The Conversation Leaders are Finally Having

I spent the last week in a room full of local leaders.

Councillors. Mayors. Senior staff. People who've given years - sometimes decades serving their communities.

It's very similar to a room of non-profit leaders. Different title, same weight: an organization or a community looking to you to hold things together, often with fewer resources than the work demands.

This year, on the local government side, the conversation moved further into the open than I've seen before: an early-morning clinic on mental health, a session on social media, bullying, and harassment, a new toolkit built for local elected officials navigating the pressures of public office.

It's a start. I'd love to see this become a main session topic, not an early-morning add-on competing with breakfast a few rooms over.

Local and non-profit leaders alike have talked about this among themselves for years. Quietly. Off to the side, between sessions, over coffee.

For a long time, the toll of this work stayed private. Show the strain, and it reads as weakness. Admit you're struggling, and it can be used against you: in a council chamber, in a boardroom, in the next election. So the front stays up. The isolation compounds. The people carrying the most keep carrying it quietly.

I've seen the same pattern in the non-profit sector. Leaders holding organizations, staff, and communities together, often with fewer resources than the work demands. The setting changes. The additive toll doesn't.

That's why peer support matters so much. Not a general wellness resource, but a network of people who've sat in the seat: current and former local and non-profit leaders who understand what it's like to be the target of frustration, to carry a community's expectations, to have no real off switch. There's a particular kind of relief in talking to someone who doesn't need the situation explained to them.

There's still a long way to go, in local government and in the non-profit sector. But leaders naming this out loud, to each other and now more publicly, is real progress. I'd like to see it matched with real infrastructure: funding and peer networks, beyond toolkits.

I'm stepping into more of this conversation myself because leaders in both spaces deserve an open and honest version of this discussion.

I don't have this figured out either, but I'm happy to be a person you can call. Reach out if that would help.