Making Space for the Mission and the Person Behind It: Laurie de Fleuriot on Fundraising, Burnout, and Peer Support
Key Takeaways
- Executive directors don’t need to carry every part of fundraising. The right support can free leaders to focus on the donor relationships and leadership responsibilities where they bring the most value.
- Addressing burnout starts with naming what isn’t working. Before looking for solutions, Laurie encourages nonprofit teams to identify the “problem behind the problem” and consider what is actually within their power to change.
- Caring deeply about the mission shouldn’t require giving up the rest of your life. Sustainable nonprofit work needs space for rest, relationships, interests, and the parts of ourselves that exist beyond our jobs.
- Peer support matters, especially in small organizations. Your closest professional peers may not work alongside you. Finding people who understand the realities of your role can make the work feel less isolating.
- Connection is part of sustaining the people behind the mission. Having trusted peers to talk openly with, share challenges, and bounce ideas off can be just as valuable as more formal kinds of professional support.
For Laurie de Fleuriot, sustainable nonprofit work is about more than raising enough money to keep the mission moving. It is also about creating enough space for the people doing the work to keep being people.
As founder and CEO of Sound Fundraising Strategies, Laurie works primarily with small and micro nonprofits navigating growth, often at a stage when fundraising still sits heavily on the executive director’s plate. Her perspective has been shaped by years of fundraising experience, but also by her own experience with burnout, reinvention, and rediscovering how much community matters.
From Fundraising Generalist to Supporting Small Nonprofits
Laurie did not enter university knowing she would build a career in the nonprofit sector. She chose a business degree because it gave her room to explore, then found herself drawn to courses in event management, fundraising, and nonprofit management.
The connection made sense. She had volunteered throughout her childhood and teens, and by graduation she knew she wanted nonprofit work to be part of her future.
Her first professional opportunity was an internship with the University of Guelph, where she joined a large advancement operation and gained exposure to everything from prospect research and planned giving to events and the early days of digital fundraising.
What stayed with her was a love of being a generalist.
Laurie spent much of the next decade working on small teams, where knowing a little about many areas of fundraising was not simply interesting. It was necessary. She built fundraising programs as an employee, volunteer, freelancer, and eventually consultant.
Then came a period many nonprofit professionals will recognize.
By 2023, Laurie was dealing with burnout and ready for something different. She stepped into consulting full-time, eventually finding her way to a fractional fundraising model focused on the small organizations she had always enjoyed working alongside.
Today, her team supports nonprofits in Canada and the United States, particularly organizations that need fundraising capacity but are not yet ready for a dedicated staff fundraiser.
Fundraising Support Can Also Be Leadership Support
Laurie’s work has given her a close view of a familiar reality in small nonprofits: when there is nobody else to do the fundraising, it often lands with the executive director.
And fundraising rarely means just one task.
There is prospect research, donor stewardship, follow-up, proposals, meetings, relationship building, and all the administrative work holding those pieces together. Add that to everything else an executive director is responsible for, and the workload can become difficult to sustain.
Laurie does not believe the answer is removing executive directors from fundraising altogether. There are donor conversations where their presence, knowledge, and connection to the mission are incredibly important.
Instead, she asks a more practical question: What does the leader actually need to be doing themselves?
Her team might prepare research before a donor meeting, support proposal development afterward, or manage stewardship and follow-up. The executive director can still bring the part nobody else can replicate while someone else carries more of the surrounding work.
“Does the ED need to be doing all of that work? No. And we help to take that load.”
It is a fundraising question, but it is also a capacity question. For small organizations especially, creating sustainable fundraising systems can mean creating more sustainable leadership roles too.
As Laurie puts it, the goal is to allow leaders “to do the things that they do best without all of the other stuff piled on top.”
Nonprofit Burnout Starts With Naming What Is Not Working
Laurie’s interest in capacity is personal.
Having experienced burnout herself, she has been thinking deeply about the tension between caring about a mission and having a life beyond it. Nonprofit professionals often bring enormous amounts of themselves to their work. That commitment can be one of the most meaningful parts of working in the sector, but it can also make boundaries difficult to find.
Laurie has noticed one encouraging shift: people are talking about it more openly.
Funders, consultants, organizations, and nonprofit professionals themselves are increasingly acknowledging that burnout and unsustainable workloads are problems worth naming.
“There needs to be that space for you to breathe and to find health, and find balance, and whatever that looks like.”
Laurie is also careful not to suggest that talking about burnout means we have solved it.
For her, naming the problem is where finding better solutions begins.
“I think that a big part of finding solutions is being able to name the problem,” she says. “Name the problem behind the problem.”
That might mean looking closely at what is not working, defining the actual source of the pressure, and asking what is within the organization’s ability to change. Sometimes, that might mean redistributing fundraising work. Somewhere else, the answer will look completely different.
The important part is making space to ask the question.
Rediscovering the Need for Community
When Laurie first became a full-time consultant, she was comfortable working independently.
She had clients she enjoyed, the work was going well, and she had no particular ambition to build a team. After years inside organizations, being a solo practitioner seemed like it might suit her.
But something shifted as she began recovering from the exhaustion she had been carrying.
“As I was coming through the other end of things and I had more resilience, I realized how much I wanted to have peers.”
She missed having people nearby who understood the kinds of problems she was solving. She missed bouncing around an idea, talking through a challenge, and even the ordinary interactions that happen when you can walk over to somebody’s desk or chat in the kitchen.
Remote work made that absence especially noticeable.
“And I love my dog,” Laurie jokes, “but it’s different.”
Her team has since grown to seven people, giving Laurie some of that day-to-day connection again. More importantly, the experience reinforced something she sees throughout the nonprofit sector: people need other people who understand the work.
Why Nonprofit Peer Support Matters
That need can be particularly acute in small organizations.
Laurie regularly speaks with executive directors leading very small teams, sometimes as their organization’s only staff member. There may be no other fundraiser in the building, no fellow executive director down the hall, and nobody internally who quite understands the decisions they are carrying.
But that does not mean those peers do not exist.
“There may not be another fundraiser working at my organization,” Laurie explains, “but there are other fundraisers that are working in my town for other similar organizations.”
Finding them requires some intentionality.
That could mean connecting locally, building relationships with people doing similar work, or finding communities like The Nonprofit Hive where nonprofit professionals can speak openly with peers outside their organizations.
For Laurie, the value is not simply networking. It is having somewhere you can be transparent about what is difficult and what is going well.
“Having someone that you can just be open with is really invaluable,” she says.
And perhaps that is particularly important when so much nonprofit work is focused outward: building communities, caring for donors, supporting volunteers, serving people, and advancing missions. The people responsible for creating all of that connection need places where they can experience it themselves.
Making Room for the Other Parts of Ourselves
There is no single fix for nonprofit burnout, overloaded executive directors, or the isolation that can come with leading a small organization.
Laurie’s experience offers something more modest and perhaps more useful: an invitation to examine how the work is being carried.
Who really needs to do this task? What support could exist around them? What problem are we actually trying to solve? Who could we talk to who has been here before?
These questions do not diminish commitment to the mission. They recognize that the people carrying that mission need room to breathe, connect, and have lives beyond their roles.
Laurie describes it simply: making room for “the other parts of your life that make you you.”
That balance will look different for everyone. But finding it may be easier when we are willing to talk about what is hard, rethink what one person is expected to carry, and find peers who remind us that none of us has to figure out this work entirely on our own.