Moral Injury Informed Programming and Support: Humanitarians, activists, and other frontline workers are highly susceptible to moral injury (MI). Moral injury occurs in situations where someone is forced to act in a way that violates their moral code, or prohibited from acting in a way that they feel is moral, creating a moral transgression called a potentially morally injurious event (PMIE). In a 2021 study from Medicine sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders) 75% of surveyed aid workers experienced traumatic events, but it’s often organizational failures. Poor leadership and lack of resources are driving moral injury and emotional exhaustion in the humanitarian sector. 

In 2021, In-Sight Collaborative partnered with researchers at the College of William and Mary to conduct an initial study on moral injury in humanitarians to better understand not just how prevalent moral injury is, but also how it impacts the lives of those living with it. The findings of the simple study were not surprising, but were profound. Moral injury was not only present in the humanitarian workers we surveyed, but the presence of moral injury had direct effects on depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and suicidal ideation. 

This points to an urgent need for more interventions aimed at addressing the environments that put humanitarians at high risk for exposure to PMIEs and supporting morally injured humanitarians. In October of 2025, the team reconvened and has doubled in size as we prepare another round of research, this time focusing on the feasibility of moral injury treatment in the form of workshops or peer support groups for humanitarian workers. 

• Embracing Holism and Liberatory Mental Health Frameworks: In-Sight Collaborative incorporates a diversity of wellness and wellbeing philosophies and practices in our programs. In order to pursue a world beyond industrial complexes and other systems of harm, we must disentangle our mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing from the same colonial-capitalist influences. 
• Healing Justice acknowledges the interconnectedness of emotional and spiritual distress and the lineages of oppression that we come from. 
• Rebellious mourning and sacred grief are vital practices for those involved in social justice work as humanitarians, activists, or even simply conscientious witnesses. Now more than ever, we have to acknowledge the immense amounts of grief the world is facing and that many of us are carrying from our own lives, from our lineages, and from bearing witness to the hardship of others. 
• Collective healing encourages the creation of loving, supportive communities where we can hold each other’s pain, acknowledge when harm is done, and work together to heal. Much of the healing that we need can’t be done in isolation. Our wellness offerings and programs aim to support the destigmatization of mental health support and the cultivation of new cultures of collective care and healing

Prioritizing Access for Those Who Need it Most: 

Wellness resources whether its therapy, gym memberships, or time away from work are outside of many people’s financial means. In-Sight Collaborative works hard to keep our resources free and pay-what-you-can so that they are accessible regardless of socioeconomic status. Everyone deserves equitable access to quality mental health resources and community support. 

Accessing in-person services is a limiting factor for those experiencing forced displacement/forced migration, humanitarian crisis, or those who are working on the frontlines of crisis zones. All of our offerings are online and we keep many of them asynchronous in the forms of workbooks, self-paced modules, and recorded sessions so that people can access them when they need them. 

Our programming is all informed by the current needs of humanitarians, activists and everyone in between. Feedback loops are integrated into all of the programs we offer at In-Sight Collaborative to ensure our offerings are relevant and meet the needs expressed by affected communities, not the needs we assume or impose upon them. 

Accompaniment of people all across the sector means our core team, board members, educators, and volunteer providers prioritizes holding spaces for 1:1 mentorship, peer support, and advocating for the structural and systemic changes that humanitarians need to not just survive, but thrive. 

Education by humanitarians, for humanitarians: Our leadership program addresses the current needs of humanitarians by calling out harms in the sector and teaching emergent strategies to move us towards liberation. Learn more from our program leadership, donors, and participants below:

Many humanitarians fear that disclosing mental health struggles will negatively affect their reputation and jeopardize contract renewals or future job prospects. To avoid judgment, many humanitarian workers internalize their distress and normalize suffering as an unavoidable "part of the job". This self-censoring reinforces silence around mental health issues and creates a high-risk environment for burnout, anxiety, and PTSD. In a notoriously under-resourced sector, even when humanitarians and activists realize they need help, accessing support is often beyond their means. Additionally, many mental health professionals do not understand the unique mental health needs of humanitarians - inappropriate interventions can increase frustration and burnout or even be traumatizing for people in need of immediate support.

Degree of the problem: High burnout, poor retention rates, and navigating emotional distress and suicidality. 

• In a 2021 MSF study, 75% of surveyed aid workers experienced traumatic events, but it’s often organizational failures. Poor leadership and lack of resources are driving emotional exhaustion in the humanitarian sector. It’s a real problem. Burnout can cost aid workers their lives. As our research in 2021 found, moral injury was strongly correlated with suicidal ideations, depression, and anxiety. 
• 2024 State of Nonprofits report, 95% of non-profit leaders express concern about burnout, with 34% reporting that staff burnout has been “very much” a concern to them in the last year. Almost 60% of nonprofit leaders are losing staff to more competitive compensation and benefits in other sectors and general burnout. 50% of surveyed nonprofit leaders report having some to a lot of difficulty filing staff vacancies in the last year. 
• The average voluntary staff turnover rate in the nonprofit sector hovers at 19-21% and 20-25% for the humanitarian sector, significantly higher than the all-industry average of 12-13%. This 20-25% figure varies significantly between organizations, with some reporting turnover rates as high as 40%. 
  
• Headington Institute notes that the incidence of mental illness among humanitarian aid workers from developed countries is often estimated to be between 22-25%, with some studies finding rates over 40%, which is higher than the general population
  
  

Are we willing to accept this for the people who sacrifice so much for others in need?

Retention of knowledge and skills from dedicated and experienced humanitarians: Our Humanitarian Leadership Program promotes co-learning and knowledge sharing from a multi-sectoral, multi-generational, international group of people who want to improve the way we view and deliver humanitarian interventions. This allows seasoned and novice humanitarian workers to engage in knowledge sharing and peer support to promote healthy coping in the current sector as well as collective imagining of what could come next. 

Specialized mental health support: Providers and coaches in our Humanitarian Wellness Network are dedicated to understanding and addressing the specific needs of humanitarians and activists working with displaced people or experiencing displacement themselves. Whether humanitarians are seeking one-on-one therapy sessions or are attending our moral injury workshops, the interventions center holistic care that acknowledges the ways we experience wounds to our minds, bodies, and spirits from the structural violence of the sector. 

The Humanitarian Wellness Hub: Did we mention these resources are online and pay-what-you-can or free? Wellness resources should not be inaccessible due to financial or geographic limitations. Our Humanitarian Wellness Hub is open to anyone in need and offers online wellness courses and training, workbooks, monthly wellness sessions, workshops, and pro-bono coaching, counseling, and wellness consulting through the wellness network. We are currently the only humanitarian organization offering the general public this diversity of resources for free or pay-what-you-can rates. Many humanitarian actors who are volunteering or working with grassroots organizations or those who are working in their own communities do not have access to the support that may be made available by larger institutions. 

Continued Research: Through research partnerships with academic establishments like the College of William and Mary and large networks of other grassroots organizations, we continue to ask important questions about the state of the sector and needs of humanitarians to drive our work forward. In-Sight Collaborative also uses outcome harvesting to gather intensely detailed feedback from our program participants, which we use to inform our educational offerings, wellness spaces, and other resources that meet the current and most pressing needs of humanitarians.