08/25/2026
Organizations are often born from pain. Someone experiences something devastating, sees a need that others may not see, and turns that experience into purpose. That purpose can become a mission, and that mission can grow into something extraordinarily powerful that changes and even saves lives.
But building an organization around a deeply personal or emotionally charged cause does not make its leaders immune from the very struggles that helped give birth to it.
A title does not inoculate us from mental health struggles. Being a founder, president, executive director, advocate, or the person everyone else turns to does not somehow protect us. In fact, the enormous responsibility of being the face of a mission, carrying the expectations of others, and feeling responsible for an organization and the people it serves can intensify struggles that may already exist beneath the surface.
We never truly know what lies underneath someone’s smile, determination, accomplishments, or relentless drive.
When something unimaginable happens, compassion can coexist with anger. Empathy can coexist with feelings of betrayal. Grief can coexist with questions that may never be fully answered. Those emotions are not mutually exclusive; they are human.
Perhaps one of the lessons for organizations built around emotionally charged causes is that support cannot exist only from the bottom up. It must exist from the top down as well. We need systems that deliberately check on the people doing the checking. A buddy system for leadership. People empowered to ask the founder, the president, the executive director, or the person who always seems strongest: How are you, really?
Nobody should become so synonymous with a mission that we forget there is a human being carrying it.
No one is immune to mental health struggles. No title, accomplishment, reputation, or position changes that reality. And sometimes the people who appear to have the greatest drive and strength are carrying things the rest of us cannot see.
We need to connect more deeply, ask harder questions, listen more carefully, and take far less for granted.
Sometimes the people holding everyone else up need someone making sure they are still standing.
Stephanie Samuels, MA, MSW, LCSW
CopLine®️, Founder/Director
