Making Up for All Those Missed Vacations

The rewards of a career spent serving the community are many. They just aren’t monetary. The term “nonprofit” is pretty self-explanatory. Long hours, low pay, shoestring budgets are standard, and for those who stick it out, who wind up running the centers, the shelters, the networks, the danger of burnout is very real.

Even if they could take the time off, they couldn’t afford to really do anything, and even if they could afford to do something, they’d wind up on the phone or fax to their organization most of the time anyway, so they might as well stay home. Too much prep and cleanup for five days in Santa Barbara, thank you very much.

Enter the Durfee Foundation. For three years, the Durfee Sabbatical Program has been providing guilt-free, strictly enforced nonworking vacations for the leaders of L.A.’s nonprofit community. The rules are simple: Applicants must have put in at least seven years, their boards must be supportive, and they must surrender their cell phones, their beepers, their fax lines for at least two months. Each year, six are chosen from a wide variety of fields and awarded $25,000 each for their leaves. Their organizations receive an additional $5,000 to start a professional development fund.

“We want to reward key leaders in high-stress, low-pay positions,” says Claire Peeps, executive director of the Santa Monica-based family foundation. “Sabbatical is a misnomer--we don’t want them to work at all. We want to give them real time to rejuvenate. We encourage them to begin their leave with travel--to get as far away from the city as possible, so there is a real break.

“We don’t want these people to burn out, because we need them too much.”

The list of recipients of the Durfee sabbaticals reads like Eleanor Roosevelt’s 100 People to Watch. This year it included Father Gregory Boyle, director of Jobs for a Future and Homeboy Industries; Anne Bray, founder and executive director of L.A. Freewaves; Saundra Bryant, executive director of All Peoples Christian Center; Abby Leibman, founder and executive director of the California Women’s Law Center; Bill Watanabe, executive director of Little Tokyo Service Center and its Community Development Corp.; and Carol Williams, executive director of Interval House, a domestic violence shelter.

*

Among them, there is well over a century of community service, and a lot of missed vacation.

“I was having dinner with a co-worker and mentioned that I needed some time off,” says Boyle, who has worked with the programs of the Dolores Mission in East Los Angeles, since 1986. “She told me about the Durfee and said, ‘The good news is, it could help you. The bad news is, the deadline’s tomorrow.’ So I pulled an all-nighter to get the application in.”

Boyle says he plans to travel, first to the Holy Land, then to visit relatives in County Antrum in Ireland.

Past recipients say travel is key.

“My obligation was not to work,” says Patricia Occhiuzzo Giggans, executive director of the Los Angeles Commission on Violence Against Women. “And I took that seriously, like I take all of my grant proposals seriously. So last year, I took my family to Brazil for a month. And then I rented a house on Morro Bay and stared at the ocean for another month. No one was allowed to call me unless my next in command and the president of the board agreed. I think they called me once. It was amazing.”

Part of the purpose of the program is to give the various staffs a chance to envision life without their leader.

“Too often a founder or director is so identified with a program that the staff, and that person, cannot imagine the program running without them,” Peeps says. “So this gives them a dry run. A chance for the next generation to come forth.”

*

Giggans and other past recipients say that one immediate benefit of the time off was the realization that they could, indeed, retire someday. Other benefits are more long-range.

“I had to get rested enough to feel tired,” says Elisa Grebin Crystal, executive director of the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena who took two months off last year. “When I got back, we were finishing a management assessment, and it was clear we were sorely understaffed. So we are reconfiguring and hiring new people. It doesn’t help the program if the staff is continually exhausted.”

Crystal, and other past recipients, was a member of the five-person panel that chose this year’s awardees, a process, she says, that was perhaps the greatest benefit of all.

“I was just moved to tears,” she says. “These are the greatest people, and proof of what a wonderful community Los Angeles is, that we could produce them.”