The Hidden Cost of Leadership: Why Black Women Leaders Are Paying the Price
By Bianca Anderson I CEO ProInspire
Recently, I went for a walk in my neighborhood before I planned to leave for the Grantmakers in Health conference. After I finished my walk, I had the worst chest pain I’ve ever experienced. I went to the ER and was diagnosed with pericarditis, inflammation of the protective lining around my heart. Over the last few months, I’ve been working with a care team to get to the root of this issue, but what I know for sure is that chronic stress is a contributing factor. This experience forced me to confront a reality that I keep coming back to: I know this work comes at a cost. I also know the cost of walking away from it is higher. But I keep coming back to the question of what that cost actually is, and who is paying it.
Chronic stress, weathering, and burnout among Black women in this work are the predictable outcomes of a field that extracts visionary labor without investing in the conditions that sustain that vision.
The Burnout Data We Can’t Ignore
The Center for Effective Philanthropy found that the share of nonprofit CEOs who say burnout is a serious concern jumped to 46% in 2026, up from just under 30% the year before, a 17-point increase in a single year. This figure is a painful reality our sector must address, one that becomes even more urgent when we consider the impact of race. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2025 report found that senior-level women are experiencing the highest burnout levels in five years, with Black women in leadership facing especially high strain. Health equity and public health research tell us what that strain can cost the body over time.
Black Women Experience Burnout Differently
Our sector often tells a familiar story: that Black women leaders who struggle with stress aren’t doing enough to prioritize wellness, haven’t set boundaries, haven’t done the inner work. My health scare is evidence against that story. I wasn’t sedentary. I wasn’t neglecting myself. I am a Black woman living in today’s society, leading an organization committed to racial and social justice, and my story shows that you can be doing the work, living what looks like wellness from the outside, and still have chronic stress affect you in alarming and unexpected ways. Cumulative structural stress creates an invisible load on Black women’s bodies, regardless of what they do right. I share this because the Strong Black Woman myth is perpetuated through silent struggling, and breaking that silence is part of the intervention this field needs. The field often celebrates Black women for our resilience. But resilience should never become an excuse for preventable harm.
Weathering Isn’t Individual. It’s Structural.
Arline Geronimus’s weathering hypothesis describes how chronic exposure to racism accelerates biological aging. I’d argue we’re seeing a version of that same pattern here: a field that asks us to transform systems while placing us inside conditions that mirror the very inequities we were hired to disrupt. We also have a social sector that claims to care about health equity and racial justice, while continuing to create workplace conditions that generate those exact harms in its own Black women leaders.
This Is a Sustainability Strategy, Not a Luxury
We can no longer afford to lose Black women leaders to burnout and health crises. If the field’s mission depends on this leadership, protecting it isn’t optional. It’s a sustainability strategy. Recently, I was reading The Highland Project’s Spring 2026 poll of Black women voters in Mississippi, and was struck by what respondents named as their vision of wealth: peace, “the freedom to enjoy life without fear that everything could unravel.”
If we believe leadership matters, then we must make it sustainable.
If we believe health equity matters, then we must build workplaces that let leaders flourish.
If we believe Black women are essential to this work, then we must treat their wellbeing as part of the mission.
Leading a nonprofit organization should not be a form of martyrdom that costs people their health. If we work in partnership, we can build the kind of workplace conditions that sustain people and create lasting change in communities. That’s the work ProInspire is committed to: helping leaders and organizations build the rest-centered practices that make this kind of sustainability possible.
What I’m Learning, and What I’m Shifting
Since my health scare, I’ve had to get honest with myself about patterns I’ve carried for years, patterns that look like strength from the outside but function as self-erasure. I’ve built a career, and in some ways an identity, around going it alone. Around holding the weight before asking for help. Around being the one who figures it out.
I’m working to break that pattern now. That looks like naming what I need out loud, earlier, instead of waiting until I’m depleted. It looks like bringing my board into decisions and struggles sooner, not after I’ve already carried them alone. It looks like leaning on peer relationships and mentors who can hold the full truth of what leadership costs, not just the highlight reel. It looks like protecting time that has nothing to do with output, rest that isn’t a reward for productivity, but a baseline requirement for being well.
None of this is fully resolved. I’m not writing this from the other side of it, tied up neatly. I’m writing it from inside the work of unlearning, because I think that’s more honest, and more useful to other leaders navigating the same thing.
Help Us Build a Different Story
ProInspire is building a repository of real-world examples of the ways leaders and organizations are cultivating wellbeing and interrupting chronic stress before it becomes a crisis. If you’re doing this work, or want to be part of building out what’s possible, we’d love to hear from you. Complete this short survey to share what you’re learning, and to be considered for a feature in our project.
We can’t build sustainable leadership alone. This repository is one small way we’re trying to build it together.