Living wages is an elephant issue

In 2025, the elephant in the room for non-profit leaders is livable wages.

As we start 2025, leaders are inundated with innumerable articles and webinars and books and consultants, all promoting leadership strategies and hacks. Underneath everything, if your people have significant anxiety about their personal finances, you cannot optimize their performance at work.

As Future of Good’s executive director, I think the most pressing issue facing non-profit leaders is livable wages in the social purpose sector. It is well known that charities are tight in terms of resources and ambitious in terms of solving problems. Solving big problems is what we do, but what about the people who are doing the work?

I have been on the receiving end of unlivable wages, and I have also paid out unlivable wages. It’s a hard situation to address. Executive Directors of non-profits are not paying unlivable wages because they are Ebenezer Scrooges. They, themselves, as organizations are trying to stay alive, but unless we take care of the caregivers, we reduce our impact and our ability to do work well.

If an employee is worried about how they will pay for child care, about what groceries are in the fridge, or about triaging various bills, they cannot be creative or empathetic at work.

As non-profit leaders, we need to get together, grapple with this and talk about it without blaming anyone, but understanding that this is a systemic issue and it’s on us to resolve it.

This challenge probably exists everywhere, but it has a specific pressure in the non-profit sector—knowing that we are serving those who are in even greater need. And how do we do that if we ourselves are constantly in a state of anxiety?

I don’t have a solution, but I hope you’ll join me for the Changemaker Wellbeing Summit to discuss how we grapple with and navigate this tension.

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