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About
The Thrive Profile™
The Thrive Profile™ was developed by Sequoia Owen, Founder of The Brilliant Lead LLC, as a practical response to a challenge she saw repeatedly across the nonprofit sector: burnout was being discussed often, but not always measured in ways that helped organizations understand what to do next.
The tool is grounded in Sequoia’s master’s-level training in mental health, more than a decade of experience in the nonprofit sector, and her work with organizations navigating burnout, trauma-informed practice, leadership strain, and culture change. It was designed specifically for nonprofit workplaces, where mission commitment, emotional labor, constrained resources, and community need often overlap.
The Thrive Profile™ draws on established research related to burnout, psychological safety, and trauma-informed workplace practices. Its burnout spectrum is adapted from psychologist Herbert Freudenberger’s five-stage model of burnout and aligns with the World Health Organization’s framing of burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
Tool Background & Development
The Thrive Profile™ was not developed in isolation. It has been refined through input from people with expertise in organizational psychology, trauma-informed supervision, nonprofit leadership, and nonprofit worker experience. This feedback helped shape a tool that looks beyond individual coping and examines the broader workplace conditions that influence whether workers are surviving, coping, or thriving.
The Thrive Profile™ consists of 56 core survey items across three interconnected levels of wellbeing:
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Individual Wellbeing: workload, stress, coping, energy, boundaries, and sustainability
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Team Wellbeing: supervision, communication, psychological safety, team support, and work-life alignment
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Organizational Wellbeing: leadership priority, workplace culture, and wellbeing policies and practices
The tool has also been strengthened through use across a growing nonprofit dataset. The 2026 Thrive Profile™ Nonprofit Worker Wellbeing Report reflects responses from nonprofit workers across 21 participating organizations, with 850 workers invited to participate and an average response rate of 78% across the dataset.
To support stronger interpretation, the national report applied descriptive statistics, correlation analyses, regression models, ANOVAs, t-tests, and other statistical methods to examine patterns by wellbeing level, age, tenure, role, and organizational conditions.
Our Values
Worker-centered
The Thrive Profile™ begins with the lived experience of nonprofit workers.
Data-informed
The assessment provides structured insight to support reflection, decision-making, and action.
Systems-aware
The tool looks beyond individual stress to examine the conditions shaping wellbeing.
Trauma-informed
The approach recognizes the importance of psychological safety, trust, choice, context, and care.
Action-oriented
The goal is not measurement for its own sake. The goal is to help organizations move toward more sustainable workplace practices.
Part of a broader worker thriving ecosystem
The Thrive Profile™ is part of a connected ecosystem of work focused on nonprofit worker wellbeing:
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Worker Thriving Co. houses the national report, public data, and sector learning.
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ThriveProfile helps nonprofits, funders, and consultants bring the assessment into practice.
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The Brilliant Lead provides broader consulting, facilitation, leadership development, and organizational support.
