Burnout & Breakthroughs: The High's Lows, and Healing of Working in Service
Burnout & Breakthroughs is a podcast for nonprofit professionals, mission-driven leaders, and purpose-driven individuals who are ready to reclaim their humanity and move beyond glorifying exhaustion.
Hosted by Samantha, a nonprofit leader with over a decade of experience, the show tells the truths we usually whisper in staff kitchens or cry about in therapy.
Recent Episodes
The Hidden Power Dynamics Inside Nonprofits (and How to Use Yours)
Holiday Burnout & Compassion Fatigue: When Caring Hurts
The Collapse of Care: Layoffs, Government Shutdowns & the War on Service
Carrying the Weight: Beyond the Job Description in Nonprofit Work
Nonprofit Career Secrets No One Tells You: What I Wish I Knew Before Starting
The Myth of the Selfless Servant: Why Boundaries Matter
Listen On
Support On
Recent Blog Posts
Holiday Burnout & Compassion Fatigue: Your Survival Guide for Helpers
From Understanding to Action If you listened to Episode 7, you heard why compassion fatigue hits differently during the holidays. When everyone else is celebrating, you're holding onto other people's heaviest moments on top of your own trauma, grie…
The Atlas Complex: From Parentified Children to Burnt-Out Caregivers
"Other duties as assigned" feels less like flexibility and more like destiny. Working in service, I've had the pleasure of meeting a variety of people from all over, but one of the things that I've noticed is that there's a particular type of perso…
No One Told Me This: The Silent Truths of Nonprofit Work
"You can't pour from an empty jug. And yet, here's the thing nobody put in the job description—so much of nonprofit culture teaches us to keep pouring anyway." There's a moment in every nonprofit career—maybe it's three months in, maybe…
About the Host
Samantha Funk is a Maine-based artist, podcast host, and Program Manager with over a decade of experience in the nonprofit sector. She holds a Master's degree in Leadership and is the creator and host of Burnout & Breakthroughs, a podcast that explores the human cost of mission-driven work and the path to sustainable leadership and healing.
Samantha’s expertise spans Creativity, Play, Game-Based Learning, Team Development, Transformational and Adaptive Leadership, Change Management, Consciousness, Emotional Intelligence, and Social Competence. Her nonprofit work has focused on community development, workforce programming, refugee resettlement, and systems-level advocacy — navigating the complexities of policy, funding, and human-centered service delivery.
Through her nonprofit leadership and podcast work, Samantha invites others to reclaim rest, rediscover purpose, and resist burnout culture, one breakthrough at a time.