“Burnout aid” is a project produced by a transnational partnership of: Culture Shock Foundation from Poland, Common Zone from Croatia and City of Women from Slovenia. We aim at creating an innovative web platform, which will deliver help and support to people at risk or in crisis of job burnout. The project is intended for educators, working with adult people, from non-governmental organizations, who are facing, or might be at risk of facing occupational burnout - specifically those working with adults from the disadvantaged groups (refugees and immigrants, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+, seniors, women) – professionals at the highest risk of burnout that might lead to more severe conditions such as state of tension and preoccupation, depression or even vicarious traumatization. We will additionally support leaders, employees and volunteers of the NGO sector. We estimate that the project will be attended by over 500 direct participants and over 20,000 indirect participants. The project will impact and strengthen the European NGO community by providing the NGO educators with knowledge and tools on how to deal with burnout, which is a constantly growing phenomenon across EU. The main goals of the project are: 1) To provide help in countervailing burnout among the NGO leaders and employees (educators, regardless of the form of employment, including volunteers) – diagnosis and innovative remedial tools to implement for both: individuals and organization. 2) To prevent the adult-educating staff of the NGOs form developing burnout. 3) To raise awareness of the burnout syndrome in the ngo-sector, among organizations’ managements, decision makers and society. The activities to be undertaken in this project will begin with researching the topic thoroughly (desk research, case studies and expert interviews) in order to obtain the most complex data on burnout from transnational perspective, to be used at later stages of the project, during working out the results. We will then start producing the web application and creating its content – the remedial tools against burnout, eg. diagnostic test, workshop scenarios, video clips, recommendations and inspirations. Finally, we will implement the web application for the NGO educators and run the dissemination events (conferences and workshops). We will deploy design thinking and user centered design methodologies in the process of working out the results of the project. Our main result will be a web application with easily accessible set of tools (diagnostic, prophylactic and remediation/recovery) helping to protect educators in NGOs from job burnout or to deal with it. These tools include: 1) diagnostic test for NGOs assessing the risk of developing burnout along with a descriptive result containing recommendations; 2) awareness building and providing information about burnout 3) workshop scenarios for NGOs to diagnose and prevent burnout and to manage the risk of burnout in the organization; 4) video clips on burnout providing both: expert knowledge and personal experience of burnout survivors; 5) best practices, recommendations and inspirations for NGOs – materials collected during case studies and adapted to the specifics of NGOs in Poland, Croatia and Slovenia. The application will become a useful, multilingual one-stop-shop for resources, gathering solutions from various fields and providing different perspectives: social, cultural, psychological, professional and personal. The web application and its content will be made available under open licenses for the use of many more NGOs in the future.
Our aim was to research burnout syndrome in an international partnership and create the tools to help prevent and combat it. We wanted to raise awareness about the scale of burnout in NGOs, share our knowledge (as there is a lot of stigma around it), and offer tools to leaders and teams to improve the working environment by learning about the factors specific to the NGO sector that contribute to burnout. When an opportunity arose to dive into the topic of burnout with international colleagues, we saw this as a great way to contribute more directly to helping to diminish this problem in the NGO sector. Our goals were: 1) To raise awareness and provide knowledge on the burnout syndrome in NGOs, among organizations’ managements, decision-makers and society. 2) To prevent the adult-educating staff in the NGOs from developing burnout. 3) To provide help in countervailing burnout among NGO leaders and employees (educators, regardless of the form of employment, including volunteers) – diagnosis and innovative remedial tools to implement. Our aim was to cooperate on a transnational level to exchange knowledge and experiences on the topic, compare local conditions, and work on solutions based on different local perspectives in order to create innovative results which will help solve difficulties in the work environment in the EU NGO sector.
The project was addressed to NGO educators working with adults who are facing or might be at risk of facing burnout - specifically those working with adults from disadvantaged target groups (refugees, immigrants, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+, seniors, women) – professionals at risk of burnout that might lead to more severe conditions such as state of tension and preoccupation, depression or even vicarious traumatization. We provided support to leaders, employees and volunteers in NGOs. In a prominently used model (Maslach and Leiter, The Truth about Burnout, 1997), burnout is a crisis in one‘s relationship with work, during which affected people become chronically exhausted, cynical and detached from work, and feel increasingly ineffective on the job. It is not a phenomenon which appears suddenly but develops gradually. Both the employer and the employee can detect burnout among the staff at an early stage and implement strategies in order to intercept the burnout progress. The three partnering organizations have both: experienced burnout and/or exhaustion in their teams and could observe this syndrome developing among other activists within other NGOs in our three countries. In 2015 Common Zone (from Croatia) conducted a survey on 213 employees from 109 NGOs which showed that an alarming 56% of the respondents experienced burnout once or several times. Based on our extensive work within the NGO community for years we outlined the needs that we wanted to address. They included: providing healthy working conditions, raising awareness about burnout and its prevention as well as offering tools to combat the burnout phenomenon in the third sector. Burnout in NGOs, and its prevention, had not been a topic well-analyzed and addressed in none of the partnering countries before our project has begun. The implementation of the project on an international perspective of 3 countries allowed us to work out results useful for a wide range of educators in European organizations. The 4 IOs produced in the project are dedicated to satisfying these needs.