Donato Tramuto, a global health activist and co-founder of the TramutoPorter Foundation, spends most of his year speaking with school leaders, nonprofit boards, and health organizations. He says a consistent pattern emerges: leaders are being asked to do more with less, and traditional command-and-control leadership 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.”
Through his work with the Foundation, formerly the Tramuto Foundation, Tramuto has observed three shifts building over several years. The first is that burnout is no longer confined to frontline staff; it is increasingly showing up among those who supervise 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 rather than incidental. Tramuto has run the Foundation’s scholarship program since 2001 and says the biggest change is how deliberate mentorship has had to become. It used to happen by accident, through a hallway conversation or a chance introduction. 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.”
He advises organizations to name specific points of contact rather than a general open door, noting that a vague invitation to “reach out anytime” rarely gets used, while a named person does.
The third trend is that compassion is getting measured, not just talked about. Tramuto says the language of compassionate leadership has caught on faster than the practice. Many 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, and National Compassionate Leadership Week, observed the second week of September following approval from The National Day Calendar, as attempts to make the idea concrete rather than aspirational.
Tramuto suggests organizations pick one measurable commitment tied to compassion this year—a scholarship, a recognition program, a mentoring structure—and put a date on it. A commitment without a date tends to disappear.
He does not describe these trends as a crisis but 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.”
The Foundation will continue using its scholarship program, the Compassionate Leadership of the Year Award, and Compassionate Leadership Week as 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.
