Charities carry an assumption that because the mission is good, the culture inside is automatically good. It rarely is, and the gap costs the people who can least afford to carry it.
We discuss Employee Resource Groups as a corporate tool. Something for large organisations with dedicated People teams, sizeable budgets, and a Head of Diversity who can champion the business case in the boardroom.
But that framing leaves out the sector that needs Employee Resource Groups the most.
Not-for-profits are rarely part of this conversation, and that is exactly the problem. The organisations doing some of the hardest, most emotionally demanding work in the country are the ones least likely to have the internal infrastructure to support the people doing it.
The assumption charities make about themselves
A belief baked into how many charities see themselves. Because the mission is good, the culture inside must be good too.
It rarely holds up.
Mission-driven work attracts people who care deeply. That is precisely what makes it work. But it is also what makes it dangerous, because deep care has a habit of tipping into over-absorption, and over-absorption has a habit of going unnoticed until burnout has already arrived.
We see this most clearly in frontline and safeguarding roles. Staff and volunteers working on child protection or welfare are carrying some of the highest emotional loads of any sector in the country. That load is not evenly distributed. Some people carry more of it than others, often quietly, often without anyone formally recognising what is happening.
This is not a criticism of the sector. A structural gap; exactly what an Employee Resource Group is designed to close…provided it is built properly.
What we would actually build
If we were briefed to design an Employee Resource Group for a children’s charity, we would not start with a launch event. We would not start with a logo, a Slack channel, or a calendar of socials.
We would start with three things.
Psychological safety for people doing trauma-adjacent work. That means clear, confidential spaces to process what they are carrying, kept separate from performance management and, where possible, separate from line management too. People carrying trauma-adjacent workloads need somewhere to put it down that is not tied to how their year-end review will read.
A clear escalation route that is not just HR. Trauma and burnout do not always present as a formal grievance. They show up as fatigue, as withdrawal, as small decisions that quietly get worse over time. There needs to be a route for raising a concern that does not require someone to first prove the concern is serious enough to justify raising it.
Leadership sponsorship that shows up in budget, not just words. A staff-led group with no resourcing behind it becomes one more unpaid responsibility for people who are already stretched thin. Sponsorship has to be tangible. It has to show up as time, as money, and as a named senior person whose job includes actually showing up.
None of this is complicated in principle. It is the same design thinking we would bring to any sector. What changes in the not-for-profit space is the stakes.
Why the stakes are different here
In most sectors, a poorly resourced Employee Resource Group results in disengagement. People stop turning up. Momentum fades. It is a loss, but a contained one.
In the not-for-profit sector, the people doing this work are often absorbing some of society’s hardest problems on behalf of everyone else, and doing it with fewer resources than the sectors that get to watch from a comfortable distance. When the internal support structure fails here, the cost does not stay contained. It shows up in staff turnover, in burnout, and ultimately in the quality of care and protection reaching the people the charity exists to serve.
That is what makes this work urgent rather than optional. An Employee Resource Group built without real structure behind it is not neutral. It is a promise made to already-stretched people that will not be kept.
Where this starts
Every Employee Resource Group we have ever seen work well started with the same discipline: naming what the group is actually for, resourcing it properly from day one, and giving it a senior sponsor who treats it as part of their job rather than an extra.
For not-for-profits, that discipline matters more, not less. The people carrying the hardest parts of this work deserve infrastructure that was actually designed for them, not a scaled-down version of what worked somewhere else.
If your organisation is thinking about what a properly resourced Employee Resource Group could look like, particularly if you are working in a frontline, safeguarding, or high-emotional-load environment, we would like to talk about it.
