I did not expect to be here at the end of the year. At the beginning of this year, I had (yes) purchased this domain and (yes) set up this website and (also yes) started offering the hotline. However, in the back of mind I figured I would end up back at a tech job, and this whole thing would be something I’d maybe do in my free time on evenings and weekends. Instead, I am here in December having spent the whole year working almost entirely on growing this business.
Before the year is out, I wanted to share a little of what I have learned, what I have achieved, what I have struggled with, and also show gratitude for the people that have showed me a lot of care and support over this very unanticipated year.
Listening Is The Main Thing
Product-Market Fit unlocked! People understand and value what I am offering. I have talked to a LOT of new people this year and everyone I talk to immediately understands the value of making endings better, hospicing what isn’t working, and gathering up the learnings and skills and people to nurture whatever comes next.
The free “hotline” calls started out as a way to validate my idea while also exploring how I could be of help to people in the sort of mission-driven organizations I would like to service. I have been bowled over by people’s willingness to be extremely raw and honest with me about their closure journey, and they have been grateful for someone neutral and non-judgmental to lend a listening ear. For those who don’t know me personally, I can be a bit of a chatterbox, so these calls have been an opportunity to train deeper listening and just be present.
People aren’t looking for me to fix things or offer solutions or point out silver linings, they mostly just want to be heard. Many times people have told me that the “nuts and bolts” of shutting down are “the easy part”; they reach out to me — a total stranger! — because they don’t have anywhere to go with all the feelings, anxieties, regrets, resentments and sometimes even sighs of relief that might be kicking up. Sure, if I can point out some things they might want to consider, all the better, but the listening is the thing.
The Field Doesn’t Have This Figured Out
Part of my hope in starting The Wind Down was that I would find out if anybody else had the challenge of “delivering better organizational endings” all figured out. Over the year, primarily through facilitating the Compost and Hospicing community of practice, I have been blessed to connect with so many BRILLIANT souls who all have one piece of the puzzle, but I — so far — only have a few peers who are holding civil society closures as their actual work day in and day out, and the great majority of them are across the pond in the UK rather than here in the US.
I’ve even had conversations with seasoned folks who’ve spent their entire careers in civil society and here they are asking little old me for suggestions and advice! This is all mostly unexcavated terrain! No one really knows much of anything! We are all slowly fashioning it together!
As political and socioeconomic climates continue their twists and turns alongside (and even hastening!) environmental collapse, I can only imagine this work becoming more urgent and hopefully better funded. As Ginie Servant-Miklos says in her new book Pedagogies of Collapse,
“This leaves us with two alternatives, in my view: deliberately dismantle thermo-industrial civilization now or let it collapse in an uncontrolled manner later. The temporal distance between the two choices is probably only a matter of one or two decades…The reason we are advocating for controlled degrowth is because the alternatives are much, much worse.” – Ginie Servant-Miklos
Sunsetting At Scale
I started the year thinking I might eventually want to work one-to-one with nonprofit teams who are in the process of closing, but the more I connected with leaders carrying out and/or contemplating closure, the more I began to feel like the real work is to work with groups of groups, speak at conferences, engage social enterprise incubators and accelerators, and maybe even write a book?
I am not saying I would flat-out refuse to work directly with just one group, but the issue feels urgent and one-to-one feels too slow. Some days, I feel like I want to run out and stop people before they start again! Or at least warn them to not get starry eyed about “new shiny”.
As Lee Vinsel and Andy Russell said in their pivotal Aeon article Hail The Maintainers
“In formal economic terms, ‘innovation’ involves the diffusion of new things and practices. The term is completely agnostic about whether these things and practices are good. Crack cocaine, for example, was a highly innovative product in the 1980s, which involved a great deal of entrepreneurship (called ‘dealing’) and generated lots of revenue. Innovation! Entrepreneurship! Perhaps this point is cynical, but it draws our attention to a perverse reality: contemporary discourse treats innovation as a positive value in itself, when it is not.” – Lee Vinsel and Andy Russell
Ushering The New AND The Old
When I threw myself into this work, I just sorta blanketed the spaces where my various communities hang out. Mailing lists, Slacks, Mastodon, LinkedIn, and also lots of random, cold emails to people who I admired and hoped I could talk to. I have been bowled over by how responsive so many total strangers were.
I have meet soooooo many super fantabulous people this year; some have become actual factual friends, while others who have just kept incessantly bringing my name up to people in conversations. Along the way, I have also had to (in true Wind Down-fashion) close some doors. Since I spent the first quarter of the year thinking I was going back to work in tech, I was juggling a lot of identities and jumping back and forth over a pretty “high fence”, but once I decided The Wind Down is what I do now, I knew I had to duck out of my “old life”. It was with a heavy heart that I logged out of some of those Slacks and unsubscribed from a bunch of those mailing lists. I also unfollowed many, many old tech colleagues and replaced them with people who were working in facilitation or in the impact space or at foundations. I also — just last week — loaded up over a decade’s worth of books I’d collected from my old field and put them, on-by-one in a local free library box down the street. I hope other people enjoy them! I now have space on my shelf for all the nerdy books I have on death and endings, ha!
I was going to start naming the names of the people I am grateful to/for here, but I am afraid I will forget someone and start kicking myself. I feel like the real ones all know and have been profusely thanked. The one thing I will mention is that I am a member of IMMA Collective, a global community of mission-driven solopreneurs and they have been in my corner all year long. They are the people I go to first with all my challenges, frustrations, confusion, and wins. It has so amazing to be building my own business but not even for a second feel alone. Thanks to Lilli and everyone who makes IMMA IMMA. #fuckitmode !
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