Mental Health

Many of the Firetree team have experience of working in the frontline of NGOs. It is this firsthand experience that allows us to understand the burden of the role on the mental health of the staff within NGOs/CBOs. In addition, after reading The Centre for Effective Philanthropy report, State of Nonprofits 2024: What Funders Need to Know, and learning that burnout is top of mind for nonprofit leaders, at Firetree we wanted to learn more. While we appreciate the report is US based, we nonetheless found it interesting how much burnout was highlighted by NGO workers. Thus started our own exploration on this topic of mental health in the South East-Asian region. We set out to look for resources and statistics on the personal mental health impacts on NGO / CBO workers as a result of the jobs they undertake. When looking for statistics on the impacts of vicarious or secondary trauma that NGO /CBO workers are experiencing (as a result of the roles they have undertaken) it was concerning to see how little information there is available. Most of the research in this area focuses on workers in emergency / crisis situations.

It should be stressed that at Firetree we are not research or mental health experts and we appreciate that there may be resources we weren’t able to access. What we did find, we are happy to share and signpost others to.

The next step in our journey is to undertake a short 10 question survey to get a quick snapshot of the landscape of mental health support for non-profit organisations (including non-profit social enterprises and community-based organisations (CBO) in Southeast Asia. The anonymous survey will be conducted in early January 2025 and the findings will be shared publicly.

Our intention is to use the information gathered to educate ourselves as an organisation that is both very interested in and currently funding mental health support for non-profits. We hope that by sharing the aggregate and anonymised results publicly, this will help to educate other funders, and also share back to non-profit and CBO team members too.

In the meantime, in the spirit of sharing resources and information, we collated some of the mental health facts available for the countries we work in:

If you have any resources that you feel would benefit others or if you believe that anything on this page isn’t reflecting the sector, please get in touch at resources@firetree.org.

Definitions:

Mental Health: Mental health is a state of well-being in which an individual can realise his or her own potential, cope with the normal stresses of life, work productively and make a contribution to the community. (WHO Strengthening mental health promotion, Fact sheet No 220)

Burnout: Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:

feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
reduced professional efficacy.

Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be
applied to describe experiences in other areas of life. (WHO
https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-
international-classification-of-diseases)

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Sources and Resources

The following are resources we found useful in our exploration of what’s available in relation to NGO/CBO staff in the Southeast Asia Region.

Networks

The Mental Health Innovation Network (MHIN) is an online community for mental health practitioners, policy-makers, service users, researchers, donors and other mental health stakeholders to share information and resources to improve the quality and coverage of mental health care worldwide.

Cambodia