The nonprofit workforce is changing at every stage of the career journey. Younger professionals bring different expectations to work, experienced talent is harder to retain, and many organizations are approaching leadership transitions without a clear succession path. This three-part series explores these shifts and what they could mean for the people, organizations, and communities that depend on a strong nonprofit sector.

From Calling to Career:
Are Younger Generations Rewriting Nonprofit Work?

For generations, people choosing nonprofit careers have understood that the work can come with certain tradeoffs: the pay may not match a comparable job in the private sector, the hours may occasionally stretch beyond the job description, and resources will almost certainly be tight.

In return, you get something harder to put a price on. You get work with meaning. You get to contribute to a cause you believe in and, ideally, see the difference your work makes.

For many people who have built careers in nonprofits, that bargain has been worthwhile. Some would describe their work not simply as a career, but as a calling.

Younger generations aren’t necessarily rejecting that idea. In fact, the evidence suggests they care a great deal about purpose. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that 89% of Gen Z and 92% of millennials say a sense of purpose is important to their job satisfaction and well-being.

What may be changing is what they’re willing to give up in exchange.

A younger nonprofit employee can believe deeply in an organization’s mission and still wonder whether the salary will allow them to build a life. They can love the work while wanting clearer opportunities to grow. They can care about the community an organization serves and still believe that caring shouldn’t require chronic overwork.

In other words, the generational shift may not be away from purpose at all. It may be toward a different idea of what a purpose-driven career should look like.

Purpose Still Matters. But It Isn’t the Whole Story.

The popular caricature of younger workers as less loyal, less committed, or less interested in meaningful work doesn’t hold up particularly well against the data. Deloitte found that roughly nine in ten Gen Z and millennial workers consider purpose important to their job satisfaction and well-being. They’re willing to act on that belief, too: 44% of Gen Z and 45% of millennials said they have left a job they felt lacked purpose.

On the surface, that should give nonprofits a significant recruiting advantage. A community health organization, food bank, museum, youth development program, or environmental group doesn’t have to manufacture a story about social impact. The connection between the job and its larger purpose is often visible every day.

But purpose exists alongside other priorities. Deloitte characterizes younger workers as seeking a combination of money, meaning, and well-being. Nearly half of Gen Z respondents (48%) and 46% of millennials said they did not feel financially secure.

That changes the equation. Nonprofits aren’t simply competing against employers offering well-paid but supposedly less meaningful corporate jobs. They’re competing in a labor market where talented people increasingly expect work to deliver several things at once: purpose, financial stability, opportunities to learn, and a life outside the office.

The challenge isn’t that younger employees don’t value meaning enough. It may be that nonprofits have sometimes expected them to value meaning so much that everything else becomes negotiable.

When the Mission Doesn’t Pay the Rent

There has long been a familiar refrain in nonprofit employment: We can’t pay what the private sector pays, but people come here because they believe in the work.

There’s truth in that statement. There’s also a point at which it becomes difficult to sustain.

Research from Independent Sector and United For ALICE found that 22% of U.S. nonprofit employees live in households that cannot afford basic necessities. Five percent live below the federal poverty level. At the same time, another 17% earn above that level but still don’t make enough to cover basics such as housing, childcare, food, transportation, and health care. Among nonprofit workers under age 25, 37% experienced financial hardship.

It’s a striking contradiction. Organizations created to improve communities and expand opportunities can employ people who are themselves struggling to achieve basic financial stability.

For someone early in a career, that reality is difficult to ignore. Housing costs are high. Student loans and other debts haven’t disappeared. Childcare can consume a substantial share of a paycheck. Economic uncertainty has been a recurring feature of young adulthood for millennials and Gen Z.

Against that backdrop, choosing a career with meaning is still attractive. Choosing one that requires persistent financial insecurity is a much harder proposition.

That distinction matters because purpose can be extraordinarily powerful in attracting people to nonprofit work. It doesn’t necessarily give an organization an unlimited ability to retain them.

The Staffing Problem Is Already Affecting the Mission

Nonprofit leaders don’t need generational research to know hiring has become difficult. Many are experiencing it firsthand.

In the National Council of Nonprofits’ nationwide workforce survey, 74.6% of responding nonprofits reported job vacancies. Among organizations with vacancies, 74% had openings in program and service-delivery positions, while 41.1% had entry-level vacancies. When asked what was making recruitment and retention difficult, 72.2% cited salary competition, 66.3% cited budget constraints, and 50.2% cited stress and burnout.

Those numbers are easy to discuss as an HR problem, but the effects don’t stay in HR. An unfilled case manager position means someone else takes on a larger caseload. An open development role can mean fewer dollars raised. Vacancies in direct service jobs can mean fewer people being served or longer waiting lists. As workloads increase for those who remain, burnout can lead to even more departures.

At some point, a staffing problem becomes a mission problem.

That’s why the conversation about younger workers matters beyond generational curiosity. Millennials already make up a substantial portion of the workforce, and Gen Z’s presence will continue to grow. If the sector struggles to offer the kind of employment experience these workers want, the consequences won’t simply show up in turnover statistics. They’ll show up in the capacity of organizations to deliver on their missions.

Ambitious, Just Not Always for the Corner Office

One of the more interesting findings in Deloitte’s research is how younger workers think about advancement. Only 6% of Gen Z respondents said reaching a senior leadership position was their primary career goal. At first glance, that might sound like a lack of ambition.

Look a little closer and a different picture emerges. Seventy percent said they’re developing career skills at least weekly, and 67% reported developing skills outside normal working hours.

This isn’t a generation uninterested in growth. It may be a generation with a broader definition of it.

A ladder has often represented traditional career advancement: do good work, earn a promotion, manage more people, acquire a bigger title, and eventually move into senior leadership. Younger workers appear more open to building careers through skills, experiences, relationships, and new challenges, whether or not every step comes with another rung on the management ladder.

For nonprofits, that could actually be an advantage.

A 25-person organization may not be able to offer five promotions over the course of someone’s career. But it may be able to give an early-career employee meaningful responsibility much sooner than a large corporation would. Employees can work across functions, interact with senior leaders, build relationships with boards and funders, manage projects, and see the connection between their decisions and real-world outcomes.

Those experiences have enormous career value. The problem is that nonprofits don’t always present them that way or manage them intentionally. “You’ll wear a lot of hats” can describe a terrific learning opportunity. It can also be code for being overworked because the organization is understaffed. Younger employees are likely to notice the difference.

Rethinking What We Ask People to Give

None of this changes the financial realities nonprofit leaders are working within. The financial constraints facing the sector are real. Government contracts may not cover the full cost of service delivery. Grants can restrict how funds are spent. Donors understandably want to see their contributions reach the people and causes they care about.

But the people doing the work aren’t separate from the impact. They are how the impact happens.

That makes this a conversation for foundations and funders as much as it is for nonprofit executives. When funding supports a program but doesn’t adequately support the people required to deliver it, the cost hasn’t disappeared. It has simply moved somewhere else: onto the organization, its employees, or both.

A more sustainable approach to nonprofit employment therefore has to include compensation, but it can’t stop there. Employees are also paying attention to whether they’re learning, whether their managers invest in them, whether workloads are realistic, whether flexibility is possible, and whether the values an organization promotes externally are reflected in the way it treats people internally.

Younger workers have grown up in an era when workplace experiences are unusually visible. Salary information is easier to find. Employees share their experiences online. Organizational statements about equity, inclusion, community, and well-being can be compared with what current and former employees say actually happens inside the workplace.

For a mission-driven organization, that creates a simple but important expectation: the mission should extend inward, too.

A Different Kind of Nonprofit Career

There’s an opportunity in all of this that can get lost when the discussion focuses only on what nonprofits can’t offer.

The sector already has many of the things younger workers say they’re looking for. The work can be deeply meaningful. Employees often have opportunities to take responsibility earlier, learn across functions, and see the results of their efforts firsthand. Relationships with communities can create a sense of connection that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. Nonprofit careers can also place people alongside colleagues who genuinely care about the same issues they do.

Those are substantial advantages.

What may need to change is the assumption that these advantages compensate for every other weakness in the employment experience. A compelling mission shouldn’t require someone to accept indefinitely low compensation, limited development, poor management, or chronic burnout.

For years, the invitation to nonprofit work has sometimes sounded like: Come here because you care enough to make sacrifices.

A stronger invitation for the next generation might be: Come here because you can build a career, develop your talents, and contribute to something that matters.

The difference is more than wording. One treats an employee’s commitment as a resource the organization can draw down. The other treats that employee as someone worth investing in.

So, Are Younger Generations Rewriting Nonprofit Work?

Probably, but not because they’ve stopped believing in the idea of a calling.

If anything, the research suggests the opposite. Purpose remains unusually important to younger workers. What they’re questioning is the old assumption that choosing meaningful work requires accepting a weaker employment deal.

It’s also worth being careful with generational labels. Gen Z isn’t a single type of worker, any more than millennials, Gen Xers, or Baby Boomers are. Many longtime nonprofit professionals have spent decades advocating for better salaries, healthier organizations, and more sustainable careers. Younger employees didn’t invent these concerns.

What may distinguish them is their willingness to treat those concerns as part of the decision about where to work and how long to stay.

That gives nonprofit leaders, and the foundations and donors who support them, something important to think about. The sector can continue treating compensation, professional development, management quality, and employee well-being as expenses to be minimized. Or it can begin viewing them as part of the infrastructure required to accomplish the mission.

The next generation of nonprofit professionals still appears to want what drew so many people to the sector before them: the chance to spend their working lives doing something that matters.

They’re simply asking why building a career around a cause they care about should mean compromising on the career itself.

The future of the nonprofit workforce may depend on the answer.

Sources

Deloitte Global, 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey. Survey of 23,482 Gen Z and millennial respondents across 44 countries. Findings cited include attitudes toward purpose, financial security, learning, and career advancement.

Independent Sector & United For ALICE, ALICE in the Nonprofit Workforce: A Study of Financial Hardship. Research examining financial hardship among U.S. nonprofit employees.

Independent Sector & United For ALICE, ALICE in the Nonprofit Workforce. Analysis found that 37% of nonprofit workers under age 25 lived in households below the ALICE Threshold.

National Council of Nonprofits, 2023 Nonprofit Workforce Survey Results: Communities Suffer as the Nonprofit Workforce Shortage Crisis Continues. Nationwide survey of more than 1,600 nonprofits from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.