Mental Health at Work Index: December 2025 Focal Brief – Stronger Teams, Greater Impact
Small, mission-driven nonprofits play a vital role in strengthening communities, providing essential services, and delivering social impact. These organizations are powered by people who bring deep passion to emotionally demanding work, often in environments with limited resources, high workloads, and blurred work-life boundaries. These realities make workforce mental health essential to organizational effectiveness and sustainability.
Findings from the Mental Health at Work Index™, which included a subset of 31 small nonprofits, reveal a sector defined by deep commitment and strong culture, but also underdeveloped mental health infrastructure, including limited strategy, systems, and measurement.
Despite these resource constraints, nonprofits demonstrate stronger-than-average leadership and manager support and outperform other sectors on multiple indicators.
Key Findings
- Leadership Support Is Strong: Nonprofit leaders show higher commitment, prioritization, and role modeling than executives in other sectors, creating a powerful foundation for advancing workforce mental health.
- Managers Are Effective Allies: Nonprofit managers outperform peers in seeking employee input, tailoring support, and recognizing contributions, reflecting a strong culture that supports staff well-being.
- Strategy and Measurement Lag: Few nonprofits have formal plans or measure outcomes, limiting their ability to prioritize resources, demonstrate impact, and sustain workforce mental health over time.
- Communication Needs Structure: Communication is caring and authentic, but inconsistent. Nonprofits need clearer plans and systems so information reaches staff, managers, boards, and families effectively.
- Resources Are Constrained: Limited capacity and infrastructure restrict nonprofits’ ability to expand mental health efforts, highlighting the need for targeted investments and collaborative support.
“You can’t pour from an empty cup. Making sure our team has the support they need to do their job effectively helps us be a stronger agency and share that strength with those we serve,” Elizabeth Kurtz, Executive Director, Charlotte Family Housing.
Thank you to the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation for its generous support of One Mind’s work with small, mission-driven nonprofits, including hosting One Mind at Work and nonprofit leaders at its West Creek Ranch in Montana. The foundation exemplifies a standard of excellence in nonprofit work through its “belief in giving back and having a great place to work.”
Download the December 2025 Focal Brief
View all reports from the Mental Health at work Index
About the Mental Health at Work Index
The Mental Health at Work Index is a self-assessment tool for business leaders who are committed to being data-driven when it comes to workforce mental health. Using the Index, organizations establish the baseline maturity of their mental health programs, pinpoint priority areas that will accelerate the impact of their efforts, and tap into evidence-based resources for optimizing their programs to achieve better outcomes, both for their employees and for their organization.
Developed collaboratively by One Mind at Work, Columbia University’s Mental Health + Work Design Lab and Ethisphere, the Mental Health at Work Index landed One Mind on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list and the winner in the workplace category for World Changing Ideas.
For more information about the Mental Health at Work Index, visit www.mentalhealthindex.org.
About One Mind at Work
One Mind at Work is a non-profit organization leading a global movement to improve workplace mental health. Our mission is to translate science to build workplace best practices that drive measurable impact on workforce mental health, leading to better outcomes for individuals and organizations. With science and data as our cornerstone, we partner with employers around the world who recognize that a healthy workforce is at the heart of a high-performing organization. We provide our members with guidance and recommendations built on decades of scientific, clinical, and translational mental health work on a global scale.