A Break Between Good Deeds

Sabbaticals give charity executives the chance to hone skills — or just unwind

As founder of the Boston charity Jobs for the Future,

Hilary Pennington is always thinking about work.

Indeed, her organization’s mission is to improve education and job-training systems so that citizens have the skills they need to succeed in today’s technology-driven economy — and so that employers do not face shortages of qualified workers.

But for the next year, Ms. Pennington will think about that mission without the long, pressure-filled work days she usually logs — days that start with 5 a.m. e-mails to her staff, and that end late, catching up with work reading at home after her two daughters have fallen asleep.

For the first time in nearly two decades, Ms. Pennington will also have ample time to focus on her own career development, her family, and her personal hobbies as she takes a one-year sabbatical from her charity to study at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University.

Ms. Pennington’s opportunity for a paid yearlong reprieve from her duties is relatively uncommon for non-profit executives. Only 8 percent of non-profit employers offer paid sabbaticals, although nearly a quarter offer the option of unpaid leaves, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.

Some grant makers, trustees, and others say that as the work that non-profit groups undertake becomes more complex and the job market becomes more competitive, the time has come to encourage more charity officials — especially top executives — to take sabbaticals before they burn out and leave charity work altogether.

Already, a handful of formal programs aimed at rejuvenating non-profit leaders have emerged, but many experts say more money and more thought need to go into developing leave policies for top executives.

Says Claire Peeps, executive director of the Durfee Foundation, in Los Angeles, which began a program to underwrite sabbaticals in 1997: “What fuels the non-profit sector is human capital. Until we start paying better attention to that and supporting people in these simple and kind ways, we will burn them out and run the rubber off the tire.”

Frank Doyle, a former G.E. executive who is chairman of the board of Jobs for the Future, agrees.

“One of the things you worry about in organizations that are thought-driven is, Where are the next big ideas coming from?” says Mr. Doyle. “The answer is that they come when people continue to learn.”

He and his colleagues were so enthusiastic about Ms. Pennington’s decision to take time off that they personally chipped in more than $100,000 to make it possible for her to pursue the sabbatical. Mr. Doyle says he hopes that other boards will consider ways to encourage their chief executives to take sabbaticals, but he says he realizes that some may worry about how their organization would cope without a leader. Such fears are precisely why relatively few executive directors or other top non-profit leaders take extended time off — especially at small groups that are so thinly staffed that nobody can afford to take off for a long time.

That is not the only problem, however. Some non-profit groups worry that if they offer a sabbatical, they will be essentially paying for a leader to plan his or her transition to a job at another organization. Other charities fear that donors and others may think that it is wasteful to give employees long periods of paid leave.

Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, is figuring out how to pay for the person or people who will fill a leadership job temporarily.

Says Bruce Newman, former director of the Chicago Community Trust, which runs a fellowship program to finance sabbaticals: “It is hard enough to find money to keep some organizations alive, let alone to suggest, ‘The executive director can take a year off and we’ll be OK.’”

Non-profit leaders who have taken sabbaticals say the time off has helped them develop new approaches to dealing with demanding jobs and gain fresh perspectives on the directions their organizations should take.

Bill Watanabe, executive director of the Little Tokyo Service Center, which serves the Japanese and Japanese-American community in Los Angeles, spent a recent Durfee Foundation-financed sabbatical traveling to the Middle East, Tahiti, and Bora Bora. He also rented a sport-utility vehicle to explore the southwestern United States with his brother.

The time off helped him realize what was preventing his group from achieving its goal of building a sports facility: It didn’t have enough political capital.

Before, he and his staff members had focused mainly on trying to find a site for the facility, without much success. But he says the sabbatical made him realize that the real problem was that politicians and business leaders didn’t take them seriously. “When I came back, I realized we needed to do something differently,” he says. “It just occurred to me that what we really need to focus on is not getting a site, but getting a more united voice.”

Several non-profit leaders have used sabbaticals to develop new organizations. While some later return to their old groups, others do not.

James Kielsmeier, president of the National Youth Leadership Council, in St. Paul, says he was ready for a break after spending a decade running his own community-service group and working closely with members of Congress to draft the federal legislation that created AmeriCorps. That work, he says, inspired him to think about how he could help another nation start its own national-service program. He chose Somalia because of his deep concern about the civil war tearing that country apart.

Mr. Kielsmeier says building an organization from scratch reinvigorated him because it reminded him of what he went through when he created the National Youth Leadership Council a decade earlier. “Maybe that is why I got so fired up,” he says.

Mr. Kielsmeier also says he saw the sabbatical as a chance to be a role model for his staff — especially to show them that it was important to take risks and to learn new things.

Mr. Kielsmeier says he is now working to take the St. Paul group in an international direction, largely as a result of his experiences abroad.

Xuan Sutter, a Vietnamese refugee who has lived in Atlanta for the past 10 years, also used a sabbatical to start a new organization.

Ms. Sutter, who had been working for Save the Children, had become frustrated in her job and decided in 1997 to take time off to think about ways to better serve the needs of refugees in Atlanta.

She won a fellowship, sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, that paid for her and nine other non-profit or government leaders to spend 18 weeks in residence at the foundation’s Baltimore headquarters over the course of 11 months. The rest of the time they traveled to seminars held elsewhere around the country, and took temporary posts at non-profit organizations so they could learn about other charities.

Ms. Sutter worked at the Advocacy Institute, in Washington, learning how to lobby politicians and deal more effectively with the news media. She also spent time at the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, in Oakland, Calif., where she learned more about environmental-justice issues.

For her required project in the fellowship program, Ms. Sutter wrote a grant proposal to seek the financial backing for a new organization she wanted to develop.

By the end of her sabbatical year, Ms. Sutter had secured $500,000 in commitments to start the Refugee Women’s Network.

Ms. Sutter says “everybody working in non-profits should have this kind of sabbatical.” She adds: “When you do this work, you are so intensely involved, it is almost like having blinders on: You see things one way. But being able to step back from the daily crises allows you to take the blinders off.”

Among the non-profit leaders who take sabbaticals — and the organizations that finance them — attitudes about how best to spend the time away from the job vary. Some leaders see it as a chance to accomplish major projects at a more thoughtful pace, without the usual array of competing demands on their time.

Others say the main objective should simply be to escape the rat race and enjoy a period of unstructured solitude and reflection. The less busy they are, they say, the more intellectually productive they feel.

At one of the country’s longest-running programs to support sabbaticals, the Chicago Community Trust’s 18-year-old Community Service Fellowship Program, the approach is “organized but flexible,” says Mr. Newman. The trust awards grants of up to $100,000 to cover a 12-month leave of absence.

“We really did not want people to simply stay at home watching Oprah,” he says. But on the flip side, the trust also didn’t want the sabbatical to simply become a scholarship for graduate study, either.

Instead, non-profit leaders are encouraged to use the time to take short courses or to participate in executive-education programs, read, converse with colleagues, explore best practices in their field, or develop a blueprint for new programs or new organizations.

While the Casey Foundation, the Chicago Community Trust, and other grant makers don’t think non-profit leaders should spend their sabbaticals lolling on beaches, the Durfee Foundation says it’s fine if that’s how the people it supports want to spend their time. Indeed, Ms. Peeps, the foundation’s head, likes to joke that the Durfee Sabbatical Program encourages charity executives to be “rigorously nonproductive.”

Ms. Peeps notes that many leaders are already such “Type A overachievers” that they have a hard time allowing themselves to relax.

The Durfee Foundation offers six sabbaticals a year to Los Angeles-area non-profit leaders, providing grants of about $25,000 to cover salary and expenses. Participants must take a minimum of two months off, but they can take as much more off as they can afford and their organization endorses.

The program deliberately avoids laying out any specific guidelines or requirements. Indeed, many leaders use the time to take vacations and enjoy quiet time.

Madeleine Lee, executive director of the New York Foundation, is one who believes that sabbaticals should be unstructured. She hadn’t planned for a sabbatical — she was offered time off by her board in recognition of her two decades of service at the foundation. Had she been given a specific task to accomplish during her 1998 sabbatical, she says, she would have become consumed in a frenzy of setting benchmarks and timelines instead of focusing on the bigger picture.

She spent most of her days in almost complete seclusion at a small country home in upstate New York. During her sabbatical she watched little television, didn’t follow the news, and didn’t spend time on the telephone. Each day, she spent from five to six hours gardening, moving flower beds, and relocating a stone walk.

For her, that meditative exercise was “a way of turning off that chatter, that endless noise in your head of lists and phone calls and things that are undone — and what you needed to do yesterday.”

Among her great epiphanies was a recognition of the value of time. “The way we spend our time is so much more important than the way we spend our money,” she explains.

Ms. Lee says that today she is “much more brutal” about turning down requests to serve on boards and commissions or to attend meetings.

“I say No to an awful lot of things if it is not really crucial,” she says.

Now into the third month of her sabbatical, Hilary Pennington says that she, too, has developed a new appreciation for time.

One of Ms. Pennington’s major objectives is to study recent developments in her field, such as the potential for new learning technologies to help low-income people advance in the labor market.

As she escapes from the daily grind, she marvels at the fact that she now has time to read about new ideas in depth, and not just hurriedly skim through material on a train ride. She can also talk more leisurely with scholars and policymakers about the major issues that her organization is grappling with.

“I can have conversations with people where I don’t need to be on to something else in the next five minutes, so they can be much more thoughtful,” she observes.

Outside of her professional projects, Ms. Pennington is planning some long vacations with her family, including trips to South Korea and South Africa. She is enjoying spending more time with her two young daughters each day. And she is doing things she had always dreamed of but never had time for, from taking piano lessons to learning Spanish.

While on the surface those might not appear to relate directly to her work, she says they all are helping her feel much less stress. The end result, she hopes, is that she will be able to remain productive and to function at high levels for many more years.

“Doing this kind of work and running these kinds of organizations, financed as they are, is tiring,” she says. “You can dry up.”

But her sabbatical is already helping her change gears, reinvigorating the passions that animate her, and giving her plenty of time, she says, “to think about the next generation of powerful ideas.”