Systemic Barriers to Equitable Leadership: Why Nonprofit Leadership Equity in New England Requires Structural Change, Not Just Individual Endurance

We need to stop treating equitable leadership as a pipeline problem alone. Across New England, the nonprofit sector is full of talented, deeply committed leaders. The more difficult truth is that too many leaders are being asked to lead inside systems shaped by chronic under-investment, scarcity, administrative burden, and inequity. TSNE’s Leadership New England 2026 report helps name that reality with clarity. The question is not simply who is ready to lead; it is what conditions make leadership possible, sustainable, and equitable in the first place. 

That distinction matters because when we frame leadership challenges as individual, the burden for solving them falls back on leaders themselves. Leaders are expected to be more resilient, more strategic, and more adaptive even as the systems around them remain fundamentally unchanged. Leadership New England pushes us to tell a different story: one grounded in research, survey data, and focus groups with nonprofit leaders across the region. It makes clear that leadership challenges in New England are not simply about talent pipelines or professional development gaps. They are rooted in systemic conditions that shape who can access leadership, who can remain in it, and who bears the greatest cost for trying to lead under strain.1 2  

These findings name what many nonprofit leaders, especially leaders of color, have long known in their bodies and in their practice: leadership is too often carried in environments defined by chronic under-investment, scarcity, uneven support, and the cumulative burdens of navigating institutions that are not yet designed for equity. 

Across New England, nonprofit organizations serve as essential civic infrastructure, and many leaders are holding extraordinary complexity at once: rising community need, funding uncertainty, workforce instability, political hostility, and internal pressure to do more with less. These conditions are not new, but they are intensifying, and they continue to fall hardest on leaders of color and leaders in under-resourced organizations. 

This is where the conversation about equitable leadership must begin. If we want a diverse, sustainable, and just leadership pipeline, we cannot treat leadership equity as a matter of representation alone. Representation matters deeply, but representation without structural change simply places more leaders into inequitable systems and then expects them to survive within them. 

Chronic under-investment remains the root condition 

Chronic under-investment remains a root cause of many of the leadership challenges facing the nonprofit sector, particularly for BIPOC-led and BIPOC-serving organizations. Broader sector research reinforces this point: burnout, workforce instability, compensation strain, and declining interest in leadership do not arise in isolation. They are the predictable consequences of material conditions shaped by years of asking organizations to do more with less, while providing too little of the flexible, long-term support needed to sustain their people and infrastructure.3 4 5 

Too often, nonprofit leaders are expected to exercise vision, steadiness, and innovation inside structurally constrained environments. They are asked to retain staff without adequate compensation budgets, lead through uncertainty without multi-year funding, and cultivate healthy organizational cultures while carrying the administrative and emotional weight of persistent scarcity. Under these conditions, even the strongest leaders are pushed into reactive modes of survival. The issue is not a lack of talent. It is a lack of equitable conditions in which talent can be developed, supported, and sustained. 

Under-investment constrains not only organizations, but leadership pathways themselves. When leaders are caught in cycles of financial uncertainty and constant adaptation, the field loses its ability to build robust, supported, and equitable pipelines into leadership. Over time, leadership becomes less accessible, less sustainable, and less desirable—particularly for the next generation of leaders, and especially for leaders of color, who are often navigating these structural pressures alongside racialized expectations, bias, and disproportionate emotional labor.6 

In my own work with nonprofit executives, leadership transition processes, and capacity-building efforts, I have seen how normalized this has become. Scarcity is so deeply embedded in the sector that it is often mistaken for professionalism. Overextension gets read as commitment. Exhaustion gets recast as dedication. But there is nothing equitable or sustainable about a sector that depends on leaders continuously absorbing institutional strain in order to keep the work moving. 

Partnership is necessary, but the sector has not built the conditions for it 

One of the systemic barriers highlighted in the report is the difficulty of building and maintaining effective partnerships. This is particularly important because collaboration is often presented as the answer to sector fragmentation. We hear that organizations should align more, share more, coordinate more, and collaborate more. In principle, I agree. But the report reminds us that partnership requires more than aspiration. It requires trust, time, relational infrastructure, and an ecosystem that does not punish organizations for working together. 

Leaders in the report describe the sense of isolation many organizations experience, even when they are working in adjacent lanes and serving overlapping communities. That insight resonates with what many of us observe in practice. The sector espouses collaboration, but it has not consistently invested in the skill-building, trust-building, and long-term relationship work that authentic partnership requires. Instead, organizations are often left to collaborate while under-capacitated, overextended, and uncertain about whether collective work will be rewarded or penalized by current funding structures.  

This matters for leadership equity because leaders from historically marginalized communities are often doing the hardest relational work in the least supported conditions. They are building bridges across organizations, communities, and funders while also navigating racialized expectations, uneven access to influence, and the pressure to produce results in environments that have not equitably distributed resources or trust. When partnership is under-resourced, it becomes another burden leaders must carry rather than a meaningful strategy for collective resilience. If we want stronger partnerships across the sector, we must fund the time and conditions that make relationship-building possible rather than assuming leaders can build collaboration on top of exhaustion.

Competition for funding distorts leadership and narrows possibility 

The report also points to competition for funding as a systemic barrier that shapes leadership sustainability. This is not simply a financial issue. It is a cultural and organizational issue as well. Scarcity-driven funding environments shape how organizations behave, how leaders make decisions, and how much room there is for investment in people, planning, and long-term health. 

When organizations are pitted against one another for limited resources, collaboration becomes harder. Strategic planning becomes shorter-term. Operational strain becomes normalized. Leadership development is deferred. Wellness supports are deprioritized. Succession planning becomes aspirational rather than real. And the leaders most harmed are often those who are already working without inherited access to wealth, institutional networks, or decision-making proximity. 

In practice, we can see the everyday manifestations of these dynamics: salaries that do not match the demands of leadership, staffing structures that leave senior leaders filling multiple roles, and boards that want visionary leadership without fully understanding the cost of sustaining it. From a systems perspective, these are not separate problems. They are interconnected outcomes of a funding environment that continues to privilege short-term outputs over long-term infrastructure and leadership sustainability.

Misaligned funder requirements produce administrative burden and burnout 

Another systemic barrier identified in the report is the burden of excessive and misaligned funder requirements. This issue may seem technical, but it is deeply consequential. Reporting expectations, competing data requests, and varying funder demands consume time, drain internal capacity, and reinforce power imbalances between funders and nonprofit leaders.

In many organizations, these burdens do not sit abstractly at the institutional level. They are absorbed by people: executive directors, development teams, program staff, and operations leaders who are already stretched thin. The administrative architecture of philanthropy often assumes a level of staffing and infrastructure that many nonprofits simply do not have. As a result, compliance becomes labor intensive, and that labor competes directly with strategy, relationship-building, program delivery, and staff support. 

Leaders experience these requirements as burdensome and capacity-draining, with implications for burnout and organizational effectiveness. That finding is especially important because it surfaces a truth that is often under-discussed: many leadership challenges in the sector are not caused by a lack of commitment or skill, but by systems that divert energy away from mission and into the continuous management of external expectations.  

For leaders of color, this burden is often compounded by racialized scrutiny and the pressure to constantly prove competence in systems that have not historically trusted or invested in them equitably. That is one reason trust-based philanthropy is not merely a philanthropic trend; it is a leadership equity strategy. 

These barriers land hardest on leaders of color 

One of the most important throughlines in the Leadership New England report is that these barriers do not affect all leaders equally. Leaders of color describe experiencing racial bias, disproportionate emotional labor, uneven support, and the compounding effects of weak follow-through on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging commitments. The report makes clear that these realities intensify the challenge of leading, and contribute to leaders being pushed out of the sector altogether. 

This finding is consistent with a broader body of research. Building Movement Project’s work on the glass cliff documents how nonprofit executives of color often enter leadership under unusually difficult conditions and then face continued racialized barriers once in the role.8 Research focused on Black women leaders similarly underscores that support infrastructure, not simply representation, is what determines whether leadership is sustainable and affirming over time. 

In my own work and research, I continue to return to this point: leadership is never just about role or skill. It is also about the conditions of legitimacy, trust, belonging, and support under which leadership is enacted. If organizations and funders are serious about equitable leadership, they must move beyond symbolic commitments and address the structural conditions that make leadership harder to sustain for the very leaders the sector claims it wants to support. 

What transformative change requires 

The report’s recommendations offer a strong path forward, particularly for philanthropy and other sector institutions. Funders are urged to adopt trust-based practices—multi-year unrestricted support, lighter reporting requirements, relational grantmaking, and authentic dialogue that recognizes nonprofit leaders as experts in their communities. They are also called to invest in leadership development, peer learning, mentorship, networking, and coaching, especially for leaders of color and leaders in small and mid-size organizations. These are not peripheral reforms. They are the conditions required to build a sector capable of sustaining equitable leadership over time. 

Importantly, this work is not only aspirational; it is operational. TSNE’s practice offers a concrete example of what it means to respond to systemic barriers by building infrastructure around leaders rather than simply asking more of them. Through What’s Next: Leading a Thriving Transition, TSNE supports leaders through retreats, peer community, coaching, succession planning, and organizational health assessment—recognizing that leadership transition is both a strategic inflection point and a deeply human process. Through Executive Search and Transition, TSNE uses an equity-driven, co-designed approach that includes leadership needs assessments, stakeholder engagement, intentional outreach to diverse candidates, and onboarding support designed to position both leaders and organizations for long-term success. And through the Executive Directors of Color Capacity cohort, TSNE provides leaders of color with peer learning, coaching, technical assistance, and participatory training for organizations led by and serving communities of color. 

TSNE’s practice also underscores that research, convening, and programmatic support are part of the same ecosystem. Valuing Our Nonprofit Workforce has helped make visible the compensation pressures and pay inequities shaping nonprofit work in the region, while Leadership New England has brought forward a shared analysis of the barriers nonprofit leaders are facing across New England. Those efforts matter because they produce the data, language, and collective understanding needed to shift the field. But they also underscore a larger truth: no single cohort, report, or leadership program can compensate for a structurally underfunded ecosystem. 

The report also calls for reexamining funding practices that create competition and scarcity, supporting collaborative models such as pooled funds and shared initiatives, and treating wellness and rest as legitimate, fundable leadership infrastructure. Here, too, TSNE’s operational models point toward a more structural response. Through Shared Services and Fiscal Sponsorship, TSNE helps absorb administrative and compliance burdens that often fall hardest on small and mid-size nonprofits and initiatives—particularly BIPOC-led and BIPOC-serving organizations—by providing financial management, payroll, human resources, grants and contracts support, legal compliance, and other back-office services that allow leaders to focus more fully on mission and strategy. This is a critical intervention because leadership sustainability is not simply about individual skill or stamina. It is also about whether leaders have access to the infrastructure, operational support, and organizational conditions necessary to lead well.

A closing reflection

From my perspective, transformative change also requires moral clarity. We must stop treating the nonprofit sector’s endurance as evidence that the system is working. In many cases, the sector is functioning because leaders are over-functioning. That is not the same thing as sustainability. The larger lesson here is that addressing systemic barriers requires more than naming them; it requires building the kinds of structures, supports, and shared conditions that make equitable leadership possible in practice.

What I find most compelling about Leadership New England is its call to move from admiration to accountability. Applauding nonprofit leaders for their resilience is insufficient if we do not also interrogate why such resilience is demanded, of whom, and under what conditions. The report asks us to examine the systems that continue to reward scarcity, overwork, and gatekeeping, and to consider what it would take to build a nonprofit ecosystem in New England that genuinely supports equitable leadership in practice rather than rhetoric. 

This begins with rejecting the notion that leadership barriers are simply an inherent cost of nonprofit work. These barriers are not inevitable; they are produced by systems and therefore can be dismantled. 

Achieving a more equitable future for nonprofit leadership will require more than encouragement directed at individual leaders. It demands structural change in how leadership is funded, supported, developed, and sustained. The urgency of this work is clear. The real question is no longer whether nonprofit leaders are resilient enough, but whether the broader sector is prepared to meet its responsibility. 

I encourage nonprofit leaders, board members, funders, and ecosystem partners to read the full Leadership New England report and use it as an invitation to examine not only who leads, but the systemic conditions under which leadership is expected to flourish.