There is a particular kind of tired that this work produces, and after more than two decades I have come to know it well.
It is not the tiredness of long hours, although the hours are usually long. It is not the tiredness of stretched budgets, although the budgets are usually stretched. It is the tiredness of doing a job whose subject matter is your own life, your family’s life, your community’s life, in rooms that are not always sure they want the work to succeed.
I have watched too many brilliant practitioners leave this field. Some moved to other sectors and never came back. Some stayed, but in a smaller, more guarded version of themselves, having decided that protecting their own wellbeing and protecting the integrity of the work had stopped being the same thing.
I want to write honestly about why that happens, and about who is responsible for changing it, because the conversation about practitioner wellbeing has drifted, over the last few years, into the language of self-care, and that language quietly places the burden on the very people least able to carry it.
Let me say the thing this whole post rests on plainly.
The wellbeing of EDI practitioners is a structural matter first, and an individual one second. The order is not a detail. It is the argument.
Why this work asks more of you than most
The exhaustion of EDI work is not the same as the exhaustion of a demanding job in another field, and it is worth being precise about why.
For many of us, there is no professional distance from the material. When you are a racially minoritised practitioner leading race equality work, or a disabled practitioner leading disability inclusion, the subject of the meeting is not a topic. It is your own experience, sitting in the room whilst you facilitate.
When a colleague resists an obvious point, when a dataset is bleak, when a difficult email lands, the harm does not stay at the office. It follows you home, and then it follows you into a news cycle that never gives the subject a rest.
On top of that sits what some call the minority tax. The academic Amado Padilla named a version of it “cultural taxation” back in the 1990s, and the phrase has aged depressingly well. Racially minoritised colleagues, and EDI practitioners especially, are routinely asked to educate, represent, advise, comfort, mediate, translate and advocate, all on top of the job they were actually hired to do. Much of that labour is invisible to the organisation that depends on it. None of it appears in the job description.
Then there is vicarious trauma, which we name readily in social work, in therapy, in clinical psychology, in clergy and almost never in EDI. Practitioners hold, week after week, the stories of people who have been harassed, excluded, overlooked and harmed. Holding those stories is the work. Holding them safely requires the supervision and recovery we build into every other profession that asks people to carry the pain of others. We give EDI practitioners almost none of it, and then we are surprised when they break.
And there is the plain fact that the EDI practitioner is often the most visible face of a change the organisation has committed to on paper and resisted in practice. You become the lightning rod. The complaints, the pointed feedback, the social media attention, the pressure from above and the cynicism from below all gather around the person whose name is on the strategy.
That has grown heavier, not lighter, as the political climate around this work has hardened across the UK and elsewhere these last few years. I could go on, the isolation of being the only person doing your job in the building, the particular grief of seeing clearly what needs to change and knowing it will not change quickly. But I suspect that if you do this work, you stopped needing the list several paragraphs ago. You know this ground. You are standing on it.
Learning to read your own warning signs
The cruelty of it is that the people who do this work are often the worst readers of their own condition. We have a high tolerance for difficulty and a high commitment to the cause, and those two qualities are exactly what stop us noticing when we are in trouble.
So let me name a few of the signs, gently, because by the time they are obvious to everyone else they are usually further along than you have admitted to yourself. The work has stopped feeling meaningful but has somehow become the only thing you have. You are working through illness and through holidays and it no longer feels strange.
Small interactions with difficult colleagues are landing far harder than they should, and staying with you for days. The people who love you have started, carefully, to tell you that you are not quite yourself.
These are not signs of weakness. They are information. The only question is whether you will treat them as such.
What is yours to do
There is a part of this that only you can do, and I want to be clear about it without pretending it is the whole answer.
Some of it is about building professional scaffolding that other helping professions take for granted. Supervision, a regular confidential relationship with an experienced practitioner who is not your line manager, in which you can put down the accumulated weight of what you are carrying, is standard in social work and therapy, and it should be standard in ours. If your organisation will not fund it, there are times it is worth commissioning for yourself.
The same goes for coaching with someone who actually understands the racial and political texture of the role; I have worked with coaches at every stage of my own career, and I have never once regretted it. And there is no shame whatsoever in therapy when you need it. The practitioners I know who reached the end of long careers with their health intact were, almost always, the ones who asked for help early.
Some of it is the smaller, less glamorous infrastructure of a working life you can sustain:
- the community of practice that stands in for the colleagues you do not have in your own building, peers in other organisations who understand the work from the inside
- boundaries that actually live somewhere other than your own head, in the diary, in the inbox, in the conversation with the senior leader asking you to take on one more thing
- the physical foundations, sleep, movement, food, time away from screens, which are not indulgences but the conditions for doing demanding work over a long horizon
I will admit my own version of this. For some years now I have taken a holiday once a year, on my own, purely to think and to recover. It is not a luxury I apologise for. It is part of how I have stayed in this work long enough to be writing to you now.
And once a year, at least, I sit with a harder question: is this role, in this organisation, on these terms, still the right place for me? Some years the answer is a clear yes. Some years it is yes, with adjustments. And some years … the honest answer is no. The years I asked the question properly are the years I am most grateful for.
What organisations owe the people doing this work
Here is where I want to be most direct, because this is where the real responsibility sits.
If your organisation has one EDI practitioner doing the work of three, that is not a problem for them to solve with better self-care. It is a resourcing decision, and it is yours. If you ask your EDI lead to absorb every harassment complaint, every charged conversation, every politically difficult moment, with no supervision and no debrief, the harm that follows is not bad luck. It is the foreseeable consequence of a structure you built.
There is a social justice argument here, and it is the obvious one: it is its own injustice to ask the people most exposed to inequity to carry its weight unsupported. But the other two lenses I always work through point in exactly the same direction.
The business performance case is plain, skilled, experienced practitioners are expensive to lose and almost impossible to replace quickly, and a field of burnt-out people will not deliver the change any organisation claims to want.
And the legal case is real, and far too rarely discussed. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, employers carry a duty of care for the psychological as well as the physical wellbeing of their staff, and the Health and Safety Executive sets out exactly what that means in practice through its Management Standards for work-related stress. An employer who repeatedly exposes a member of staff to harm without protecting them is carrying risk that is legal as much as it is ethical. Vicarious liability under the Equality Act 2010 sharpens the point further.
None of this is exotic. Funding supervision as a contractual entitlement rather than a rare favour. Resourcing the function for the actual scale of the work. Holding senior leaders accountable for the inclusion work that belongs in their own roles, instead of letting it slide down to the EDI lead by default. Building succession in from the start, so that no individual is trapped by being irreplaceable. These are simply the things a serious employer does for any function whose work is genuinely hard.
On leaving, which the field discusses too rarely
There is a question practitioners ask one another quietly and almost never in public: when is it right to leave?
My honest answer is more often than we are willing to say.
I have seen the same pattern many times. Someone stays in a role that is harming them out of loyalty to the staff networks depending on them, out of fear that no one will take their place, out of how tightly their own identity has wound itself around the work. None of those are foolish reasons. None of them, on its own, is reason enough to stay if the role is steadily harming you.
Leaving a role, or an organisation, or even the field for a while, is not failure. In most of the cases I have watched closely, the failure was the organisation’s, not the person’s. The work does not need martyrs. It needs people who can keep going at a pace that is compatible with their own flourishing, and who show, by staying well, what they are asking their organisations to become.
A closing thought
I have done this long enough to know there is no tidy solution to the wellbeing question. The work is heavy because the reality it confronts is heavy, and the people drawn to it tend to be people who feel that reality keenly, which is both why they are good at it and why it costs them.
What I have learned is narrower than a solution, but it has held. The practitioners who last are the ones who built real scaffolding around themselves, who refused over and over to take organisational failure personally, and who kept a life outside the work large enough to be a refuge rather than an afterthought.
To the practitioners reading this: your work matters, and your wellbeing matters at least as much. The choices you make to protect yourself are not a distraction from the work. They are the work.
And to the leaders reading this: the conditions you create for your EDI practitioners are part of your EDI strategy, whether you meant them to be or not. You do not get to say your organisation takes this seriously whilst the people doing it in your name are being quietly worn down.
At Bakare Barley, we work with EDI practitioners and the organisations that employ them on supervision, coaching, and the wider infrastructure that keeps people well in this work over the long term. If any of this has landed for you whether as a practitioner or as a leader responsible for one, I would welcome a conversation.
