To keep staff from burning out, close the whole office for a week
“Our offices are closed this week.” Why more nonprofits are taking a synchronized break that does what individual vacation days can't.
By M.J. Prest
Senior Editor, Solutions
August 21, 2026 | Read Time: 8 minutes
June is the busiest month of the year at Keshet.
At this nonprofit, which works to advance equality for LGBTQ+ members of Jewish communities, Pride Month is overflowing with festivities, parades, advocacy, and stories shared on social media. “People are often working in evenings and on weekends to make Pride Month happen for our communities, and then at the end of that, we really need a moment to recharge,” says Jaimie Krass, its president and CEO.
In 2025, Keshet began ensuring its entire staff could do that by offering a weeklong, organization-wide shutdown at the beginning of July. That means no one on call, no social-media monitoring, and coordinated “our offices are closed this week” autoreplies from every employee — Krass included.
She says she received overwhelmingly positive feedback from peer leaders who are impressed with how Keshet prioritizes rest. “They were looking to us as a role model that we were giving ourselves this time off, especially during such a crucial time for our communities,” Krass says.
Keshet is not alone. More nonprofits are experimenting with paid break weeks following busy seasons, to enable staff to recuperate in a way that offering individual paid time off cannot.
The Chronicle spoke to three champions of the trend to learn what they’re gaining — in morale, and increasingly in recruitment power and retention — and how they make it work. Here are their key insights.
A closed office removes pressure in ways that vacation time can’t.
Even generous vacation policies fail when colleagues rely on you for day-to-day tasks. Break weeks eliminate that pressure, Krass says. “It removes even the possibility of someone getting a last-minute, urgent, ‘I just need you to hop online for this one purpose’ request.”
It also lifts a “psychological weight” from time away from the office, she adds: “You’re not wondering, ‘Am I going to get that Slack message today? Am I going to see that email pop up in my inbox?’ There is truly the expectation that you are not checking Slack, you are not checking your email — and in fact, no one at the organization is checking either of these things.”
The funder R&R: the Rest of Our Lives promotes the break-week model to keep nonprofit staff from burning out. Josh Feldman, its founder and CEO, says structured rest offers “guardrails” to protect work-life balance. “American workers don’t use the vacation they have,” he says. Individual PTO puts the burden on each worker to claim it, Feldman says, while an organization-wide shutdown reflects a work culture taking “a holistic look at benefits.”
“It democratizes rest,” Feldman says. “Everybody in an org gets to take a break at the same time.”
Time the break to follow your busiest season.
The recruitment department at Teach for America kicks into high gear every spring as the team courts undergraduates and early-career professionals to join the organization’s nationwide teaching corps.
For decades, the nonprofit has given its 1,600-person staff an enterprise-wide holiday break between Christmas and New Year’s, but December is a long way off from its recruitment high season.
To protect the recruiting staff from exhaustion, that entire team receives an additional “recharge week” at the end of each academic year, says Darin Lim Yankowitz, Teach for America’s senior vice president of recruitment.
When the team reconvenes in early summer, they feel renewed for the work ahead, he says: “Giving people real opportunities to rest and recharge is part of how we do that and how we create an environment where exceptional people are going to not burn out, but be committed to something that they care about and stay here year after year after year.”
Teach for America has offered the recharge week as a benefit for its 140-member recruitment staff for roughly the past six years, Lim Yankowitz says. Other departments within the organization — like the corps member leadership development team — also receive their own paid weeks off, pegged to follow their work’s busiest periods.
Lim Yankowitz credits the break, among other retention efforts, with reducing turnover among recruiters at Teach for America. He recalls that prior to the recharge-week policy, the average length of tenure for a recruiter was one to two years, but now many have been in the role for four or five years. “Our ability to achieve big things depends on top talent being able to make their home here for the long haul,” he says.
Success comes down to communicating early.
Advance notice is paramount to making the plan work, the experts say — both internally and externally.
Keshet gives its employees a template out-of-office message so that expectations remain uniform and clear. It also tells key donors and board members well in advance, and announces its break week on social media so that its followers know not to expect new activity.
Krass says during Keshet’s first break week in 2025, she worried about leaving its online presence without comment moderation — “because we do receive a lot of hate as an LGBTQ+ Jewish organization” — but the week passed without incident. That gave the nonprofit the confidence to repeat the social-media pause during its break this summer.
It democratizes rest. Everybody in an org gets to take a break at the same time.
Keshet’s leadership team chose to keep no one on call. They defined in advance what would count as a true emergency, like a teenager reaching out for crisis support or a mass-casualty event that affected members of its community. Krass says they agreed that under a few narrowly defined circumstances, they would interrupt the scheduled break, but “we kind of went in saying, barring that, we are fully offline.”
Finally, Keshet makes the first day back from break week meeting-free so that everyone has a chance to triage their inboxes upon re-entry. That gives staff “the opportunity to readjust and pace themselves as they settle back into the rhythm of work without there being suddenly the demand of countless meetings,” Krass says.
The strongest job candidates are asking for balance.
Teach for America hires many workers from Generation Z, and Lim Yankowitz says the Gen Z candidates his team recruits prioritize work-life balance more than older workers did. He notes that young people have grown up during a recession, a pandemic, and now AI-driven economic anxiety — and have watched work fail to protect earlier generations.
To attract the strongest candidates, break weeks are one way Teach for America differentiates itself from other nonprofits and from the corporate world, he says. “Every single person on my team could earn vastly more money if they were doing recruitment in the for-profit space. They are here instead because they believe deeply in what we do and because we create an environment that makes them want to be here.”
Grants can help, but they aren’t a prerequisite.
A small but growing number of foundations have begun putting money behind break weeks.
R&R: the Rest of Our Lives runs a program to cover some of the costs behind closing an organization for a week. Its annual Breakweek grant awards $3,000, along with coaching and evaluation tools, to U.S. nonprofits that serve the Jewish community. Keshet self-funded its first break week in 2025, then became one of R&R’s Breakweek grantees in 2026.
Feldman says this kind of support is spreading. R&R also convenes the Rest Roundtable, a group of funders that make grants for sabbaticals and other forms of structured time off, though many, like the California Wellness Foundation and the Colorado Health Foundation, give only within defined regions.
For organizations without a funder behind the break, Feldman’s advice is to start small — a three-day weekend, or even a half day — and treat the first attempt as a low-stakes experiment. The workplace is changing fast, Feldman says, and organizations have a chance to “design it so it doesn’t design us.”
The people who feel most essential need the break the most.
The experts emphasize that even the people who feel the most indispensable really can step away.
Krass acknowledges that it’s hard for CEOs to fully unplug but argues that this pressure is the reason to try. “It is very easy for us to feel the real urgency of the moment and to feel how dire and high the stakes are,” she says, but “we don’t all have to be married to the work. Our commitment to the work is not negated by actually taking time off.”
Lim Yankowitz finds relief in not being the bottleneck: “When everyone shuts down together, you don’t carry any of that mental load of, ‘Oh, gosh, is my absence making things harder for someone? Is my absence a roadblock that’s preventing us from doing something that I care deeply about?’ Because we’re all off together and you know that truly nothing is moving.”
