Why Nonprofit Culture Can’t Stay a Side Conversation - and the New Event That’s Putting it Front & Center

Nonprofit Learning Lab
5 hours ago
3 min read

This is a guest blog by Kate Viana from Nontoxic Nonprofits.

As we leave behind 2025 - a year in which nonprofits took their worst battering in decades - nonprofit leaders are dealing with shrunken budgets, increased demand for services, rising board expectations, greater funding scrutiny, and dangerously overextended teams.

Burnout is rampant - over 70 percent of nonprofit professionals report being impacted (Center for Effective Philanthropy). Turnover is north of 20 percent (RallyUp). Morale is tanking in the face of persistent, profound uncertainty.

The nonprofit world has been wringing its hands over these issues for years while simultaneously normalizing burnout, excusing bad leadership, and avoiding real conversations. As a sector, we’ve tacitly concluded, “It’s just the nature of the beast.”

But it isn’t. And it cannot be the sector’s future. It’s past time, not just to name culture as the problem, but to treat it - rightly - as the core of how organizations function every day.

Why Culture Is So Often Misunderstood

Culture typically gets reduced to morale, personality dynamics, or surface-level fixes: team-building activities, wellness initiatives, or new values statements. It can feel hard to measure, so leadership tends to avoid working on it.

But culture isn’t about vibes, and, done right, it’s not really all that hard to measure.

Culture is what people experience when leadership decisions, governance structures, communication norms, and operational systems intersect with real human constraints. It shows up in how decisions are made (or avoided), how conflict is handled, how information flows, and how power is exercised.

Boards shape culture through what they oversee and tolerate. Executives shape culture through what they clarify, prioritize, and enforce. Funders shape culture through timelines, restrictions, and reporting demands. And staff live inside the result.

When culture work is treated as abstract or motivational, it rarely sticks. When it’s treated as systems work - embedded in leadership behavior, accountability structures, and communication practices - it becomes sustainable (and measurable).

What Nonprofit Leaders Need

In my 15+ years in this sector, the same themes have come up over and over.

“We care, but care doesn’t replace the need for robust systems.”
“Everything feels reactive instead of intentional.”
“We want practical tools, not platitudes.”
“There’s no shared language to discuss what’s going on.”

Put simply, leaders are looking for clarity about roles, expectations, decision-making, and how to lead in ways that reduce harm rather than quietly normalize it.

The Work of Nontoxic Nonprofits

At Nontoxic Nonprofits, we help organizations identify and address the communication and leadership patterns that quietly erode trust and morale long before burnout or turnover make the cost visible.

We approach culture as infrastructure: something created every day through leadership behavior, governance choices, and the systems organizations rely on to get work done.

That lens has shaped everything we do, including the creation of a new space for these conversations.

Why Nonprofit Culture Fest Exists

Nonprofit Culture Fest was created because these conversations need dedicated space. We can no longer postpone or avoid the need to heal our workplaces and take real, thoughtful care of the people who do this incredibly important work.

Most nonprofit conferences focus on fundraising, compliance, strategy, or programs. Culture often shows up as a side session or an afterthought. Yet culture is the environment in which all of that work happens.

Nonprofit Culture Fest is designed as a one-day convening focused specifically on nonprofit culture, communication, leadership, and the systems that shape team experience. It’s built for practitioners who want honest, compassionate conversations and tools they can actually use.

What Makes Culture Fest Different

Culture Fest isn’t about polished keynotes or recycled talking points. It’s intentionally designed to prioritize:

Speakers with lived nonprofit experience
Sessions grounded in real organizational challenges
Clear, actionable tools and frameworks
Honest conversations about trust, communication, and leadership
A tone of learning and healing (not performance or self-promotion)

The goal isn’t to prescribe a single “right” way to lead, but to help nonprofit leaders think more clearly about how culture is created and how it can be shaped more intentionally.

An Invitation to Lead Differently

Healthy missions require healthy systems. And healthy systems require honest culture work.

Nonprofit Culture Fest is an invitation to step back from constant urgency and reflect on how nonprofit work gets done and how it might be done in ways that are more sustainable, transparent, and humane for the people carrying it.

The event will take place April 10, 2026, at Gwinnett Technical College in Lawrenceville, Georgia (just outside Atlanta), and is designed for nonprofit leaders, managers, and practitioners who are ready to treat culture not as a side conversation, but as a foundation for impact.