Life as a Nonprofit Executive Director

COMMUNITY POWER · UBUNTU PHILOSOPHY · ETHICAL PROSPERITY

It Started With a Demolition Notice

I did not set out to run a nonprofit. I became an organizer because someone decided my home should stop existing.

In Brooklyn in the 1990s, my home and two hundred others were slated for demolition so the neighborhood could be made attractive to people who did not live in it yet. That is the polite word for it — gentrification. What it looks like up close is a letter, a deadline, and a set of neighbors realizing at the same moment that the decision was made somewhere none of them were invited.

I spent the years after that on affordable housing advocacy for low-income families and older adults. It taught me the thing I have organized around ever since: the people closest to a problem are not waiting to be rescued from it. They are waiting for someone to stop overruling them. That conviction became Ubuntu Village in 2015.

In 2017 we began work in Uganda — first aid, routine healthcare, and educational support for one village. We went on to work in Zimbabwe and Nigeria, and today our programs run in Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria.

We are no longer stewards in Zimbabwe, and I want to be precise about why, because this is the ending the sector almost never reports. The communities we worked alongside there became self-sustaining through mechanisms of their own — built for them, by them. Nothing collapsed. No funder walked away. They simply arrived at the place where our presence was no longer the thing holding anything up.

That is not a program we lost. That is the entire point, arriving on schedule. An organization that cannot celebrate the day it is no longer needed somewhere has quietly confused its own continuation with its mission — and I have watched that confusion outlive more than one good idea. The connection between who makes policy and whose body pays for it has never stopped being the spine of this work, and it is the same spine that runs through our piece on colonialism and global health policy.

What the Job Actually Is

People picture a nonprofit executive director as someone who decides things. Some days. Mostly the job is holding a dozen unrelated threads and refusing to drop any of them.

I verify projects and visit programs to confirm they match what we said we would do. I keep our donors close — not as a transaction, but because people who fund work deserve to know what it became. I keep our board of four aligned, which in a small organization means everyone knows everything, because there is no one else to know it. And I write: several posts a week, so the people who find us find something real rather than a landing page.

The unglamorous truth is that organization is the whole game. In an organization this size there is no department to absorb a dropped thread. If I lose track of a task, it is simply lost, until I find it again.

The Number That Explains the Cash-Flow Years

When we started, we ran low on cash every month. I used to file that under my own inexperience. Then I read the sector’s data on itself.

In 2020, Echoing Green and The Bridgespan Group published a study of funding disparities among leaders of color. Comparing organizations in the same applicant pool, doing comparable work, they found that the revenues of Black-led organizations were 24% smaller than those of their white-led counterparts — and that their unrestricted net assets were 76% smaller.

Unrestricted net assets are the money an organization can actually decide about. It is what covers a late grant, a broken vehicle, a month when nothing lands. Seventy-six percent less of it is not a budgeting difference. It is the difference between an organization that can absorb a shock and one that cannot. Within the same study’s Black Male Achievement fellowship — where every organization was working on the same issue — the gap in unrestricted assets reached 91%.

I want to be careful about how I hold that. It is not a grievance and it is not an excuse. It is a description of the water. Knowing it changed one thing for me immediately: I stopped reading our cash-flow years as a verdict on my competence.

Burnout Is a Structural Condition, Not a Character Flaw

The Center for Effective Philanthropy surveyed 239 nonprofit leaders for its State of Nonprofits 2024 study. Ninety-five percent reported some concern about burnout. A third said they were very much concerned about their own. Half said their concern had grown over the previous year, and more than three-quarters said burnout was affecting whether their mission got accomplished at all.

When ninety-five percent of a population reports the same symptom, the symptom is not personal. The sector asks people to do work that cannot be finished, on money that arrives late, and then treats exhaustion as a failure of resilience. It is not. It is what happens when the design of the job and the design of the funding do not match.

There is an Ubuntu answer to this that is not a self-care tip. I am because we are applies to the person running the organization too. A director who is held by a board, a community, and a set of relationships that do not depend on her performing invulnerability lasts longer than one who is admired for never needing anything. Being unheld is not a leadership style.

The Overhead Question, and Who It Punishes

Sooner or later someone asks what percentage of a donation goes to “the cause,” as though salaries, systems and staying solvent were something other than the cause.

The three organizations that built their reputations on rating charities — GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance — jointly disowned that metric, calling the overhead ratio misleading and simplistic as a measure of performance and urging donors to look instead at goals, strategy, governance and actual results.

The overhead standard falls hardest on the organizations with the least cushion. An organization with 76% fewer unrestricted assets cannot also starve its own operations to look virtuous on a pie chart. Asking it to is asking it to fail slowly and call that integrity.

What I Would Tell Someone Starting Now

Track every expense from the first day. The most common way a small organization gets into trouble is not theft or bad faith. It is a founder who was too busy doing the work to record what the work cost.

Be able to say the mission in one breath. If you cannot, neither can your board, and neither can anyone deciding whether to fund you.

Ask the question you think will make you look inexperienced. It will not. Staying confused to protect your image costs more than the question ever would.

Learn the water you are swimming in. Read the funding data on organizations like yours. Not to be discouraged — to stop mistaking a structural pattern for a personal failing.

And you are not alone in this. There are more people willing to help than you expect. But the hard part stays yours: persistence, and a mission clear enough to keep you pointed at it on the days nothing lands.

Eleven Years In

I am not going to tell you it gets easy. It gets clearer, which is better.

What has held is the thing I learned on a Brooklyn block with a demolition notice in my hand: communities are not a problem to be solved by people who arrive from elsewhere. They are the protagonists. My job is to make sure the resources reach them and the story about them stays true. Everything else — the spreadsheets, the grant portals, the galas, the months the cash ran thin — is logistics in service of that.

If you are weighing whether this sector is for you, that is the question I would sit with. Not whether you can withstand the hours. Whether you can stay in the room long enough to be useful without needing to be the hero of it.

If you know someone running a small organization on fumes and blaming themselves for it, send them the section about the seventy-six percent.

Sources

1. Dorsey, C., Bradach, J.L. & Kim, P. (2020). Racial Equity and Philanthropy: Disparities in Funding for Leaders of Color Leave Impact on the Table. Echoing Green and The Bridgespan Group
2. The Center for Effective Philanthropy (2024). State of Nonprofits 2024: What Funders Need to Know
3. GuideStar, Charity Navigator & BBB Wise Giving Alliance. Charities Urged to Crush Overhead Myth and Take Actions Toward an Overhead Solution

Related Reading

• ‣ Colonialism and Global Health Policy
• ‣ Reparations and Healing: A Public Health Argument
• ‣ What Is Ubuntu Philosophy?

I am because we are. No one builds anything alone, least of all the person whose name is on the paperwork.