Reintroducing Sabbatical Program Grants at the Meyer Foundation
In a world where every news update seems to bring another crisis — wars, climate emergencies, threats to democracy — it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Closer to home in Greater Washington, deeply rooted racial and economic inequities in housing, schools, jobs, and safety persist, preventing our community from being a place where everyone can truly thrive.
At the Meyer Foundation, we view the visionary work of our grantee partners to change and reimagine the systems that drive these inequities as essential and long-term. We understand this work can also be difficult and draining on the mind, body, and spirit, particularly for people who hold marginalized identities.
There are no quick fixes for maintaining energy for the ebbs and flows of this work and resisting the constant pressure so many of us feel to always be productive. However, at Meyer, we believe rest can help.
Earlier this year, we launched the Restoration Fund, a new capacity building initiative designed to promote the wellbeing of grantee partners’ staff, boost morale, and help sustain organizers for the long haul as they engage in advocacy, base-building, and other organizing efforts.
In the spring, we awarded one-time Restoration Fund grants to 53 grantee partners to support activities — from gym memberships to healing circles — that foster the wellbeing of staff and other people closely involved in grantee partners’ work. We focused these Restoration grants on organizations with smaller operating budgets where resources for rest are often limited.
Building on this, we are excited to announce the second component of the Restoration Fund: a sabbatical grant program. This program encourages deep rest by enabling grantee partners to step away from their jobs to rest, relax, recharge, or just have fun. These grants will support sabbaticals from four to eight weeks and include funding to cover interim staffing costs to ensure continuity in organizational operations while a colleague is away. Our guidelines on sabbatical grants include more details on who’s eligible and how to apply.
This new sabbatical program is informed by what we learned from the Julie L. Rogers Sabbatical (JLR) Program, which the Meyer board created in 2014 to honor Julie L. Rogers who served as Meyer’s president and CEO for 28 years from 1986–2014. Julie cared deeply about the wellbeing of nonprofit leaders long before it became a mainstream topic of conversation in philanthropy.
Insights from program evaluations and feedback from grantee partners have shaped our new sabbatical program to be more equitable and accessible. This includes allowing for shortened sabbaticals that create space for deep rest without requiring the extensive absence of a key staff member. It also includes extending eligibility beyond executives to include senior staff, organizers, and others working within the frontline community — all of whom experience burnout from carrying out their important roles.
We also recognized that our selection process for the JLR Sabbatical Program may have inadvertently contributed to the fatigue and burnout that drove people to apply for a sabbatical in the first place. When we asked applicants to tell us in their written application and finalist interviews why they wanted to take a sabbatical, many bared their hearts and souls describing burnout and personal struggles. While they all were deserving of extended rest, we were only able to award a handful of sabbatical grants. Our selection process required us to make decisions based partly on a rank ordering of applicants’ burnout, grief, trauma, and fatigue, further perpetuating unjust power dynamics. We’ve made improvements to the selection process this time around: if the number of applicants exceeds the funds we have available for sabbatical grants, we’ve made the somewhat unorthodox decision to select sabbatical recipients by lottery.
Racial and economic justice work can be challenging and taxing. Some of the change we collectively envision may not be realized in our lifetimes. As funders committed to this cause, we need to not only source this long-term work, but we also need to recognize the humanity of the people advancing it — often in challenging circumstances and political environments — and find ways to ease the harms placed upon those who lead it. The Restoration Fund is our contribution.
