Say you’re a young person who wants to build a better world. You go in for interview after interview at an anti-malaria nonprofit, touting your passion for their mission, your ability to multitask, your formative experiences in Model UN. You do consulting tests like explain how many nickels you can fit inside a Chevrolet. It matters because they say it matters. You’ll never actually put the nickels in the Chevrolet. Anyhow, you’re hired.

A week later, you’re ushered into the office where you’ll spend ten hours a day building that better world. Your desk is squeezed between two metal filing cabinets in a dusty beige room in an expensive American city. Dozens of similar cubicles are framed by management offices, the opaque walls of which stand between you, Associate Ordinary Sad Sack, and the honor of a window view. A fluorescent bulb flickers above your head.

Meanwhile, people you came up with — your college friends, your fellow Model UN-ers — are posting pictures of themselves stretched out in fuzzy chairs, or drinking mimosas in the boardroom, or skateboarding from meeting to meeting. They’re app developers, or client services managers, or production “ninjas.”

Surely they have no inner life, you mutter to yourself. I’m rich in spirit, you remind yourself. If you repeat this mantra while rhythmically stroking your cracked phone screen, an ephemeral calm eventually settles in.

As the narrative goes, service work and suffering go hand in hand. Want to be a priest? Forget sex. Want to be a nonprofit worker? Forget perks. You don’t need a standing desk. You don’t need free spirulina smoothies. You don’t need to do yoga at the office or work from home when your kid is sick. You just need to put your head down, spend ten minutes booting up your piece-of-shit Dell desktop, and prepare for your annual review where you’ll cross your fingers for a $600 raise.

Fine. But is there anything wrong with wishing that doing good sucked slightly less?

RResults for Development, a D.C.-based organization focused on alleviating poverty, is one of a growing number of nonprofits that have begun looking to Silicon Valley for solutions to the suck.

R4D has grown rapidly, from 15 people in 2008 to a $26 million dollar organization today with more than 120 staff members. They work in 55 countries, on a range of projects that includes providing childhood pneumonia treatment in Tanzania and conducting secondary education research in Colombia. And they’ve recruited the kind of mission-driven people tech companies and consulting firms would salivate over.

But until last year, their office was centered around one of these cubicle-infested beige rooms. When R4D outgrew their space, they decided the time was ripe for an office that would reflect their stated values: entrepreneurship, flexibility, and autonomy.

The new space is simple, sweet and chic, like Google on a dorm-room budget. Architects encouraged R4D to put the management offices up against the window; they refused. “We maintained a few single offices, but they’re much smaller than they were,” said Gina Lagomarsino, R4D’s CEO and president. Instead, their large windowed space is used as a conference room, to eat lunch together, and to host parties. Lagomarsino’s office is the same size and style as all the others: it’s in the inner corridor, with transparent walls, and a door she leaves open.

The majority of staff members now use standing desks, and share a couple of “wurf boards” — surf-board-esque wobbly platforms that make the wurfer work his or her core to stand upright. The cubicles are gone, replaced by airy spaces dotted with beanbag chairs. Staff members can chuck beanbags into a tie-dye cornhole board, and shoot basketballs into a freestanding hoop.

R4D is one of many nonprofits adopting the playful, modern aesthetic or plush benefits of Silicon Valley workspaces. A promotional photo from Charity:Water’s Soho office shows a young white man working on a sofa with his sneakers propped up on the table in front of him, Macbook on his lap, a pile of pizzas to his side. The only indication he works for a clean water charity rather than a tech startup are the bright yellow jerry cans conspicuously propped against the wall behind him (jerry cans are used to carry water in many developing countries). Employees working in international lending platform Kiva’s loft space receive a one-week paid trip abroad after being there for a year, 50 percent off orders at their local sushi spot, and free massages.

Lagomarsino is quick to balance her pride in R4D’s people-first approach with an emphasis on restraint. “We don’t have some kind of palace,” she says. “There’s always this worry that someone’s going to say you’re spending too much money on this office space, that it’s nicer than the one before.” In apparent response to the same concern, Charity:Water’s website pre-emptively notes that “every piece of beautiful art, furniture, and technical infrastructure at the office, as well as every event, has come through donations.” (As a charity organization, ostensibly everything comes through donations, but they put a fine point on this nonetheless.)

Many nonprofits, squirming under the frugal thumb of foundations, donors, and independent data collectors, have been reluctant to invest in the kind of spaces and employee care programs that corporations have guiltlessly adopted. But that’s starting to change.

DDonors have historically encouraged nonprofits to cut overhead — money they spend on administration, staff salaries, and office costs — and spend more on programs for the communities they serve. This sounds reasonable, in theory; in practice, it drives the suck. The pressure to keep overhead low has meant that the nonprofit worker is often stiffed on his or her salary, ends up doing the work of two or three people, struggles with faulty administrative systems, and works in a poor office environment. A 2011 survey found that 86% percent of nonprofit workers did extra work that was not expected of them for their job, and a full 30% considered themselves burnt out.

In 2013, the three most influential nonprofit watchdog organizations — GuideStar, BBB Wise Giving Alliance, and Charity Navigator — banded together to start a campaign called “The Overhead Myth.” And earlier this year, they stopped extracting and advertising the percentage of nonprofit spending that went to overhead costs, acknowledging that so doing had contributed to a “nonprofit starvation cycle,” driving staff exhaustion and attrition.

According to Clark Kellogg, a professor of design thinking at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, “It’s a fallacy that spending money on the where and the who is a bad thing…. We’re all so skittish about the funders. But what funders and bosses are looking for are courageous, well-articulated solutions, and we’re too afraid to make that happen.”

Since the watchdog organizations changed their metrics in early 2016, nonprofits have enjoyed a little more wiggle room to upgrade their spaces. But if you manage an organization that’s strapped for cash and stucco ceilinged, how do you get started?

RRapt Studio is a prolific, high-touch design studio that’s created offices for large companies like LinkedIn, Trulia, and GE. But project lead Louis Schump believes you don’t need a serious budget to create a gracious, functional space; in fact, he has found that frugality can be both visible and stylish.

“The tendency towards opulence, or the concept that nice things are expensive things, is partially a side-effect of working in a capitalist society,” he said. In the case of the scrappy delivery startup Postmates, Schump worked with a small budget. Because messengers were coming through the office for quick pickups, he arranged stools instead of desks. As the company is cell phone-based, he used the money that could have gone to heavy electrical wiring and put it toward low-cost, high-impact aesthetic touches.

Before any attempt at redesign, workplace designers advise an organization’s staff members to get clear on their values and their mission. (This is the architectural equivalent of Carl Sagan’s saying “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”)

“It’s really essential to build internal alignment before any change is made, and to shed light on why it’s being done and how. If you just pull the rug out from under people it can be very unsettling,” said Kate McCoubrey Judson, a senior strategist at SYPartners, an organizational consulting firm.

“Some of the toughest team management situations I’ve seen are when people have sat at a desk for years and they have their cat calendar and the school photo of the kid aging over time for 12 years,” she added. But the modern hot-desking model — in which staff share communal desks without strict seat assignments — means the cat calendars have to go.

It’s critical that each staff member is on board with the overhaul before it happens; hastily-made or poorly-communicated changes can foster resentment, undercutting the very point of the project.

Judson says that a cheap, simple way for a nonprofit to get a better sense of its space is for staff members to create a Google doc, and have each person record what they’re doing and where they are three times per day for a week. This will create a heat map of how the office is used, and what kinds of spaces are most popular for what purposes. For instance, Judson has found many a staff members in open-plan offices having important conversations in bathrooms or taking calls in closets.

This is a nod to something Schump emphasized in our conversation: just because a certain kind of office design is en vogue does not mean it will fit your organization’s needs.

At facilitation sessions with cash-strapped nonprofits, Judson would gather staff members around a table to brainstorm a redesign of their space using Legos. She’s also used visual cards to prompt them to consider what their work environment feels like now, and what they want it to feel like. For those in a real pinch, Judson suggests simple space hacks like stacking pillows to absorb sound, or using fabric, cardboard, and rods to create private areas. Mobile installation is “not too precious,” she said. “You can just move it and change it as you want.”

And yet, there’s an upper limit to how much creativity can be cultivated inside even the most elegant office. “If I were to ask you to think about the most inspired conversation you had over the past year, I can almost guarantee you it didn’t happen in your office,” said Kellogg, the design thinking professor. “Those key moments that are life-changing, those epiphanies that do change the course of organizations and, ultimately, society, are not happening in the boardrooms. They’re when we’re out in nature, or with people we really care about. I don’t really know what to do with that.”

In other words, spiffing up your office space is an effective way to fight the nonprofit suck. But implementing flexible policies that allow staff members to work outside their office space may have an equally powerful creative benefit.