There’s been a trend semi-recently on social media about things that are “kinda chic.” Many of them have to do with things you wouldn’t normally apply the term “chic” to—anything from having a baby in your late 30s to calling your mom (shout-out to Reese Witherspoon) to being from Baltimore (shout-out to @emilyinbaltimore and me, Ellie Shippey, for now living in Baltimore very chic-ly 😀).
It made us wonder here at the Center: How would nonprofit work—and the conventions and paradigms we associate with it—be examined through a “kinda chic” lens? Why would that be a useful thing to contemplate? And how do we make the answer important enough to put in front of our network?
I won’t make you wait for the answer: It’s about taking on a mentality that helps us actually savor the work.
When we take a term like “chic,” a word we associate with things like “The Devil Wears Prada” (specifically the first one! The second one was far less chic, in my opinion—the overwhelming amount of fan service in the sequel was really not “giving,” as the kids say), 1,000-thread-count sheets, a Michelin-starred restaurant and so on, and apply it to the humble work we do in this sector, we give ourselves the opportunity to understand ourselves as more than just virtuous and hardworking. We get to think of ourselves as sophisticated, dignified and sometimes maybe even glamorous.
I believe we do so by practicing what the trend itself is doing: intentionally looking at something—in this case, our work as nonprofit professionals—as chic precisely because its value runs deeper than the things that have a universally accepted luxurious connotation. Perhaps a Porsche? Definitely not a Cybertruck.
When we assign a quality of chicness to creating meaningful impact, the work can become savorable. It can even take on a romantic quality. Telling ourselves a story about why our work is chic helps us look for and find beauty in the ordinary—and, in doing so, can promote a more positive experience of the work itself.
There’s research behind that idea. Psychologists Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff define savoring as attending to, appreciating and enhancing positive experiences in their 2007 book, “Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience.” Research has also linked gratitude practices with well-being, including a 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis led by Geyze Diniz examining the effects of gratitude interventions.
Think of it, loosely, as an equation: savoring × gratitude = well-being.
None of this is to suggest we should force ourselves into a toxic positivity mindset. The nonprofit sector has long been prone to romanticizing sacrifice, and it’s our prerogative to reject the idea that mission-driven work should require chronic overwork, inadequate compensation or personal depletion. Savoring the work shouldn’t mean ignoring the parts of it that need to change.
In fact, if we’re going to romanticize the meaning and rewards of nonprofit work, we should be romanticizing boundaries just as much. Enforcing boundaries isn’t just practical—it’s a form of self-respect and sustainability. Research supports this: In a 2012 qualitative study published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, social workers identified boundary-setting as one of the strategies that helped protect them from the emotional toll of compassion fatigue. Pairing those boundaries with a “kinda chic” mindset—one that encourages us to notice and appreciate the meaningful details of the work—can help us sustain our connection to what makes the work worthwhile in the first place.
Those ideas don’t have to be at odds. Together, they can help create a relationship with nonprofit work that allows us not just to do it, but to savor it—and, ultimately, sustain it.
And I would be remiss to end this blog without putting the “kinda chic” mindset into practice. So, here we go: Writing a whole blog about finding more joy, meaning and sustainability in nonprofit work?
Kinda chic. 🙂