Two important events for fundraisers come together this time of year:

1. The holidays (and the giving spirit they engender).
2. The year-end tax deduction cutoff. 

This is fundraiser prime time. Everyone is, of course, aware of this and the competition is fierce. Creativity and innovation are indispensable. The same old smiling Santa on your nonprofit’s holiday card will no longer get the job done. 

After hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, social workers and service providers naturally focused on the immediate needs of their clients. They provided food, childcare, safety and support, among other services. However, a year has passed and the critical needs of these people, helpless in the face of mother nature’s awesome power, continue to evolve rather than abate.

In recent years, homelessness in New York City has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In August 2018, there were 62,166 homeless people, including 15,189 homeless families with 22,511 homeless children, sleeping each night in the New York City municipal shelter system. The number of homeless New Yorkers sleeping each night in municipal shelters is now 79% higher than it was ten years ago, and families make up three-quarters of the homeless shelter population.

This is the fourth in our series on case manager stress relief. In the first post, we discussed the physical things that can be done to relieve stress. The second focused on ways to find mental stress relief and the third focused on identifying and lessening exhaustion factors. In this post, we will examine how case manager burnout can be prevented with good supervision and mentorship.

The Pew Research Center has found that 20% of the U.S. public—and 34% of adults under 30—are religiously unaffiliated. These are the highest percentages ever recorded. 34% of those considered younger Millennials (born 1990–1994) reported no religious affiliation, compared to Generation Xers (born 1965–1980), with 21% reporting to be religiously unaffiliated.  

A caseworker’s job consists of many facets: assessing client needs, home visits, evaluations, reporting, listening to concerns, problem solving, providing referrals and the list goes on. While wanting to collaborate with coworkers and the community on projects is always the goal, the ability to do so can often be hindered by a caseworker’s workload. Fortunately, with the right case management software in place, increased collaboration can be possible.

In this new dystopian world of negative and divisive political discourse, we find it refreshing to seek out and report on the positive, uniting energy of the mission-centric nonprofit “other-world” we inhabit with our colleagues across the country.

The San Francisco board of supervisors recently introduced a budget measure that would raise the minimum wage for nonprofit and in-home supportive service workers from $15/hour to $17/hour. When challenged, the board justified the $13 million added annual expense to the city budget by citing the crisis the home healthcare field is experiencing in San Francisco. It is bleeding workers daily.

All governmental organizations and NGOs are founded by well-meaning actors with good intentions. However, corruption inevitably sets in as the “good intentions” are gradually eclipsed by the inevitable organizational impulse to survive and self-perpetuate. Institutions, like organisms, seek survival for themselves and their descendants. They survive, reproduce, replace, predate, evolve, alter, consume and grow. And when a sufficient number of institutions coexist, they function like an ecosystem.

This is the third in our series on case manager stress relief. In the first post we discussed the physical things you can do daily to relieve stress. The second post focused on ways to find mental stress relief. Today, we look at how to prevent burnout by identifying and lessening exhaustion factors.