📝 Show Notes
In this episode of Goddess in Training, I’m joined by Tina Krall, founder of MissionCraft and The Nonprofit Culture Lab, to talk about the burnout crisis in the nonprofit world—and how cultural dysfunction is at the root of it all.
This episode is a must-listen for:
✨ Fundraisers (especially those in survival mode)
✨ Nonprofit staff, volunteers, and board members
✨ Donors who want to understand how the sausage really gets made
✨ Anyone exploring how workplace culture is actually infrastructure
We talk about:
Why fundraisers leave (and what it costs your mission)
How micromanagement kills momentum—and people
The “Power of No” in a sector afraid of boundaries
How siloed teams quietly sabotage revenue
The intuitive side of fundraising (and leadership)
Why your organization’s internal vibe absolutely shapes your external impact
💛 Learn more about Tina's work at MissionCraft Partners and follow her brilliant writing on Substack.
🎵 Music credit:
Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by Arkawa
Used with permission. More at arkawamusic.com
🌐 And as always, visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuition journey
🙏 Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/goddessintrainingpodcast
🌑 Culture is Infrastructure
Tina Krall says something in this episode that struck a deep chord:
“Culture isn’t soft. It’s not a ‘nice to have.’ It’s infrastructure.”
And she’s right.
As someone who spent years navigating nonprofit fundraising from the inside, I’ve seen firsthand how much time, energy, and potential gets lost—not because the mission isn’t worthy, not because the donors aren’t generous—but because the culture is broken.
Micromanagement.
Unrealistic expectations.
No seat at the strategy table.
Leadership that hires you to disrupt, then punishes you for succeeding.
If you’ve been there, you know.
If you’re still there, I see you.
✨ Beyond Fundraising
You don’t have to be a fundraiser to get something out of this conversation.
Tina is speaking to something much bigger—something many of us are confronting right now, across sectors and systems:
🌀 Who gets to lead?
🌀 What does sustainability actually look like?
🌀 How do we stop replicating dysfunction while claiming to build change?
In moments of institutional collapse or crisis, many of us default to urgency—triage, spreadsheets, budget gaps. But what Tina’s offering here is a quiet revolution: the belief that tending to your people is tending to the mission.
You don’t fix revenue problems without fixing relational ones.
You don’t fix team dysfunction with more training.
You fix it with clarity, culture, and trust.
🛑 What Would Happen If You Stopped Shrinking?
Toward the end of our conversation, Tina said something that gave me chills:
“Stop shrinking yourself to fit broken systems. I spent too many years doing that before age gave me the clarity to see what really mattered.”
Let that one sit.
How many of us are still doing it?
In our work, our relationships, our families, our beliefs?
What if the next era—of work, of collective healing, of fundraising itself—isn’t about fixing what’s broken, but about refusing to accept it as normal?
With love,
Sarah
