The aim of the Burnout Aid tool that you are about to open is to provide you with knowledge on burnout in non-governmental organizations, the assessment questionnaire regarding the risk of developing the syndrome, and potential solutions to the problem. The tool was prepared in international cooperation of Culture Shock Foundation from Poland, Common Zone/VoxFeminae from Croatia, and City of Women from Slovenia. Our team included: psychologists, social workers, trainers, a crisis counselor, a lawyer, sociologists, and educators:
Piotr Grabowski, Paulina Jędrzejewska and Karolina Pluta from Culture Shock Foundation
Gabrijela Ivanov and Marina Milković from Common Zone/VoxFeminae
Urška Jež, Tjaša Hauptman from City of Women
We worked on the tool based on our desk research and qualitative study on occupational and activist burnout in NGOs, conducted in the three countries in 2020 (learn more about the research and its results here). We also interviewed national experts regarding the problem and the possible solutions to solve it. We then extracted the most commonly cited characteristics of the burnout syndrome into a matrix and weighted the importance of each one, using the peer judges method. This process led us to form the questionnaire assessing the risk of burnout for both the individual and the whole organization, which was then beta-tested in the NGO community. Its results are scored within three different subject categories, which weigh equally into the general score.
Afterward, we commenced preparing the solutions regarding preventing and dealing with the process of burning out. They include recommendations, guidelines, exercises, and inspirations submitted by the team members and then analyzed by the team as a whole or tested during workshops with the users.
We hope that you will find the effects of our work useful in raising the awareness of burnout syndrome and taking care of the activists’ and teams’ well-being.