🧡🌿 Honoring Stress Awareness Month with Soul Work, Not Just Hard Work
Reclaiming Joy in the Midst of Burnout
April is Stress Awareness Month—and in the nonprofit and community care worlds, this awareness is more than just a calendar event. It’s a mirror. A moment to pause, reflect, and ask: what are we normalizing in the name of service? Who benefits from our burnout? And how do we reclaim a culture where joy, rest, and creative expression are not indulgences but lifelines?
At Love Before All, we believe that the myth of urgency is a legacy of systems designed to exploit. It tells us that everything is a crisis, that we must sacrifice ourselves to be seen as committed, and that success means productivity at all costs. BUT WE KNOW BETTER! The nonprofit sector, like many social good spaces, often rewards overextension and under-resourcing. We hear it in phrases like "wearing many hats" and "doing more with less." These are not badges of honor—they're warning signs.
The reality is: stress is not just personal. It’s systemic. And it’s political. When Black, Indigenous, and overburdened and under-resourced people are expected to work themselves to exhaustion just to be heard, when caregivers are praised for their selflessness but not compensated for their time, and when joy is dismissed as unserious, we are living in a culture that does not yet understand what it means to care.
Let’s shift the narrative.
In our leadership and our lives, we must create space for practices that sustain the soul. The truth is:
Joy is strategic.
Laughter is healing.
Creativity is resistance.
These are not distractions from the "real work"—they are the real work. They remind us why we show up, who we’re fighting for, and what kind of world we’re building. From our Nonviolence 365 training with the King Center, we learn the essential role creativity plays in crafting win-win solutions in conflict resolution.
✨ Here are a few grounding practices to invite into your leadership this month:
Start your meetings with joy. A song, a poem, check-in questions like “What made you smile today?” and “What is alive in you at this moment?” can recalibrate the energy and remind folks they are more than their roles.
Interrupt urgency with breath. Before responding to that email or jumping into problem-solving mode, take a pause or do a quick meditation. Not everything is an emergency. Some things need spaciousness to be solved well.
Make space for laughter. Invite humor into the workplace. Shared laughter builds trust, reduces stress, and opens creative pathways.
Honor your rhythms. Pay attention to your energy cycles throughout the day or week. When are you most creative? When do you need rest? Design your workflow to match your body’s wisdom.
Protect your playtime. Schedule unstructured time for something that nourishes you—music, art, movement, silence, nature, nothing. Not because it’s productive, but because you matter.
As writer and community organizer Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry says, "Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy." Choosing joy, centering care, slowing down—these are radical acts in a world that would rather we stay too tired to imagine.
This April, we don’t just want to be aware of stress—we want to move through and beyond it. We want to build cultures, organizations, and communities that value the whole person; that create room for softness, silliness, soulfulness; that honor the fullness of being human.
We cannot dismantle the systems we replicate in our bodies. Let’s build something different. Let’s lead with love, fuel with joy, and rest like our freedom depends on it—because it does.
With laughter, love, and freedom,
Your Curious Cultural Architect
#StressAwarenessMonth #RestAsResistance #NonprofitWellness #LoveBeforeAll #JoyIsStrategy
