Donato Tramuto, a global health activist and co-founder of the TramutoPorter Foundation, says the same pattern keeps surfacing in his conversations with school leaders, nonprofit boards, and health organizations: people in charge are being asked to do more with less, and the old command-and-control style is not holding up under that pressure. "I hear the same thing from a superintendent in Maine and a hospital administrator somewhere else," Tramuto says. "The people they manage do not want to be managed. They want to be seen."
He points to three shifts he has watched build over the past several years through his work with the TramutoPorter Foundation, previously the Tramuto Foundation. The first is that burnout is showing up at the top, not just the bottom. For years, burnout conversations focused on frontline staff, but Tramuto says the more interesting shift is what is happening among the people supervising them. "Leaders are exhausted too, and a lot of them are ashamed to say it," he says. "That silence trickles down. If a principal or a manager cannot admit they are tired, nobody underneath them feels safe admitting it either." His recommended action is for leaders to build a short, honest check-in into their week, even ten minutes, where they name how they are actually doing before asking the same of their team.
The second trend is that mentorship is becoming structured, not incidental. Tramuto has run the Foundation's scholarship program since 2001, and he says the biggest change he has seen is how deliberate mentorship has had to become. It used to happen by accident, a hallway conversation or a chance introduction, but now it needs a plan. "More than 200 young people have come through our scholarship program," Tramuto says. "The ones who get the most out of it are the ones who know they can reach out to a board member whenever they need to, not just at the start or end of the year." The action he suggests is for organizations that want mentorship to matter to name specific points of contact, not a general open door. A vague invitation to "reach out anytime" rarely gets used, he says, while a named person does.
The third shift is that compassion is getting measured, not just talked about. Tramuto says the language around compassionate leadership has caught on faster than the practice. Plenty of organizations now use the phrase in mission statements, but fewer have built anything to back it up. "Saying you value compassion costs nothing," he says. "Building a week around it, a scholarship around it, a mentorship structure around it, that costs time and money. That is the difference." He points to the Foundation's Compassionate Leadership of the Year Award, launched in 2023, as one attempt to make the idea concrete rather than aspirational. National Compassionate Leadership Week, observed the second week of September following approval from The National Day Calendar, gives organizations a fixed point on the calendar to plan around instead of treating compassion as a floating, undated value. His action step is for organizations to pick one measurable commitment tied to compassion this year, a scholarship, a recognition program, or a mentoring structure, and put a date on it. A commitment without a date tends to disappear, he warns.
Tramuto does not describe these trends as a crisis. He describes them as an opening. "Every one of these shifts is a chance to build something better than what we had," he says. "Burnout at the top is a signal to be honest. Mentorship going structured is a chance to be more useful to young people, not less. Compassion getting measured is a chance to stop talking and start building." He says the Foundation will keep using its scholarship program, its Compassionate Leadership of the Year Award, and Compassionate Leadership Week as the concrete pieces behind that argument, rather than leaving the idea to sit as a slogan. Since 2001, the Foundation has supported nearly 140 organizations and helped tens of thousands of people through student scholarships and financial grants worldwide. Tramuto is based in Ogunquit, Maine.
