Agency and Burnout in Nonprofit Work

Agency is a word that has become synonymous with personal power, the ability to dictate one's own actions, and the exercise of control over circumstances through individual behavior. Many nonprofit groups directly serve communities, which means personal power—of both staff and those they aid—is a core element of their work. Being in the driver seat in terms of solving problems is an enticing viewpoint, but does agency exist in the way nonprofit staff are often taught, and do the many beliefs that hinge upon it ultimately help or hinder charitable work?

Discussions about agency go back to Greco-Roman philosophy, and thinkers since that time, from Hegel to Wilfrid Sellars, have debated it all the way into the modern era. The concept has been such a preoccupation partly because it's foundational to how humans interact within societies and the wider world, and it impacts everything from religious principles to beliefs about success or failure.

Dr. Carrie Oelberger, an assistant professor of nonprofit management at the University of Minnesota, has researched charitable organizations and fields, drawing upon and contributing to organizational theory, the sociology of work, economic sociology, and the study of social movements. She's earned a B.A. in History from Haverford College, a PGDip in Maori and Pacific Nations Education from Victoria University of Wellington, and an M.A. in Sociology and a Ph.D. in Organization Studies from Stanford University. Part of her current research focuses on burnout in the nonprofit realm—in effect, what are the personal consequences of undertaking the often Sisyphean tasks associated with nonprofit work? She's compiled her work into a paper titled “The Myth of Agency.”

Dr. Oelberger was able to make time to chat with me about her paper, which derived from two years collecting ethnographic data across ten nonprofit frontline service organizations and from multiple interviews with 67 staff members. She studied three categories of nonprofit workers: citizen-agents, state-agents, and accompagnateurs. “The citizen-agent,” she explains, “describes the self-assumed identity of a resourceful user of discretion or agency in response to individual cases, and the state-agent describes a state-imposed identity of a strict rule enforcer that processes clients according to standardized routines.”

Her paper reformulates some of this terminology. Citizen-agents are “fixers” while state-agents are “processors.” Fixers feel individually empowered, while processors recognize that there are limits to what they can personally do. Oelberger clarifies this further: “Fixers have an emboldened sense of their own agency and a constrained sense of client agency, so generally place the onus on structural/institutional reasons for why their clients are struggling. Processors, in comparison, have an inflated sense of their clients' agency and blame them for failures, while holding a constrained sense of their own agency.”

The third category of workers, “accompagnateurs,” have a nuanced understanding of agency, and take on the role of empathetic guides through the processes of accessing or receiving assistance. Accompagnateurs are characterized by their willingness to share a journey with someone without privileging “technical expertise above solidarity or compassion,” as medical anthropologist Paul Farmer and Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez phrased it in their seminal 2013 book In the Company of the Poor. “Those that adopt the accompagnateur identity,” Oelberger notes, “are often members of marginalized communities that have experienced poverty, discrimination, and limitations to their own agency throughout their lives.”

Oelberger explains what the three worker types looked like in practice during her field research:

Processors often, they'd sit down to meet with a client, the first thing they'd ask them is, “What's your ID number?” It's not like you're connecting with a person, you're just like processing someone through a system. “Did you finish this thing? I noticed you didn't finish this thing. You didn't get this form.” They're literally just bean counting with the person. If the person asks for a bus voucher or a housing voucher or a food voucher or something like that, they'll be like, “You've already asked for two this month. What do you think? This is a place for free handouts.” They don't treat them with any sense of humanity or any sense of real compassion for the daily lived struggle that these people are going through.

Fixers tended to use their own moral judgment, personal identities, or life experiences as prisms through which to approach their work. If they deemed clients deserving, they often employed their own discretion to marshal available resources. Oelberger explains, “The fixers would, after a meeting with the clients, then spend two to three hours calling different offices, trying to get bus vouchers, trying to get food vouchers, trying to patch things together. They'd do their own research for jobs that the person could apply for, try to download them all, try to streamline it, put them in a packet that they could give to the person the next time they saw them.”

In relation to the accompagnateurs, Oelberger says,

The accompagnateurs, I think they really met their clients where they were at and were like, “What do you need from me today? How can I be helpful to you?” I guess the best way to describe it is they just infused a lot of humanity into the interactions that they had, which is why I think the clients really enjoyed being matched with them, and the staff members themselves found it really energizing. They were the only folks that when I asked how they felt about their jobs, they were like, “I love my job. I feel inspired by my clients. I love getting to work with my clients.” They did it in a way that filled them up and filled their clients up somehow.

Oelberger sees the concept of agency as a Western idea:

I might say it's part of how I understand white supremacy culture in many ways. It seems very embedded within histories of colonialism, this idea that we are independent agendic actors that can control our destinies, and that can control other people's destinies. It's a very culturally specific idea that, I think if we looked back over the span of human history, is fairly new. But I think it's very pervasive in the United States and other places that have been colonized by Europe.

Ultimately, this expectation that people can influence undesirable states of affairs can affect personal outcomes for nonprofit workers when they find that their beliefs don't stand up to the empirical reality of socio-economic barriers. “The interesting transition is that when fixers burn out,” Oelberger explains, “they tend to either leave the field or, if they remain, they change from a fixer orientation to a processor orientation, in essence flip-flopping where they see agency, moving it away from themselves and onto their clients, but having a hard time admitting there is constrained agency for all, which is what accompagnateurs believe.”

Oelberger recalls fellow students from her university programs and how their backgrounds sometimes presaged the fixer-to-processor transition. “They were generally white, generally middle class folks accustomed to having a significant amount of agency in their own lives,” she explains. “They all went to school for social work or something similar. So they understood institutional barriers, they understood institutional inequality, they understood institutional racism, and they understood the barriers that their clients are facing.”

But even with all that understanding, burnout was a common result. Such workers may return to school to get more advanced degrees with the idea of changing institutional structures through policymaking, while others may move on to other professions entirely. Within Oelberger's study, she found clear evidence that “In contrast to the negative personal and work outcomes for the two dominant institutional roles—high attrition for citizen-agents and high cynicism and disengagement for state-agents— . . . accompagnateurs had the most sustainable and effective careers in the workforce development field.”

Achieving an accompagnateur mindset and moving past rigid ideas of agency institutionally can make for more efficacious charitable work. In her continuing work on this issue, Oelberger offers wide-ranging advice for nonprofits and related entities, including schools, that wish to cultivate such an ethos, covering areas ranging from professional development to goal setting. Better employee training in the history of inequality and its present-day manifestations, meditation-related approaches that allow nonprofit workers to better connect with clients and shed work stress, broadened qualifications sought from frontline workers, and attempting to closely mirror the makeup of communities in which work is taking place are all part of her mix of recommendations.

These recommendations require institutional change to an extent that won't be easy for frontline organizations and schools, but Oelberger's research nevertheless points toward a better path, with better outcomes for both aid recipients and the staff she's seen firsthand performing crucial work. “I think the thing that really does motivate me to do this,” she explains, “is the understanding that I come to this having worked in the nonprofit sector for a while before I went back to graduate school to get my doctorate. So I think I went into it feeling like we're not having the conversations we need to be having in the nonprofit space about the sort of things that happen inside of organizations.”

“We're so focused on others that we don't do a good job in-house. And then ironically, because we're ignoring that, we're actually doing a disservice. Oftentimes, my broad research agenda is motivated really by that desire to sort of rethink the kinds of conversations we're having about what's appropriate to talk about, so that we can do justice and less harm to the folks that we're trying to help, and make the nonprofit sector not an obnoxiously unhealthy place to work.”

Dr. Carrie Oelberger is an assistant professor of Management in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and a McKnight land-grant professor at the University of Minnesota. She earned her Ph.D. in Organization Studies from Stanford University. She also holds a Master of Arts in Sociology from Stanford University, a PGDip in Maori and Pacific Nations Education from Victoria University Wellington, and a B.A. in History from Haverford College. Prior to entering academia, she worked for a decade on a grassroots education development project in rural Tanzania. She continues to provide consulting support for philanthropic foundations and prosocial organizations to inform their organizational design and programmatic practice.