A sector held up by caregivers
The Kataly Foundation recently found that 42% of social movement leaders are struggling with personal capacity that is affecting their ability to even participate in capacity-building resources meant to help.
They are experiencing this alongside funding crises, overwhelm from the sheer need of their services, and total burnout. These challenges are well documented and funders are working on solutions to help. But I offer another layer we must consider in order to fully support organizations.
If you look at available data from the AARP, Pew Research Center, Center for Effective Philanthropy, and others, it is not hard to imagine why exhaustion shows up so prevalently in the social sectors:
Roughly 1 in 4 American adults are caregivers for a family member, and this number is rising every year.
47% of those providing care are part of the “sandwich generation,” elder millennials caring for both children and aging parents.
Caregiving has a more negative than positive impact on careers, emotional well-being, physical health, finances, and social life…basically every measure of what makes up a person's life.
And the kicker: the social-sector workforce is concentrated in this exact sandwich generation age band. This workforce is also roughly two-thirds female-identifying, and disproportionately in financial precarity.
Women of color in particular are often pushed into the smallest, most fragile organizations, which are least likely to be able to offer paid leave and dependent-care benefits. So, an organization that pauses staff benefits to fill funding gaps is by default cutting benefits used by employees caring for children and elderly parents. It's just math.
This sandwich stage carries real weight. People are trying to keep it together without much headspace to sort through what is changing. It’s hard. And for mission-driven professionals already holding emotional labor in their work every day, it is really hard. Making decisions about memory care on a nonprofit salary while also raising their own kids. Worrying about multigenerational housing while quite literally working to save democracy. Life does not pause for a funding crisis and it does not pause for the mission.
The data on what is happening to nonprofits right now is actually pretty abundant and helpful. We know that a large majority of nonprofits lost funding from at least one source in 2025 and that it has worsened in 2026. We know burnout is a top reason leaders state for leaving their roles. We know in general that the global workforce has an “engagement” problem. What we do not know specifically is the overlap by sector of the number of people who are also navigating the sandwich generation trifecta of work, aging parents, and their own household. The major sector workforce surveys do not ask about caregiving status, so the exhaustion I noted above shows up in the data as simple burnout or turnover. This means the cause stays invisible.
The philanthropic community talks a lot about organizational capacity, and to their credit many funders have recently been doing a lot. But the conversation is almost never about the life stage of the people doing the work.
I am particularly looking forward to the Building Movement Project's Race to Lead 2025 survey results, which for the first time explicitly adds questions on caregiving, geography, and identity. It will be the first dataset I am aware of that will examine this intersection. In the meantime, I think we need to admit that the absence of concrete data is itself a finding here, because if we are not measuring something, we are making a choice about what counts.
