Over the last several years, philanthropy has become increasingly attentive to nonprofit worker
well-being. Funders are supporting sabbaticals, flexible funding, and other investments intended
to help organizations support and retain the people doing the work.

The field’s understanding of well-being has been expanding alongside the increasing focus.
Recent research from Nonprofit Finance Fund describes worker well-being as
multidimensional.Compensation and benefits remain important, but the field is beginning to
recognize the social and cultural aspects of nonprofit workers’ experiences as core to their
well-being, too. Well-being then looks less like a program or benefit and more like part of the
infrastructure that allows an organization to function well.

Much of philanthropy’s conversation about nonprofit worker well-being has appropriately
focused on the people working in the organizations foundations fund. But foundations are
nonprofit organizations, too. What does it look like for foundations to also support the well-being
of their own staff?

There is an important distinction here. Foundation staff and staff at operating nonprofits do not
generally experience the same material conditions. Many foundation positions come with
salaries, benefits, flexibility, and organizational security that are unavailable to many workers
across the nonprofit sector. Foundations also occupy a position of financial and institutional
power in relation to their grantee partners.

Yet, leaving foundations largely outside a conversation about nonprofit well-being gives us an
incomplete picture of the sector. It can subtly position foundations as observers of nonprofit
organizational health rather than as organizations with their own constraints. Rather than
flattening differences in power or precarity, including foundations allows for a fuller
understanding of how organizational well-being operates across a sector made up of very
different kinds of nonprofits.

Well-being is already showing up inside foundations

One finding from the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s 2026 report, A Sector in Crisis, makes
this especially visible. Nearly half of funders that had begun offering new forms of support
beyond typical programmatic grants were providing support for nonprofit staff well-being. In the
same study, 40 percent of foundation leaders identified staff burnout or turnover as a risk
facing their own foundations.

While foundation staff likely have access to more resources, many are working within
organizations facing changing expectations, increased urgency, leadership transitions, political
pressures, or expanding responsibilities.

The more interesting point is that philanthropy is already applying an organizational lens to
well-being externally. Funders increasingly recognize that the people doing nonprofit work affect
an organization’s ability to sustain that work. Extending that lens to foundations themselves is
less about shifting attention away from grantee organizations and more about following the logic
of what the field is already learning.

ELEVATE’s co-founders explored a related idea with colleagues in a recent Foundation Review
article on flexible well-being funding. The article focused on a different context, but one
takeaway is particularly relevant here: the conditions surrounding people may be just as
important as the resources available to them. Organizational culture, especially leadership
buy-in and perception of risk, shapes whether an explicit focus on well-being can take hold.

For ELEVATE, that connection becomes particularly interesting when we look at learning and
evaluation work.

The conditions surrounding learning and evaluation are changing

Across ELEVATE conversations, we have heard people describe an L&E environment that feels
increasingly demanding and uncertain. Learning practitioners are helping foundations interpret
rapidly changing environments, support strategy, facilitate internal learning, respond to
leadership and board needs, and make sense of what is happening across portfolios and
places.

The 2026 Let’s Keep Learning study from Engage R+D and ORS Impact gives us a useful
window into those changes. Nearly two-thirds of foundation respondents reported that staffing
had remained about the same over the previous year while responsibilities broadened. Forty-six
percent of foundation learning and evaluation (L&E) respondents reported increased
responsibility for providing data and insights for program strategy and decision-making.
Forty-five percent reported increased responsibility for designing and facilitating learning, and
41 percent reported increased responsibility for informing board strategy.

Although staff report taking on more responsibilities, the L&E function itself appears to be under
greater scrutiny. More than a fifth of foundation respondents experiencing changes cited internal
concerns about the value of L&E. Participants described pressure to produce faster, simpler
outputs, connect their work more directly to immediate decision-making, and respond to
assumptions that emerging technologies could reduce the need for dedicated L&E capacity.

Outside of foundations, the changes have been more pronounced. Nearly 60 percent of
consultants reported decreases in philanthropic opportunities, describing smaller scopes and
budgets, fewer RFPs, greater competition, and increasing demand for rapid-turnaround work.

We cannot use the findings of the pulse survey as evidence that L&E practitioners as a whole
are burned out, but they do point towards a pressurized learning environment. Behind
expanding responsibilities are people figuring out what they can reasonably add to their plates,
and behind eliminated positions are people determining who will carry the work forward.

The well-being of people is part of learning infrastructure

Philanthropy often talks about becoming more adaptive and learning-oriented, despite learning
sometimes being treated as though it is primarily a technical activity. Meaningful organizational
learning requires time to make sense of complexity before reducing it to a simple conclusion. It
requires enough trust for people to surface findings that challenge an existing strategy, and it
requires an organizational culture where uncertainty can be acknowledged and navigated rather
than interpreted as failure. These organizational conditions overlap considerably with how the
field is beginning to talk about well-being.

The current environment is creating legitimate demand for faster, more immediate learning,
while L&E practitioners are doing more, sometimes with less. The issue is not that L&E should
resist change or that faster learning is inherently worse. A healthy L&E field needs practitioners
who can adapt to changing needs. It also needs conditions that allow them to say when a faster
answer may not be a better answer.

While the well-being of L&E practitioners inside foundations may be easy to treat as an internal
management or HR concern, learning staff do not work in isolation from the rest of philanthropy.
Their workloads shape how much time they can spend advancing community-centered learning
practices. Organizational culture can affect whether they feel able to question assumptions or
surface inconvenient evidence. Leadership expectations shape the kinds of questions they are
asked to answer and the time available to answer them. When one part of that ecosystem
changes, people in another part may feel the effects.

The strength of the L&E field is therefore not only a question of how much evaluation
philanthropy commissions, how many learning positions foundations maintain, or which
methods are gaining traction. It is also a question of whether the people doing this work can
sustain themselves within it.