Here in Vermont, we love to praise our nonprofit organizations by saying, “Wow! They do so much with so little.” It’s meant as an earnest compliment. But after sitting across the table from dozens of nonprofit leaders over the years, I’ve come to think of this compliment as something more like a warning sign.

I keep hearing variations of the same story:

An executive director who hasn’t taken a vacation in three years because they’re the only one who knows how payroll works, what to do when a program hits a wall and how to hold every organizational partnership together.

A program coordinator who does the job of two-and-a-half people, at a salary that wouldn’t cover rent in the community they serve.

A board that means well but doesn’t know what its job is, so it either rubber-stamps everything or micromanages the wrong things.

Meanwhile, the building gets a new wing and the program offerings increase. The need is real, the donors are generous and the organization says yes, yes and yes again, through all manner of crises, shortages and storms. That’s what nonprofits do.

The result is predictable. Executive director burnout and turnover that costs organizations institutional knowledge. Staff who leave because caring about the mission is not enough to live on. Boards who want to help but don’t have the tools to govern well. Strategic drift because the organization is not built for where it’s trying to go.

The money to fix these problems barely exists, and nonprofits are incentivized not to spend money on them in the first place. Many state-funded contracts cap what nonprofits can spend on admin, treating planning, HR and financial systems as overhead rather than critical infrastructure. Donors often reward the organizations that spend the least on all of it, mistaking a low overhead ratio for good financial stewardship. Program dollars are everywhere because donors and funders can see exactly what it buys in the form of meals served, kids tutored and beds filled. Capacity building is a harder sell because its return is invisible until an organization collapses. The Vermont Community Foundation generously offers a nonprofit capacity building grant of $5,000, but even they note, “this amount is typically not enough to cover the full cost of providing these services.” We collectively fund the mission but starve the very machinery that keeps it running.

Vermonters who care about a nonprofit’s mission should care just as much about whether that organization has the systems, leadership pipeline and organizational health to deliver on that mission for the next twenty years. That means treating capacity-building support as core to the investment. It means boards taking their governance role seriously enough to ask hard questions about sustainability, not just program growth and outcomes. It means the rest of us pushing back on the instinct to praise an organization for running lean when what we’re really describing is an organization––and its people––running on fumes.

Vermont’s nonprofits get it done. But “getting it done” has a cost. Right now, our nonprofit sector is shouldering that cost one burned-out executive director and one unfilled position at a time. On National Nonprofit Day, before we celebrate what nonprofits accomplish with so little, let’s make sure they have enough. Imagine what they could accomplish, and sustain, for Vermont.

Sarah McGowen Audet
Middlebury