Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?

Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eater

Toni Cade Bambara’s question from The Salt Eaters resonates deeply as I reflect on the importance of mental health and what it takes to sustain it—for ourselves and others. This question offers clarity: wellness is not passive. Healing is not merely the absence of pain. Wholeness requires truth, active change, and a refusal to treat survival as leadership.

In the nonprofit sector, the cost of survival is too often absorbed by the people we ask to lead. For leaders on the front lines of justice, democracy, and care, wellness is a daily negotiation with budgets, bodies, funders, grief, uncertainty, urgency, and the future.

This is especially true for Black women leaders, often expected to be both the strategist and the sanctuary: to translate pain into possibility while our wellbeing is treated as secondary to the work we make possible. Too often, sacrifice is mistaken for leadership. And, too often, resilience in the face of workplace trauma, funding structures, and broader systems of harm, is normalized without confronting the underlying systemic causes.

Wholeness requires truth, active change, and a refusal to treat survival as leadership.

Before founding The Highland Project, I learned to confuse urgency with purpose and endurance with excellence. I was praised for being exceptional. But behind that praise was depletion. I was running toward achievement, impact, belonging, safety, and purpose. I wanted to actualize Black brilliance and be of use to future generations. Because the work felt sacred, the exhaustion was harder to name. But my body was telling the truth: no appetite, constant motion, and no capacity to be still.

Through practice and the teachings of leaders like Octavia Raheem, I learned that rest is not a reward. It is a requirement for vision.

The Conditions We Lead Inside  

At The Highland Project, our research on Black women’s views on wealth, the economy, and democracy shows that Black women are naming the toll of living inside these conditions. In 2025 polling with the firm brilliant corners Research and Strategies, 45 percent of Black women voters said their mental health had worsened; 67 percent disengaged from the news to protect their peace; and by fall, 88 percent were dissatisfied with the direction of the country.

This is not background noise. It is the environment our leaders are operating inside of.

Across the nonprofit sector, leaders are navigating funding cuts, delayed payments, political attacks, rising community need, burnout, economic anxiety, uneven power dynamics, and uncertainty while living with the same conditions as the communities they serve. The leader is inside the crisis, translating it, absorbing it, and trying to build a way through.

Dr. Gail Parker’s work on ethnic and race-based traumatic stress helps name what many leaders know in their bones: harm lodges in the body, shaping breath, rest, safety, and exacerbated levels of stress carried across generations.

Through practice and the teachings of leaders like Octavia Raheem, I learned that rest is not a reward. It is a requirement for vision.

Mental health in the nonprofit sector is not just a wellness issue. It is a funding issue. Chronic underfunding creates the conditions that drive staff burnout and organizational instability—forcing many nonprofits to operate in sustained crisis while staff absorb the costs of mission-driven work.

There is a dangerous story underneath our sector: that a leader’s body is expendable in service of the mission. When leaders burn out, organizations lose memory, relationships, imagination, and continuity.

Practice spaces, retreats, coaching, and wellness stipends can matter deeply. Meet Me at the Highland’s Legacy Studio helps leaders pause, listen inward, and reconnect to their legacies. And still, no single offering is enough.

A retreat is not enough if a leader returns to a budget built on precarity. If funding is short term, restricted, and contingent on proving urgency, care becomes a temporary intervention inside an unsustainable system.

What Wholeness Requires

If we are serious about mental health, then we must be serious about budgets that include multi-year general operating support, leadership sustainability, administrative labor, investment before crisis, and room to lead from somewhere other than survival.

To fund nonprofit leadership as if leaders only need technical assistance or rapid response dollars is to misunderstand the assignment. If we want sustained change, we have to fund sustained leaders.

Funders must ask better questions—and invest in the responses: What did the work cost? Who is supporting the people doing the serving? What conditions would allow this work to be sustained with dignity?

Wholeness is no trifling matter. If we want leaders and communities to be well, and movements to endure, awareness is not enough. Wellness requires steady, flexible, restorative investment.

Investment that understands that the people closest to the work are not fuel to burn. They are the future.