Rest Isn’t Radical

Editor's Note: We are pleased to highlight some of the excellent commentary from our grantee partners in this space. Today we are cross-posting a new piece from Jennifer Ching, Executive Director of North Star Fund. Jenn was part of the inaugural 'Writing to Completion' writers' group which RSCF sponsored to encourage our grantee partners to write about some of what they are learning in these challenging times. The original can be found here. Enjoy!

I’m taking a sabbatical. Rest shouldn’t be radical.

I’m almost 50 years old, and I have never taken off more than 15 work days for rest-related purposes. I’ve been working since I was 14, through every summer and every school year, sometimes multiple jobs. I’ve always had to work, but I grew up into a life where my need to work—for financial support, to pay off school loans, to cover my rent and then mortgage—morphed into a life where work was the symbol of my worth.

I’m a Gen Xer so you may be used to this tune from us—we’re the folks who display badges of overwork and underpay like chest plates on superheroes (or, let’s be honest, their sidekicks). We learned our behaviors through a broken labor hazing culture. We were told that a relentless work ethic was our honor, our contribution, and so we matured from the “I stayed up all night to study for the SAT” to “I stayed super late to make this deadline” to “I was on calls during my kid’s soccer game.” We answered 11PM emails at 11:02PM with “Sorry for my delayed response.” We bridged the generational gap from running to all-night diners to ordering takeout from our favorite Chinese place to ordering dinner, toothbrushes and socks online, at the same time.

The funny thing is, at the end of it all, nobody appreciates the martyr. Nobody even likes them. We have been performing for an audience that doesn’t exist.

Even worse, we became terrible leaders as a result, plowing our expectations for an unceasing work ethic into new grounds and new generations—even as we saw, learned, and experienced first-hand the cruelty of capitalism. Those of us in the non-profit sector raised funds that never fully covered the work we were asked to do. We rewarded the workers who “went above and beyond” and groused to each other over late night drinks about the m/zillenial universal complaint about long hours. We robbed Peter to pay Paul and called on our teams to be grateful for our mission-aligned work, even as it felt more and more unsustainable every day.

We saw the stacking of inequities, maybe even acknowledged them, but did not have the capacity—so we thought—to dismantle them.

Now, so many of us don’t have enough financial security to own our homes, or pay for our kids’ college, or help our aging parents in need of long-term care. We’re looking towards our own post-work lives, farther and farther away, and deeply unsettled. The answer, it seems, does not lie in our work ethic.

Perhaps, then, it lies in our relationship with rest.

I harbor no rosy misunderstanding that something as simple and privileged as white-collar office policies alone can dismantle capitalism and its baked inequities. But I believe that leaders must recognize that cultures of work must include cultures of rest. When leaders across sectors reform our approaches to how we work, we open the doors and windows to reforming our abilities to bring creativity, and change, to our work’s purpose. Work and the performance of work can be like a noxious gas. It fills every corner and nook—and blocks us from the physical distance and time required to shift, and to dream.

I am proud to lead an organization that has had a five-year sabbatical policy for many years—preceding me, so I take no credit for it. Through my work here, I’ve come to understand how important it is for us to remake how we work—intentionally—in order for us to remake the world around us. I’ve also come to see that the steps we take can have a ripple effect in how other organizations work. We cannot dismantle society’s inequalities when we refuse to address how work is structured towards regulation of our bodies and our time without any reprieve. Together, we make a movement.

As the working world discusses the COVID era shifting norms of work, I hope my sector—non-profit organizations, philanthropy, and all the spaces in between—take leadership to lean into our missions and values and apply them to our workplaces, and not just our work. Let’s be bold in our thinking and operationalize values through our actions.

At North Star Fund, we continue on this journey. In the early days of March 2020, we suddenly went remote and, as a result, temporarily reduced our hours to Monday through Thursday. We quickly saw that there wasn’t any reduction in so-called productivity, and so in 2021 we created a new 32-hour work week. Our team is expected to schedule 80% of their working hours within Monday-Thursday business hours, but the rest is self scheduled for what may work best for their personal needs. We’ve expanded our leave options and offer floating holidays chosen by the team member, not dictated by the organization.

Resources are always tight in a non-profit setting, and these decisions are not without a fiscal impact, but they allow us to put our investments in our team members, and not in the equal or higher costs of transitions.
So, I’m off to rest a bit. I’m thankful to my colleagues who forced me to schedule my sabbatical when I got squirrely and dodged their questions about why it wasn’t appearing on our shared calendars. My fellow Gen X leaders in particular—let’s rip off our overwork badges and apply our energies towards reshaping work itself.

I look forward to reconnecting when I return.

In solidarity,
Jennifer Ching
Executive Director