Heads up Subscriber First Name, I’m going to get a little vulnerable in this email:

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Over the years, I’ve become more comfortable talking openly about my journey with anxiety and depression. Part of this journey has included being honest how workplace burnout has affected my health. Last October I posted a video on LinkedIn where I told the truth about my burnout stories.

Honestly, I was really hesitant to share that story because I still feel some shame about my burnout and how its impacted my mental health over the years. I know this shame is directly tied to a stigma that many of us have inherited: the belief that mental health struggles should stay private, and that burnout is an individual problem we’re supposed to figure out on our own.

However, once I posted that video, I started having more “if you show me yours, I’ll show you mine” conversations.

Nonprofit executives, middle managers, frontline staff, board chairs—people started telling me the truth about what their burnout had cost them over the years. Their health. Their job. Their relationships. Their confidence.

This collective truth-telling on burnout has emphasized that we’re not just tired. For many of us, burnout creates serious risks for our physical, mental, emotional, social, and even spiritual wellbeing. And those conversations led me to start asking this bold question:

Who Burns Out, And Why?

The more I asked this question, the more curious I became about the answers. Some people responded immediately with their hypotheses. Some people pointed to themselves and unpacked their own burnout experiences. Others had to pause and really think. Our curiosity led us to create something new:

Who Burns Out, and Why? is a free resource collection created by Do Good Leadership Collective to help leaders and organizations better understand the real risks of burnout—and what it takes to prevent it.

This Mental Health Awareness Month, we want to make a few things clear:

🔹 Burnout may not be a formal medical diagnosis, but it absolutely creates real health risks. It’s time our institutions start treating burnout like the serious risk factor that it is.

🔹 If burnout is a social determinant of health, then we also have to acknowledge the systemic inequities that shape who burns out, how burnout shows up, and who gets access to recovery.

🔹 The better we understand who is burning out and why, the more we can move upstream—away from constantly putting out burnout fires and toward building customized, preventative support for the people who need it most.

Subscriber First Name, these resources are completely free and designed to support both you and your team. Inside, you’ll find:

✅ A research-backed white paper

✅ An infographic to spark conversation

✅ Team reflection worksheets

✅ A presentation deck to bring this conversation into your organization

✅ An invitation to chat with me live about this content on June 10th

This toolkit is for you if you’re ready for your organization to stop treating burnout like a personal failure and start understanding it as the systemic leadership challenge it really is. Explore our Who Burns Out, and Why? resources and forward them to someone who needs this conversation!

Last call for our Book Giveaway for the Slow Read Book Club!

We’re thrilled to start reading Reimagining Nonprofits and Philanthropy with you all later this month. In the meantime, you can sign up here—which will automatically put you in the raffle to win a free copy!