Unprecedented is a commonly used term to describe our current moment. The uncertainty and the sense that we’ve never been through anything like this before only adds to the unease bordering on sheer terror that we all feel.

But none of this is entirely without precedent. The so-called Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 offers cautionary examples and some cause for hope as one considers the rapid return to normalcy by 1920. My son has been sharing quotes with me from Pox Americana, an account of the smallpox epidemic of 1775-82 and the quarantine measures that were imposed in New England (quirky family, I know).

We’re nonprofit leaders, not epidemiologists, of course, so while we might worry about the pandemic, there’s also an imminent existential threat facing the communities we serve and the organizations we lead. Annual galas are being cancelled, user fees are evaporating, and our donors are feeling as economically squeezed as we are. We need not look back a century or two for precedent—the Great Recession of the last decade has hardly receded from memory.

A Private Battle

In 2008, I experienced a collision of personal and professional existential threats in a ten-month period from which I am still recovering and learning. I became the CEO of a regional youth workforce development organization in July 2008. At the beginning of October, a routine medical checkup revealed that the lymph nodes in my neck and chest were abnormally enlarged. Two CT scans and a biopsy in early November led to a diagnosis of mantle cell lymphoma, a rare cancer with an 18-month mortality prognosis. Luckily for me, the results of a five-year clinical trial in Scandinavia were published eight days before my diagnosis showing a 75% survival rate for patients under 65 years old (“I’ll take that door, Monty.”).

I endured six rounds of chemo, a stem cell transplant, and a month of isolation in a hospital room with a lovely view of the Charles River followed by a month of quarantine at home. I was into manic hand washing and social distancing long before it became a thing for the rest of you. I’m writing this 11 years later, so obviously, the story ends well.

A Public Catastrophe

Meanwhile, in the world outside my body, Lehman Brothers went bust, the stock market tanked, and in December, the program officer of a foundation that accounted for about 55% of our annual budget rode the Acela up from New York to break the news that they were pulling our grant because their endowment had lost more than half of its value in the market collapse. I started my first round of chemo the day after that meeting.

While going through those six chemo rounds, I led a painful analysis of our nonprofit’s programs and finances, considering the best way to shrink the budget without killing everything my new colleagues had spent years building. We ended up closing half of the organization’s 23 program sites and laying off 60 percent of the staff in three months. That story doesn’t end nearly as happily as my cancer story did. While the organization’s New Hampshire sites endured and rebuilt, the rest of the organization atrophied and died within two years.

Lessons for 2020

As the nonprofit sector confronts another annus horriblis, I think there are hard-won lessons learned from both the last recession and my time in cancer quarantine that are worth revisiting. What did we do right, and what would we do differently, knowing what we know now?

How To Manage Through A Recession

It’s usually worse than you think. Whatever your worst case scenario is, cut 10 percent more and you’ll probably have your floor. Human nature abhors considering a truly awful scenario, but the only way you can confront the fear and come back from it is to name it and face it unflinchingly. Build a range of scenarios from awful (you go out of business) to better than awful and then determine (a) how you’ll know if you’re in a particular scenario and (b) what you’re going to do if you are.

Incremental isn’t going to do it. Again, it’s normal to want to peel back a bandage slowly, hoping that you’ll spare yourself or the patient some pain. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have closed half the sites of the nonprofit I was leading. I would have cut back to 20% and tried to rebuild from there, with more capital in the bank to run the remaining programs well and give us enough time to ride out the downturn.

Tell the truth. Happy talk is empty talk, and your audience will see through it, immediately or eventually. It’s better to acknowledge the risks in your plans for the future and the pain of present. Ask your stakeholders to assume those risks with you, and be prepared to reward them if the risks pay off in the future.

Nobody is interested in your pain. While you may find yourself crying in the car, you will need to hold it together in front of your staff and board. Their grief and fear of the future will be at least the equal of yours, often with far fewer personal supports than you will have at the top of an organization.

Do the right thing because it’s right, and don’t expect to be thanked. We used the exit grant from our funder to give laid off staff three months’ of pay before they had to file for unemployment, a decision that I have never regretted. While some appreciated the gesture, most were more focused on their own uncertainty about the future and some were angered not to have been among the staff we retained after the cutbacks. We didn’t do the right thing to be thanked, we did it because it was right, and because I wanted the people we kept to see how we treated those who were leaving.

My story isn’t a hero’s journey out of Joseph Campbell. I took a set of awful personal and professional circumstances and I endured them. The lessons that I learned, both the failures and the successes have served me and my clients well in ten years as a nonprofit consultant. We will suffer in the next year, but I am confident that we will endure, and my hope is that we will learn something that serves us through the next trial. Come to think of it, perhaps that is the hero’s journey.

Up Next: How to Manage Yourself Through a Quarantine