nonprofit sector, including thoughtforms and patterns that hold you back, and what to do instead: noticing overgiving and self abandoning