(Photo from Pexels)
Business leaders and policymakers across the country are searching for ways to address workforce shortages, retain employees, and prepare people for an economy increasingly shaped by automation and demographic change.
But those conversations often overlook the organizations that help people remain employed in the first place.
The Bipartisan Policy Center this past March released The Case for a National Talent Strategy, calling for a more coordinated and intentional approach to developing the workforce needed for America’s long-term economic competitiveness.
That strategy is urgently needed. But the national workforce conversation still has a major blind spot: the social sector.
Behind every functioning workforce is another workforce quietly holding it together. Childcare and afterschool providers help parents remain employed. Nonprofits deliver workforce training and reskilling. Social workers stabilize families experiencing a crisis. Mental health professionals help employees and their families navigate stress, substance use, and burnout. Community organizations connect workers to housing, transportation, food, elder care, and financial coaching before instability becomes job loss.
The social sector is the workforce behind the workforce. Our economy depends on it, even if our workforce policies rarely acknowledge that dependence.
We tend to treat employment, childcare, behavioral health, housing, and family stability as separate policy issues. For workers, however, these systems are deeply connected. A job opportunity means little if a parent cannot find childcare, a worker cannot get to the job, or a family crisis makes continued employment impossible.
A complete workforce strategy must account for both the conditions that allow people to remain employed and the stability of the organizations providing those essential supports.
And right now, the social sector workforce is under enormous strain. The social sector employs approximately 14.3 million people, representing about 10% of the American workforce. Too often, however, we treat this work as a permanent act of sacrifice, fueled by passion, goodwill and exhaustion.
Demand for social services is rising while many of the organizations responding to that demand face funding uncertainty, staffing shortages, and growing burnout. The Center for Effective Philanthropy recently reported that 46% of nonprofit CEOs describe their own burnout as “very much” a concern in 2026, up from just under 30% in 2025.
When childcare collapses, mental health support is unavailable, or family instability escalates, the consequences frequently appear at work as absenteeism, turnover, burnout, and lost productivity. What looks like an individual employee problem is often the result of systems failing around that employee.
Some employers are already beginning to recognize that reality. In Fort Worth, Texas, the nonprofit Pathfinders partners with employers to provide workplace financial coaching for employees experiencing financial stress.
Employers routinely invest in recruiting, training, benefits, and leadership development. Partnerships with trusted community organizations can be another part of that strategy, helping employees address challenges before they result in prolonged absences, disengagement, or job loss. People do not leave their human needs at the office door, and workforce stability is shaped by conditions both inside and outside the workplace.
These partnerships cannot substitute for fair wages, predictable schedules, paid leave, or healthy workplace cultures. But when employers meet their own responsibilities, community partnerships can help them understand and address workforce instability more comprehensively.
Yet while the social sector is increasingly expected to stabilize the workforce, we continue underinvesting in the people doing that work.
According to Independent Sector, 22% of nonprofit employees do not earn a living wage. Nonprofit turnover rates consistently outpace many other industries. Burnout is widespread, leadership pipelines are thinning, and compensation often fails to reflect the essential nature of this work.
Many social sector organizations also lack the resources to invest adequately in frontline management, professional development, technology, workforce data, and the organizational systems that help employees succeed. Although often classified as administrative expenses, these expenses directly affect service quality and an organization’s responsiveness.
These workforce pressures have consequences far beyond nonprofit organizations. When childcare providers cannot retain staff, parents lose access to care. When behavioral health organizations cannot fill vacancies, families wait longer for help. When community organizations lose experienced staff, the people relying on them receive less consistent support.
Ultimately, social sector instability becomes instability for the businesses, public agencies, and communities that depend on it.
The social sector has for decades operated on a quiet assumption: that purpose can compensate for chronic underinvestment in people. Purpose is powerful, but without infrastructure, it eventually becomes exhaustion.
We cannot meet 21st-century demands with workforce systems built for another era or build resilient companies on top of a fragile network of social sector organizations.
Recognizing the social sector as workforce infrastructure requires more than changing the language we use to describe it. It requires changing how different sectors invest and act.
Government agencies must ensure that grants, contracts, and reimbursement rates reflect the real cost of recruiting, supporting, and retaining qualified staff. Too often, public funding excludes the supervision, technology, training, and administrative capacity required to deliver services consistently.
Philanthropy must stop funding programs while treating the people and systems behind them as overhead. Flexible, multi-year funding enables organizations to improve compensation, strengthen management, modernize technology, and adapt to changing community needs. These investments make sustained impact possible.
Businesses should examine what drives turnover and absenteeism and where community partnerships can complement responsible internal policies. Employers have a stake in the systems their workers rely on.
Social sector leaders also have responsibilities. Funding constraints are real, but mission cannot justify unhealthy workplace practices. Leaders should treat workload, supervision, career development, psychological safety, and the experience of frontline workers as strategic priorities. They should also communicate more candidly about the true cost of delivering services, rather than masking gaps through short-term workarounds.
Nonprofit leaders must also use their collective voice in workforce policy, making clear that childcare, behavioral health, housing stability, and community supports are not peripheral to America’s workforce strategy. They are part of the infrastructure that makes employment possible in the first place.
America’s talent challenge will not be solved without the social sector. We cannot recruit and train our way out of a workforce problem while allowing the systems that keep people working to weaken around them. In fact, a national talent strategy that invests in workers, but ignores childcare, behavioral health, housing stability, and the people delivering those supports is not a strategy at all.
The social sector is not adjacent to America’s workforce infrastructure; it’s the foundation for it. If business leaders, policymakers, and funders are serious about building a stronger American workforce, they must start treating it that way and investing accordingly. The millions of social sector workers who hold America’s workforce together cannot remain the blind spot or an afterthought in any national workforce strategy if the intent is to be successful.
*****
Jody Levison-Johnson is president and CEO at Social Current. Suzanne Smith is founder and CEO of Social Impact Architects.
