“Self-care is never a selfish act—it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others,” says Parker Palmer.
Cosmorock.org offers a new portal on Nonprofit Burnout and Wellness. Nonprofits run on passion and a commitment to social impact, but that dedication sometimes comes at a cost. A growing challenge, burnout is often driven by overwork, tight budgets, and the emotional weight of important causes. The portal explores the causes of burnout, what it looks like, and how to prevent it. It offers a curated a set of videos, books, and resources to help you and your team prioritize wellness and resilience.
What Causes Burnout? The passion that fuels nonprofits can also lead to burnout, especially when staff are overextended or facing tough challenges daily. Key contributors include passion overload, trying to meet heavy workloads with limited resources. And then there’s the emotional toll from lack of appreciation and low pay, as well as unclear roles.
Curated videos explore how to spot signs of burnout and how burnout affects nonprofits, as well as solutions. By fostering flexible work schedules, promoting mental health resources, and encouraging regular time off, groups can create an environment where staff thrive.
A Culture of Wellness
Nonprofit leaders have a critical creating a culture of wellness, setting the tone for work-life balance and wellness. By modeling these behaviors and showing empathy, they can create a culture that values and supports staff well-being.
Preventing burnout is not only possible but necessary for an effort’s long-term success. With the right strategies, nonprofits can foster a healthy, balanced work environment that strengthens both the team and the organization’s impact
Building a resilient team requires creating a culture where staff can balance their passion with rest and well-being. Flexible hours, counseling, and regular appreciation are just some of the steps that can make a big difference.
Not long ago I discovered several small yaupon hollies growing in my yard. The plant actually originated in the Ouachita Mountains (my Little Rock yard sits in their foothills) and made its way over the ages to the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts. In the South you may find them in the woods — they can grow as high as 25 feet — or as shrubbery outside a suburban home or in a Kroger parking lot.
Apparently, people in my neighborhood had been drinking yaupon tea for thousands of years. Known by many as “black drink,” it was important to native cultures from South Texas to the Chesapeake. It’s North America’s only caffeinated plant. Native Americans valued this cousin of yerba mate for ceremonial use. They drank it at social and political gatherings and liked it as a stimulant. Yaupon was also a medicine, and was traded among tribes as far away as the Great Plains.
Recently, one of my sons went into some nearby woods, gathered some yaupon leaves, and roasted them in the oven for 15 minutes. We drank our first yaupon tea. Hmm. Interesting. Actually, nice!
The more I learned about yaupon holly, the more excited I got.
Because yaupon is native to North America, drinking it here (and less coffee or tea) is great for the environment in many ways. It dramatically cuts the carbon footprint by needing fewer inputs such as water, fertilizer, and pesticides, and transportation. And yaupon holly strengthens biodiversity in its range by attracting bees, butterflies, and 20 species of birds.
Yaupon tea not only has caffeine, it also tastes great! And it has theobromine and antioxidants for the health conscious. Drinking yaupon supports local farmers and producers, strengthening local economies. In the last decade or so, we’re re-discovering yaupon tea. As many as a few dozen yaupon farmers and producers are sprouting across the South, and Whole Foods named it the top trending food of 2023.
So if yaupon has all these things going for it, why weren’t we drinking it all along?
The Latin name that changed history?
If you’re still reading, welcome to the Latin-name rabbit hole! Do you know the Latin name of any food you eat? Of any plant? Can you remember the last time one came up in a conversation? Probably not. Yet, it’s almost impossible to talk about yaupon tea without having the Latin-name talk. And that’s not by accident.
In the 1780s England’s King George III was having financial troubles, with substantial debt from both the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. This was worsened by the loss of revenue from thirteen former American colonies. Fortunately, he could count on his share from the Chinese tea monopoly to fill at least 10 percent of his coffers. Tea was critical.
But King George had a potential problem: Americans were shipping yaupon tea to very small but growing markets in Europe. In England it was called South Sea tea, in France it was Appalachina, in Spain, té del indio, or Indian tea. And though small, yaupon tea was an American thing, grown where neither the king nor the East India trading company had any influence.
Enter Sir Joseph Banks
In 1773 the king had appointed his advisor Joseph Banks to be unofficial director of the Kew Gardens in London. Banks played a key role in transforming the garden into a hub for research, economic botany, and exploration. A renowned botanist, he guided both the Crown’s and the powerful East India Company’s policies on plant introduction and agricultural development, shaping the Empire’s economic landscape.
For example, as chief botanist of Captain James Cook’s first expedition, Banks collected and documented plant and animal species from previously uncharted territories. He became an advocate for economic botany, using his influence to promote the cultivation of plants with economic value. He was instrumental in introducing breadfruit to the Caribbean as a cheap food source for enslaved people, organizing the famous HMS Bounty expedition to bring the plant from Tahiti to the British colonies in the West Indies.
Banks was clear-eyed about the commercial importance of tea to the empire. He concocted a secret plan to smuggle tea plants from China to India. This would end China’s monopoly. And by bringing it to the Indian colonies, it would greatly shorten the sea routes and increase profits. Banks died before this happened, but years later an English agent snuck into China’s guarded tea areas and got enough plants and tea experts for the plot to succeed.
God save the tea!
To help turn Kew Gardens into a renowned research center Banks recruited Scottish botanist William Aiton to oversee the a vast collection of plants from around the world. Including the yaupon holly from America.
Aiton is also known for something else. In 1789 — the year George Washington was first inaugurated — he published the Hortus Kewensis, a particularly important botanical book of thousands of plant species which were newly introduced to Europe from expeditions around the world. It’s a catalog of plants cultivated in the Kew Gardens.
This book came out a few decades after Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who established our system of naming plants and animals, published his Species Plantarum.And here’s where it gets interesting: Linnaeus had mistakenly assigned the name Ilex cassina to both the Yaupon Holly and Dahoon Holly in his 1753 publication. At the time, yaupon was commonly referred to as cassina in the Americas, especially among European settlers and naturalists.
A quick detour: When European explorers first arrived in the region during the 16th and 17th centuries, they wrote of the rituals and daily practices of Native American tribes, such as Creek and Cherokee. Yes, Native Americans, and the visiting explorers, drank yaupon as we would drink coffee today.
But it was also used in rituals that often involved drinking large amounts of tea to induce vomiting, which was believed to purify both the body and spirit. These “purging” ceremonies, often accompanied by chanting and drumming, usually took place before important events such as councils or wars. There is no shortage of speculation today about what actually caused the purging: the way the drink was prepared, other ingredients, and so on.
Aware of these accounts — in one of history’s greatest fake-news marketing masterstrokes — Aiton “fixed” Carl Linnaeus’ error and named yaupon Ilex vomitoria, meaning holly that causes vomiting. It actually doesn’t, but Aiton gave yaupon a Latin name that would suppress the yaupon tea’s future. In a final blow, he gave ilex cassina, the name yaupon should have had, to a different holly.
Even though the market for yaupon was small Aiton and Banks understood its potential risk to the tea monopoly. And they were, no doubt, testing cups of yaupon tea from their own plants. It’s easy to do! They would have tasted a really nice tea and would have noted that it didn’t make them vomit. Out of curiosity they may have then drunk, say, ten cups of tea and gotten the same result. Any economic botanist would have done this.
Now the Americans would have to market to themselves and to European customers a tea that “causes vomiting.” Mission accomplished!
A new chance for ilex vomitoria
Today, 235 years after the Latin-name put a kibosh on it, yaupon tea is making a comeback. This exciting resurgence is only a decade old. A handful of southern farmers are selling their yaupon teas in farmers markets, online and in an increasing number of stores. In just a decade, as many as several dozen small yaupon tea operations have cropped up. As demand grows so do the hollies. Hundreds of thousands have been planted across the south in recent years.
Make no mistake, Joseph Banks and William Aiton are still with us. They are doing everything they can think of to consolidate power for the few. As in the few large corporations that control the lion’s share of coffee, tea, chicken or anything else we eat or drink.
But here, maybe we have a chance to do it right. Meanwhile, let’s all go out and have a cup of yaupon tea!
Some other accounts of ilex vomitoria
There’s something about the ilex vomitoria story that causes some of us to tumble down the rabbit hole. Here are just a few other folks’ versions of this yaupon tea Latin-name coup.
One day driving on a busy street in my neighborhood, I noticed a couple of kids in their yard holding up signs, flagging down cars. A few adults sat nearby in lawn chairs watching and laughing. I was about to keep going when I realized what was happening: They were selling Girl Scout cookies! Immediately, the combination of cute kids being entrepreneurs and the anticipated taste of a Thin Mint kicked in. I parked and bought a few boxes.
Kids marketing cookies. In 2014, thirteen-year-old Danielle Lee took this to a new level when she planted her cookie sales in front of a medical marijuana shop in San Francisco and sold 117 boxes in two hours. Anticipating copycats, the Colorado Girl Scout officials quickly nipped this marketing idea in the bud and warned their girls: none of that! They pointed out that the kids couldn’t set up outside strip bars, liquor stores, or any other adult-oriented businesses.
Fair enough. But these stories raise questions for those who market for causes: How do you legitimately tap into real needs, perceived needs, or wants? Does anyone truly need three boxes of Thin Mint cookies? The primitive-lizard part of our brain tells us, Yes, we do! But another voice tells us those cookies don’t fit into our plan to eat healthy. Okay, so the cookies fall more into the want category. Of course, everyone wants to support the worthy Girl Scouts. Whatever motives are tapped, the cookies sell—200 million boxes worth about $800 million a year.
Marketing exchange in overdrive
The marketing exchange is about trading: I give something that benefits you and you give something that benefits me. When goods (tangible), services (intangible), ideas or money are traded, each party gets something of value from the other. The marketing exchange for even a cup of coffee isn’t always simple. You want a cup of coffee and a shop has coffee for sale. You buy a cup. But hold on, if you live or work nearby, you could have made a whole pot at a fraction of the cost. So what’s up? Maybe you can’t make a cappuccino at home, or maybe you really just wanted to get out, to meet friends, or to do your work around other people. So, you are partly buying that third place beyond home and the office. And maybe you’ll pay more if it’s fair trade coffee, because you care about the livelihood of the farmers who grew it.
The creativity of benefit marketing exchange went into overdrive at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as state and local governments and others laid out goodies to encourage the vaccine-hesitant. Apparently, saving your life, protecting those who are important to you wasn’t worth the inconvenience of getting a shot. The Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama offered two laps around the track for anyone willing to get the shot. Around the country, folks were given tickets to places like Six Flags and events like Yankees games. For many it was a cash bonus of $100. In Arkansas, it was hunting and fishing licenses. Many states offered lottery incentives, including California’s ten chances to win $1.5 million. And to come full circle, Indiana gave out boxes of Girl Scout cookies!
Most of us aren’t naturally bold. Fortunately, audacity is an attitude to be nurtured and a skill that can be learned. Audacity for its own sake is not the point. It’s not about being loud and wearing a large yellow hat to stand out in the crowd (although if you want to do that have fun). But to accomplish anything worth accomplishing you’ll need some audacity. And, as Eudora Welty observed, “All serious daring starts from within.”
Start with a goal and move toward it step by step. Identify how you’d like to be more daring and think of a few steps to begin. To become a powerful speaker, commit to making a presentation that’s beyond your comfort level, even if it’s to just a half-dozen people. Invite that person you admire or would like to meet to join you for a cup of coffee. Send a bold email. These actions may not sound daring but boldness is a skill and an attitude that grows with practice.
Move past hesitation. You find yourself thinking, this is what want to do but then you hesitate and don’t act. Those microseconds of indecision occur throughout our day and, while small, they can define us. When moments of hesitation arise, seize the opportunity, flex your muscles and do that thing that moves you toward your goals.
Break the Rules. The Dalai Lama said, “Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.” King knew he wasn’t allowed in that room and certainly wasn’t allowed to sleep there overnight. Enjoy the playfulness and freedom of coloring outside the lines. It’s more fun, more exciting, more alive. It’s also where most growth and discovery happen.
Act as if you’re already like how you’d like to be. Invent yourself. Name your dream and claim it by showing up. Live into a bolder way by pretending. If you want to be a writer, write. If you want to be an activist, go to the marches. If you want to make a statement, don’t wait until you have the perfect words (you never will), just make it. Yes, it will feel awkward, do it anyway. Create a story with your life. Anais Nin said “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
Master that area you want to learn about. It will be hard at first, like learning a new instrument, and may feel awkward until you’ve got some practice behind you. Lean in intellectually, do the research, learn the skill. “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination,” said John Dewey.
Talk with strangers. What’s their story? Make the effort to meet the people you’d like to know, listen to anyone, get out there to mingle.
Do something, anything! Don’t wait for an invitation, jump in and be daring. “Fortune favors the bold,” says the old Latin proverb. The bold are constantly moving, and the more you do, the more opportunities present themselves.
Question authority! If the establishment had its act together we wouldn’t have these problems, right? Reacting to a sense that Apple was getting too bureaucratic, Steve Jobs led the Macintosh team to an off-campus skunkworks workspace where they flew a Jolly Roger flag. Their motto: “It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy!”
Have fun! While much of world change activity is serious, having some fun can bring energy to the cause. As Helen Keller said, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
Reframe your thinking. Meek and mild, half-hearted actions will got get us where we need to go. Boldness is a skill or attitude that can be developed, learned. Shift from “boldness is scary and dangerous” to “boldness is a life-affirming adventure.”
To meet the urgent needs of our time, we will need to be audacious, daring. Rosa Parks didn’t have tired feet; she had audacity. So did Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Mead, and pretty much anyone who’s ever made a difference, big or small.
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