Our work is guided by a single question:
What is required of us to serve the public good?
People enter public interest work because they feel called to help repair the world, yet the institutions charged with serving the public often struggle to sustain the very staff who serve within them.
Washington, DC is home to the largest concentration of government workers in the country: 38 percent of the District's workforce is employed by federal, state, or local government, and nearly 50,000 federal civilian employees work within the District itself.
The challenge is especially acute on Capitol Hill, where our work is focused: 51 percent of all congressional staffers left in 2025, the highest turnover year ever recorded, compared to a turnover index of only 23 percent between 2021 and 2024.
If any company lost half its workforce in a single year, it would prompt urgent concern. Yet this level of turnover is now occurring across the institution responsible for supporting the legislative branch of the United States.
Ecumenical Commons formed to resist the growing burnout crisis eroding the workforce on which our already-weakened social and democratic infrastructure depends.
How we started
When they arrived on Capitol Hill in 2023, Ecumenical Commons founder and Executive Director Kelly Crouch was disarmed by the irony of how values-driven public interest work was being performed by exhausted people.
Kelly, fresh from the London School of Economics and Union Theological Seminary, noticed smart, driven young staffers buckling under moral injury and burnout while navigating profound ethical and emotional burdens with little support. At the same time, as a legislative staffer, Kelly saw that only a narrow band of economic ideas made it through the filter of lobbyists, think tanks, and universities shaping what the Hill actually sees.
Kelly knew that a wider world of economic thinking existed outside that filter, ideas that centered human dignity and wellbeing rather than market outcomes alone, and that staff deserved better support in navigating these consequential issues. In both cases, the people were what was being overlooked.
Ecumenical Commons grew from these intertwined concerns: caring for the people doing the work and expanding the moral imagination behind the work itself. We believe that workplaces dedicated to the care of the public should be defined by purpose, not exhaustion, and that amid rapid democratic backsliding in the U.S., it is imperative that we commit to sustaining the people called to work for the common good.
If we want healthy democratic institutions, we must invest not only in building pipelines of talented people into public service, but also in helping them remain grounded, imaginative, and connected to the deeper sources of meaning that called them to the work in the first place.
We are an organization rooted in Quaker values and practice and informed by a plurality of wisdom traditions. Ecumenical Commons has been directly incubated and supported by two faith communities in DC: Friends Meeting of Washington (FMW) and Church of the Holy City (CHC).