Making Space for the People Behind the Work: AMPLIFY Girls’ CDO Wellness Program

Community-driven organization (CDO) leaders are often seen as the people who keep everything moving, supporting their communities, advocating for girls, responding to crises, and delivering results.

But we often don’t see what happens behind the work.

The CDO Wellness Program, co-created by AMPLIFY Girls and Healing Together, responds to partners’ recognition that their well-being, wellness, and mental health are critical to sustaining their work with adolescent girls. The program gives organizational leaders space to pause, reflect, connect, and prioritize their well-being.

Gloria Micheni, AMPLIFY Girls’ Partner Learning Officer and lead for the CDO Wellness Program, spoke to Dr Tabitha Mpamira, founder and CEO of Mutera Global Healing.

The pair, who spoke on the sidelines of our Malawi Partners’ wellness retreat in September, had a candid conversation about the realities behind leading a community-driven organization, why conventional wellness advice does not always work for grassroots leaders, and why caring for the people behind the work must become part of how the development sector operates.

Gloria: Leaders of community-driven organizations are often viewed as the unbreakable engines of their organizations. What is happening under the hood that the outside world doesn't get to see?

Tabitha: I think one of the biggest problems with how these leaders are viewed is that we see their output before we see the human behind the output.

What they're going through is what you and I are going through on a daily basis. They are parents. They are sisters. And they are holding a lot more than just the work.

First and foremost, they're having a human experience, and they've chosen to do work that creates impact.

If we pause a phone and charge it at the end of the day because it's been working overtime, why are machines sometimes given more care than the humans behind the work?

Most of these leaders are able to carry a lot. But that doesn't mean it's not heavy.

We have to stop taking in the message that just because your work has an impact, you should sacrifice your well-being.

Gloria: Leaders and founders of community-driven organizations wear multiple hats. They are often told to take a break, set boundaries, and say no. Why can this standard wellness advice become tone-deaf for leaders running grassroots organizations and working directly with the communities they serve?

Tabitha: There are many reasons, but the biggest one is that standard wellness advice is usually not geared or targeted to the cultural context that these leaders are living in.

You cannot yoga your way out of structural stress!

You can't simply set boundaries when someone's crisis is at your doorstep. The people you serve may literally be calling your phone left and right, including people who aren't even directly served by your organization.

Then you have uncertain funding, a political climate that may change on a daily basis, and work that is deeply personal.

So wellness has to acknowledge the realities these people are living within. It cannot ask them to simply become better at enduring unsustainable conditions.

Sometimes funders will say, "It's important that you take care of yourself," but then ask for a 30-page report every month.

So when is that going to happen? And you're not dealing with only one funder.

There is a conflict between what the requirements in philanthropy are and the care that we're asking leaders to undertake.

Wellness then becomes one extra thing on their checklist, instead of asking: What do you need? What can we take off your plate? What are you sitting with?

The solutions should come from them, not from what works in the US, what works in Europe, or what the research says in a completely different context.

Especially in the clinical world, we love to see evidence. But who is it evidenced on?

Gloria: It has now been two years since you started running these retreats with AMPLIFY Girls collaboratively. What was the core philosophy you wanted to build into the program when we began co-creating it?

Tabitha: First and foremost, the person behind the work matters more than the work.

Some people might ask, "What do you mean? We want to know how many people you helped."

But they will not help that many people if they're not well.

In all our retreats, even the leaders themselves initially say, "What? You're not going to ask me what my mission and vision are and my strategy?"

And we're like, "I don't even want to know what you do. I want to know who you are. What do you need?"

We wanted to center the human first. Then we wanted to make sure the care was preventative.

We also wanted it to be culturally responsive. That's why doing this with AMPLIFY Girls was so important.

So that was the core of the work: make it personal, culturally responsive, preventative, accessible, and built around the leader, not something offered only once they're in crisis.

AMPLIFY Girls has really set the stage for people to walk away feeling something they've never felt before: that they come before the work.

Gloria: How did you design the program so that it didn't feel like another item on their to-do list, or something they could simply check off after attending the retreat? How did you make the results more sustainable?

Tabitha: The first rule of that is: I don't design. I co-create.

Our team met with each individual who was going to be in the room, as best as we could, so that we could understand what was needed.

We spoke with the AMPLIFY Girls team about why they were bringing this forward. We also conducted pre-service surveys.

We did everything we could to gather information on what is needed, not what we think they need.

Getting information from the leaders themselves, as well as from AMPLIFY Girls at a higher level, was key.

Another question we kept asking was: Does this reduce the load or add to it?

Support needed to be flexible, easy to access and, importantly, confidential.The AMPLIFY Girls team were not allowed in the room. The space was for the leaders.

We explored how experiences such as childhood trauma can inform how we show up today. We looked at how trauma is transferred and how things we have learned along the way can continue to shape us without us realizing it.

We incorporated these cultural and social messages and looked at how they have informed why we do what we do.

We also brought in science, including biology and neuroscience, to understand how the nervous system responds and why it can be difficult to rest when you've learned to operate in a constant state of doing.

Gloria: AMPLIFY Girls' network is largely made up of women-led and women-founded community-driven organizations. Many of these women are navigating complex societal and organizational pressures. How do gender dynamics, generational trauma, and cultural factors impact how women lead and experience trauma?

Tabitha: Most women leaders still have to carry responsibilities for their families, usually more than men do. For those who are parents, there is also maternity leave and everything that pregnancy and childbirth does to your body.

Then they have to carry their communities', their staff, and everyone else's expectations about how a woman should lead. There are expectations around sacrifice.

And there's the whole myth of the "strong woman."

You're not supposed to crack. You're not supposed to break.

Sometimes that expectation can even come from other women leaders who have had to break glass ceilings themselves.

Women may not have the same kind of support, and they are often held to such a high standard.

One leader once shared that she was having a conflict with a donor, and the donor told her, "Maybe you should hire more men in leadership. This might be why this isn't working."

You can imagine having to go back from that conversation and simply continue doing what you have to do.

What this retreat has been able to do is give women permission to acknowledge how heavy these things are.

And the biggest moment, every time, is hearing someone say: "I thought it was just me."

Every gender has its own unique experiences, but women often carry a particularly complex set of expectations.

Gloria: Philanthropic initiatives are increasingly recognizing mental health as a pillar of systems change. Should funders treat leaders’ mental health as core funding or as an extra benefit? 

Tabitha: Absolutely. If we want sustainable movements, we need sustainable humans.

I think in this work, we have ignored how change happens for far too long.

In a way, we've even celebrated the suffering of those who bring their work to life.

Well-being infrastructure should be treated like any other infrastructure an organization needs to function.

Nobody questions when you're funding technology. Nobody questions when an organization needs audits or security.

These are understood as necessary costs of running an organization.

But we question the person who makes it all happen when they need the basics, enough to pay their bills, enough to thrive.

More and more funders are starting to do this work, but sometimes it becomes a checklist: "We supported these wellness events this year. Take your team to the lake, then get back to fifty hours a week and keep moving."

Instead, wellness needs to become infrastructure rather than a check mark.

That means sustainable paid time off. Sustainable income. Salaries that allow people to live.

Then you're able to do this work without compromising your own well-being.

Gloria: Looking ahead, what is your dream for wellness and trauma-informed support becoming more integrated into the sector over the next five years? What would you like to see by 2030?

Tabitha: My dream is that we stop celebrating burnout.

There should be no awards for "I see you at every conference. You're doing amazing work. You don't sleep. I get emails from you at 2 a.m. You're so dedicated."

We don’t measure good work by somebody ending up in a hospital.

That has happened to almost all of us.

So, I dream that one day, sacrificing your body and your heart will no longer be seen as evidence of your commitment to a mission.

I want founders to start asking first and foremost: How are the people carrying the work? What do they need? Before the work itself.

With the same seriousness we give scaling and outcomes.

Right now, people are throwing money at AI before asking about the humans doing the work.

I hope that care becomes part of how we build organizations, not something we offer when people begin to break.

As we continue to support our partners with the tools to prioritize their well-being and that of their staff, we call on the development sector to join us and make wellness an essential part of funding for community-driven organizations. The people doing some of the most important work on the ground are human, too. It is time we look beyond the work, recognize the person behind it, and invest in their well-being.

Parts of this interview were edited; catch up on the full interview: