MCLD’s commitment to our well-being and mental health
MCLD members – civil society leaders, NGO staff, community-based organizers – support their partners through extremely challenging circumstances, with too few resources. They do this amidst shrinking civic space and attacks on civil society, amidst disruptions to funding and volatile shifts in our sector’s landscape. All the while they are caring for their teams and themselves. This is incredibly demanding. Not surprisingly, mental load, stress, and burnout are not uncommon.
Therefore it is an MCLD commitment to foster spaces and share resources to support members to manage stress, prevent burnout, support wellbeing, and promote care. This is part of our self-reliance pillar, part of our vision of community, and necessary for CLD leaders to keep going with the critical work of supporting communities and their leadership.
We are not mental health professionals and our starting point is to do no harm. Therefore, our goal is to connect members to resources, facilitate practitioners from multiple cultural perspectives to offer services, and provide spaces for decompression and connection. We know that not every tradition and approach will resonate with all our members and we invite people to participate where it serves them.
How we support member wellbeing and mental health:
- Guided exercises, strategies and techniques for decompression and grounding – for example in our January 2026 Global Call
- Advocacy and engagement on care work and the pressures facing civil society
- Exploration of trauma-informed leadership and approaching systems change from a healing perspective
- Spaces for building human connections with colleagues – discussion in small groups, mentorship platform, and more
- Encouraging creative meeting formats to build connection and staying mindful of the load that our members all carry