Are nonprofit leaders unknowingly taking a ‘scarcity vow’?

A nonprofit founder-executive director, a woman of color, once asked me when it would be okay to start paying herself. For over three years, she’d been covering staff salaries instead. She was asking for permission to consider her own needs.

We’ve all heard versions of that question. It’s what I’ve come to call the “nonprofit scarcity vow,” a quiet commitment to not ask, not take, not name what they need.

I use the word “vow” not to suggest individuals’ commitment to scarcity but to indicate it’s a learned response to a sector that has, for decades, made the very act of asking for more a high-risk activity, especially for women, people of color, and first-generation professionals. The data on who pays the price is clear. The question is what we do with it.

Women and leaders of color do ask but often don’t receive

The popular story is that women and people of color ask for less in salary negotiations because they’re less assertive, but a 2024 study from researchers at UC Berkeley and Vanderbilt found that women now negotiate raises and promotions at the same rate as men, or more often. They’re simply 25% less likely to receive what they ask for. The pay gap persists not because women don’t ask but because the answer is more often “no.”

In the nonprofit sector, the Building Movement Project’s Race to Lead research found 49% of EDs and CEOs of color reported inadequate salary as a leadership challenge, compared to 34% of white leaders. A Bridgespan and Echoing Green study found that organizations led by people of color operate with budgets 24% smaller than those with white leaders, and Black-women-led organizations receive less funding than those led by Black men or white women.

As a result, the scarcity vow takes hold

After a few years of that pattern, not asking for what they need starts to feel like the responsible thing for EDs to do. After all, they’re looking at the budget, the cash flow, the dwindling reserves, and hearing from staff they’re at capacity. The scarcity vow takes hold less as a decision than as a habit of judgment: “I will not request the raise. I will not push back on the grant amount. I will not name the gap between what this work requires and what we have.”

I’ve heard leaders describe it as humility, stewardship, being realistic, being a team player and a leader. Often it’s a combination of all of these things. And it’s a cost they, their organizations, the sector, and society can no longer ignore.

How the scarcity vow shows up in the work

The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s 2026 State of Nonprofits study found that nearly 90% of nonprofit leaders reported some level of concern about their own burnout. Nearly half (45%) cited staff-related issues including recruitment or retention as a significant challenge.

The overhead myth is one of the factors behind this. When organizations are penalized for spending on people, have lower salaries, smaller teams, more roles per person.

How to address the nonprofit sector’s scarcity problem

Telling nonprofit leaders to simply ask for more is not an effective solution. It ignores the fact that these issues are structural, cultural, and reflective of our sector’s most deeply embedded practices.

Here are practical steps nonprofit leaders, board members, and funders can take:

Nonprofit leaders: Notice your own decision-making patterns: Did you reduce the grant ask because it felt safer? Who told you it would be? Did you cut a position or professional development to demonstrate to your board you can make efficient and difficult business decisions? Is it actually a good business decision to do so?

Board members: Ask your ED what they took out of the budget before they brought it to you. Ask what the organization would do if it had 30% more revenue and treat the answer as a planning document. Boards can appeal to funders for general operating support, multiyear commitments, and fair salaries. Pressuring your ED to deliver more revenue or more services with dwindling support is not an effective strategy. Think about how you can partner with the ED to increase revenue or scale down operations.

Funders: This is where the structural lever is. Unrestricted funding, multiyear grants, salary parity in budget review, and a willingness to fund the back office is the difference between a sector that merely talks about nonprofit sustainability and one that produces it. Pressuring organizations to revise their budget until their EDs or program directors are working unpaid hours is not sustainable.

From filling the gap to closing it

The scarcity vow keeps the sector affordable by underpaying the people closest to the problem. As long as nonprofit staff keep filling the gap between the funding the work requires and what they receive, the problem goes addressed.

Nonprofit leaders are not asking to be rewarded. They are asking to be allowed to do the work without damaging themselves to do it. The first step is naming the pattern and the structural barriers. The next step is for funders to dismantle them, for nonprofit staff to not be silent about it, for us to all understand our role in creating a sector as abundant as the world we work toward building through our missions.

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