The People Holding Up Our Systems Are Tired: Burnout, Care and What Has to Change
About the Session
The people trying to hold up our systems are tired.
Leaders, organizers, funders, advocates, and practitioners are working through shrinking budgets, political uncertainty, organizational restructures, accelerating crises, and problems that rarely feel finished. The response is often to ask people to do more: make another decision, absorb another responsibility, manage another transition, carry another difficult conversation.
Eventually, the costs show up in people’s bodies, relationships, mental health, and ability to lead.
Burnout is often treated as an individual problem with individual solutions: take time off, exercise, meditate, set better boundaries. Those things can matter. But exhaustion, moral injury, loneliness, and executive fatigue can also be signals that organizations and sectors are asking people to sustain ways of working that are fundamentally unsustainable. Collective care asks a different question: what would change if care were treated as infrastructure rather than an employee benefit?
There is also a more personal question underneath the organizational one. In a world with seemingly endless need, how do we resist defining our contribution by how much we can carry? What happens when we make room for rest, joy, play, relationships, and reflection? And how do we become clearer about what is actually ours to do?
This session will create space to examine both the systems we work within and the people we are becoming while doing the work. It will explore how organizations can redesign work, leadership, decision-making, safety, and support, while giving individuals permission to think differently about purpose, contribution, health, and the relationships that sustain them.
The goal is not to help people become better at tolerating unhealthy systems. It is to ask what healthier ways of working, leading, and living might actually look like.
Discussion Group Leaders
Andrew Henck is Lecturer in Organisation Studies & Leadership Facilitator at Context Change Consulting, strengthening organizational culture, leadership, and team dynamics through facilitated approaches to change and collaboration.
Francesca Raoelison is Founder and Executive Director at Omena, preventing emotional abuse by building emotional literacy and healthier relationships among children, families, and communities.
Maha Khan is an Independent Stakeholder Engagement and Convening Strategist, fostering more connected and effective leadership through strategic convening, relationship-building, and human-centered approaches.
Tina Ajuonuma is Founder and CEO at The Better Org, advancing organizational and cultural transformation rooted in care, justice, anti-racism, intersectional feminism, and liberatory practice.
Nicole Kamaleson is MD, Social Impact Practice (Executive Search) at DSG | Global, strengthening social impact organizations by connecting them with leaders who can drive meaningful and lasting change.
What to Expect
A reflective and practical conversation about burnout, leadership fatigue, organizational health, mental and physical wellbeing, relationships, purpose, and collective care.
Participants will have space to step outside the usual pressure to produce another solution and consider both structural and personal questions: what needs to change in the systems around us, what sustains us as people, and how can we contribute meaningfully without treating exhaustion as evidence of commitment?
Who This Is For
This session is for leaders, funders, social entrepreneurs, organizers, practitioners, team and organizational leaders, and others doing demanding work in environments of sustained uncertainty and change.
What You Will Get Out of It
A way to understand burnout as both a human experience and an organizational design signal
Ideas for making care, relationships, and psychological health part of how organizations operate
Space to reflect on purpose, contribution, and the question of what is actually yours to do
Perspectives on the role of rest, joy, play, and connection in sustaining creativity and resilience
Practical questions for building ways of working that do not depend on people continually running on empty