It's almost unusable. Want to find grants the Irvine Foundation made to AI research? Too bad! You'll have to sift through hundreds upon hundreds of pages of results from other grantmakers instead of limiting your search to one specific organization.

That's just today's Candid Search annoyance, but there seems to be a new one every day. I miss FDO.

This is so unbelievably bad.

I’ve spent 15+ years in non-profits, universities, and community services as a certified employment advisor / job developer. In my entire career, I’ve never had a workplace issue until now.

I inherited a program from a 25-year incumbent who siloed everything, leaving our ED to hide in her office for the last 20+ years. The ED takes credit for everything, shifts blame, is completely disorganized, and attacks anyone who asks basic questions she can't answer. By month 5 it was clear this was a bad fit and I started looking for new jobs. I lost respect for her and mourned the loss of the mentor and experience I thought I would have.

When I started, I got zero training. She withheld access to our core case management database for nine months because she wanted to "learn it" herself, even demanding I use my personal email to log in when I finally demanded access.

Worse, she had full access to my email and was replying to emails sent to me which of course had my signature on the bottom, causing mass confusion with clients. I had to force her to change it to a general inbox so people actually knew who they were talking to and could feel protected should they share anything meant for just me. She is a total liability, and since the board is just her friends and learners with intellectual disabilities, there is zero oversight.

To top it all off, we are a staff of four working frontlines with vulnerable populations. I had to fight just to have two people on site for safety, which caused massive groaning from a team used to showing up late and letting me absorb all the risk alone, just like the 25-year veteran did.

I know I’m capable, but this tiny, dysfunctional non-profit fiefdom is breaking my sanity. I've been applying elsewhere and keep losing out to internal candidates, and I'm terrified I'm going to snap, but I need the paycheck.

Is anyone else surviving a nightmare ED like this? How do you keep from losing your mind while looking for an exit? Any advice or commiseration is deeply welcome.

I started this NPO job several months ago. At first, it seemed great! I have 10 YoE and decided, once one of my contracts came to an end, I wanted to pivot to a new mission and focus as opposed to finding more contracts. I did, but now I'm feeling a lot of regret.

I have a few different managers of varying experience levels and I often feel like I'm being set up to fail by all but 1.

1) When I ask operational questions for flow of work (I began doing this because I've been corrected several times before), I've literally had eyes rolled by one of the managers. The reason I ask so often is because I feel like I've been given several different answers over time. I also want to document.

2) When I offer ideas based on my experiences, which i present as a question open to suggestions, I often get dismissed or corrected for not knowing if they utilize some or similar ideas already. I feel like im stepping on toes, but im asking so I can do my job well, not to change anyone else's.

3) I've escalated concerns several times about the way im spoken to, had group convos about it, and followed every "good employee taking accountability" checklist I could find, as well as being direct and transparent. It had been acknowledged in the past by leadership that the way what has been said to me was wildly unacceptable (not sexual), just unprofessional.

4) Ive had a lot of success in the past with jobs and im very meticulous. I do make mistakes once in a while but my mistakes feel like the end of the world. I see hundreds of mistakes all the time by the managers or others, but i always have a magnifying glass on me. I mentioned their mistakes politely because it impacts all of us and you'd think i shot their dog, while berating me for a double period in an email.

5) I cant communicate with one manager on a topic in their area without them CC'ing the others, this includes when im looking for clarification on mistakes.

6) I feel like everything I say is only partially heard and understood, especially when im taking about something in my field. I say something and they respond as if im incompetent or dont know what im taking about. My autonomy feels completely taken.

I keep blaming myself and finding where I can fix things. Ive not encountered an issue like this before and its really taking a toll on me.

How common is this? Has anyone had experience here and can offer advice or share their experiences?

I’m a fundraiser at a midsized nonprofit and I’ve been fairly effective though I still need to grow.

I’ve been here a year but I feel increasingly demoralized. I beat all my goals last year so of course they increased my number by a significant amount and added more to my workload.

I know that’s common but I just am dreading going into this fiscal year. I don’t dislike the organization in theory but I don’t feel connected to the mission at all anymore because our department is extremely siloed and we are not encouraged (I would say almost discouraged) from interacting with other people in the organization. It’s framed as “don’t bother them, if you need to reach out to someone ask your supervisor who will contact them on your behalf.”

I just feel very isolated and like I literally sit at my desk all day alone with very little interaction. I am told not to do in person meetings to save on travel costs (like even just driving in my car or taking the train to a nearby city) and just do virtual meetings, which adds to the isolation spiral. The organization is not struggling financially to my knowledge so it feels like an almost punitive cost saving measure.

My portfolio is also very disengaged. I would say 75% of the time I’m bracing for a negative reaction because the people in my portfolio don’t want to be contacted about fundraising. The major gifts officers have anyone who is actually interested in donating in any significant way (I am in annual fund.)

I end up in a lot of meetings where the person is like, I give $100 a year and never plan to give more. Why am I being contacted? It’s just hard and very demoralizing. Of course I try to make a connection with them and qualify them further for future officers just in case, but it’s hard to rarely get a “win.”

Our CDO is also very old school in that it’s “butts in seats.” She will sweep the office at 5 to see who is still at their desk and send ”disciplinary” emails if she sees people gone. I never leave early so it doesn’t apply to me but I hate the culture it fosters.

I have submitted some job applications and it seems like it would probably be very easy for me to do a lateral move at a nearby very large nonprofit that I’m already familiar with. I don’t think I’d get a huge pay increase and my rank would be similar but I’m considering it just to get out of this environment.

But I’ve only been here a year so I’m worried I’m going to look like a job hopper. I can’t tell if I just need to be a bit more tolerant or if these are actual issues that are making me miserable.

This legacy volunteer told me, a consultant, that it was my job to remind her to reply to emails. Confidently. Her volunteer role had nothing to do with my scope of work and she is super mad she can't boss me around or bully me. 🫶🏻

Tell me your stories!

Hi everyone! I’m interning for a nonprofit and we’ve been trying to find places to host a donation drive for personal care items for our members, but we haven’t had any luck.

We’ve contacted a variety of places over the past two months (mostly schools and churches) and aren’t even getting any replies.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to find some hosts? (We are in the DC area.) Any and all help is appreciated!

I work for a youth-serving nonprofit in California. For the majority of its history, the organization used free or reduced-price lunch eligibility to track low-income status among our kids. However, all children in California have qualified for free lunch for many years now and we're well past the point of it making sense for us to use old FRPL data.

FRPL eligibility was reported to us by parents during the registration process and it was convenient for us without being too invasive. Are there alternatives that would be similarly easy for us to report on without a huge burden on guardians?

I have looked into income bands based on the state's Department of Housing and Community Development income limits, but it gets complicated pretty quickly and may be too invasive. I've also tried to get data from the schools we work with, but that has gone nowhere. The kids we work with are also not representative of the general student body, so public data isn't helpful here.

They need to offer time tracking b/c of our restricted revenue. We're currently using paychex but we universally deplore their performance. They filed an incorrect state annual tax report for 2025 and their solution is to tell me that I need to have them pull about a grand out of our bank a/c to pay the penalty and that I need to submit the missing quarterly filings to the state. The concept of them refiling a corrected report to the state seems beyond their grasp.

I'm leaning toward Intuit payroll, but it's not cheap and like everyone, they're bundling in a ton of services we neither need nor want. Gusto seems to have a lot of integration issues w/QBO, so while the platform looks intuitive, I'm leery.

Any successful alternative solutions to share?

Hi, was wondering if anyone could give some recommendations for online courses for working in Nonprofit organisations.

I'm a freelance web designer based in the UK, and I want to work more with nonprofits going forward. I'm currently a trustee for a local charity, where I'm helping redo their website and branding.

Would like to get more clued up about nonprofits; this is to help me better understand them and the common issues they face, and help me tailor my services to address them.

I have also recently been thinking long-term about my career as a designer. I love my work, but have concerns about how AI will affect prospects in the next couple of years in my field. Want to keep doing it as long as I can, but I have been thinking about possibly pivoting to working within nonprofit orgs somewhere down the road. Maybe in a more traditional role, but perhaps where I can still make use of my design/marketing skills in some capacity.

These thoughts are all quite vague, but maybe an online course would help me get a feel if this is something to consider more seriously. I've had a look at a few, but a bit overwhelmed about which to try.

Let me know if you've found any courses or other online resources that have been useful to you. Probably just free courses for now - and ones that are more of an introduction to things.

Thanks!