Author: camilleacey

Closure consultancy is a very new field; so new, in fact, that we haven’t even agreed on a name for the practice. Some people call themselves organizational development consultants while others are transformational doulas. Whatever the name, the focus is still clear: we want to help you in the sometimes-messy process of closing up shop. Here are some specific areas we can help you think through:

• Communications Support – when you make the decision to close down, you will undoubtedly have a lot of internal and external people to communicate the situation to. Your consultant could help you think about how and when to message the upcoming changes.
• Project Management – there is always a non-trivial amount of paperwork associated with closing down a project or organization — be it closing down bank accounts or dealing with the post office or tax authorities. A good closure consultant can make sure you are thinking through every entity you deal with and how you will close up accounts with them.
• Digital Archiving – What do you want to do with your websites, your digital documentation, and all the email addresses? Will you carry on paying to keep a memorial site up or do you want to work with another organization for ongoing stewardship?
• Physical logistics – Will you need to move out of your office? Get rid of physical assets like desks and chairs? Your closure consultant may be able to help you think through selling or donating anything you will no longer need.
• Emotional Support – Most importantly a closure consultant is someone who has been through closure before and knows how many different emotions it can bring up. They will be there to support you and be a reliable sounding board as you navigate this difficult time.

When Is The Right Time To Bring In Help?

One of the things we in the “closure” space are trying to advocate for is an ongoing awareness of endings. The best thing you can do at any stage of your organization’s development (and most preferably at the beginning!) is familiarize yourself with the Sensing An Ending toolkit. There is very sound guidance there about how to design an organization that is receptive and equipped to have a healthy and conscious ending — even if that ending may be decades or centuries away!

• Early – Even if you are in good financial and organizational strength with no ending in sight, bringing in a closure consultant (like me!) to speak with your organization about the realities of endings and how to be ready for closures is a great way to instill a sense of preparedness and consciousness in your team.
  However, if you are starting to get an early sense that things may be winding down, that is also an excellent time to start engaging with someone who can work alongside you to start designing a compassionate and careful closure.
  
• During – If you’ve already started closing down and realize you are in over your head or just need an extra pair of hands, don’t fear! You can still pick up the phone and reach out for help. Accepting overwhelm is a good first step to being receptive to the kind of help a conscious closure consultant can provide.
  
• After – Even if the closure is complete, it still can be beneficial to sit down with a consultant to make sure there is nothing you forgot and also just to support you as you write your story of what happened and where you want to go next.

Other Professionals You May Need

While bringing in a closure consultant can be a big help in managing all the moving pieces of a closure, they are no substitute for some of the other roles that may be critical to a successful ending. These professionals include:

• HR administrator
• Lawyer
• Tax accountant/bookkeeper
• Moving company
• Webmaster

While no amount of spending on conscious closure can undo mistakes made at the start or throughout the life of an organization, a consultant helping you navigate the choppy waters of organization can help you avoid doing additional harm and walk away feeling proud of all that you accomplished during the life of your organization.

If you are interested in how The Wind Down can help, contact us!

(this article is inspired by Why You Should Consider a Death Doula, a LifeHacker article by Anna Lee Beyer)

Morning Closure Affirmation 

by Iyanla Vanzant from One Day My Soul Just Opened Up

Today, I surrender, I release, I detach from every person, every circumstance, every condition, and every situation that no longer serves a divine purpose in my life.
Today, I realize that all things have a season, and that all seasons must come to an end.
Today, I realize that all things fulfill a divine purpose to support my growth and evolution as a unique and noble expression of life.
Today, I realize that there is no end. There is only now, and this now begins a divinely new season and purpose in my life.
Today, I choose a new beginning over the pain-filled memories of the past.
Today, I choose a new season, filled with purposeful thoughts and activities.
Today, I choose to close the door to yesterday and open my mind, my heart, and my spirit to the blessings of this moment.
In this moment, I am filled with light. I am filled with joy! I am filled with love that brings divine understanding!
For this I am so grateful!
And so it is!

Let Me Remember

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime
CLOSURE begins by telling the truth about what I feel.
I am entitled to honor what I feel.
When one door closes, another door opens.
Whatever you repress will become stress.

“A good consumer off-boarding experience should be…connected consciously to the rest of the experience through emotional triggers that are the measurable and actionable by the user. It should identify and bond the consumer and provider together in mutual responsibility.” It’s aim should be to neutralise the negative consequences of consumption. It should be concluded in a timely manner and avoid.”

– Joe Macleod, Endineering: Designing Consumption Lifecycles That End As Well As They Begin

Though Joe Macleod’s book Endineering is focused on designing consumer offboarding experiences, it offers ample information and much sage advice that is universally applicable to those of us thinking about designing ends of services, projects, and organizations.

While the importance of bringing thought and intention to closing down mission-different work is immediately obvious to some, others might struggle to grasp why time, money, and human effort should be given over to any enterprise that is no longer growing. In the hope that more people — especially those in the position to fund and implement — understand the importance of conscious closures, I compiled this short (and non-sequential!) list of critical things that can be lost in bad endings.

Knowledge Loss

Whether an organization is in operation for a hundred years or even just one, the collective efforts of all the people whose time and energy went into making the work happen also represent a wealth of knowledge that can likely be of great use to the public at-large and more specifically to the sorts of people that might want to carry forward the mission of the organization in the future. In the haste to close down, organizations often don’t take the time to properly store and or share that data in an easily accessible place or pass along critical information to partner (or even former competitor!) organizations who might urgently need it.

Without a focus on the gathering and long-term stewardship of such information, the blog posts, reports, and white papers you lovingly published eventually fade away from hard drives, while passwords and logins to shared clouds are lost. If you don’t discuss who will carry on renewing the domain and maintaining the hosting, credit cards get cancelled and websites expire. The breadcrumbs that would lead the next generation in the right direction are blown away in the wind.

Relationship Breakdown – Internal

As mentioned above, an organization or project is its people. When endings are mishandled or carried out without critical communication, transparency, and consideration, the bonds that held you together can quickly break down. If people feel their livelihoods or identities are threatened by the end of the organization and they don’t feel as though they have a say in the how or when of that end, they can quickly get burned out and checked out.

According to the Areas of Worklife Model, one of the key contributors to burnout is the feeling of unfairness coupled with feeling as though you have no voice. While the group may be winding down, the same people that kept it open are often critical to making a successful landing. When they aren’t on board, the ride can be bumpy and many people may be looking to make a quicker than desirable exit.

“When you do not have the opportunity to express what you are feeling at the close of a relationship, the relationship is incomplete…without closure in any relationship, the people involved feel incomplete…[it] evokes a tremendous amount of emotion that must be released. The release results in closure. When you do not release, you wonder, you hurt, the whys go unanswered and eventually create anger and fear. More important…when there is no closure, you miss the lessons and the blessings.”

– Iyanla Vanzant, One Day My Soul Just Opened Up

Relationship Breakdown – External

In addition to the breakdown of critical relationships within the initiative, poorly-considered endings can also alienate partners and funders.

As projects grow, the network of organizations they are a part of can also continue to grow and deepen. When the difficult decision to close down occurs, it is important to identify and communicate with all the people that make your work happen. In many cases, the community in which you operate may be quite small and if people feel as though they were “the last to know”, they may feel snubbed or insulted.

Failure to loop in external stakeholders can also result in lost opportunities to archive knowledge, shift initiatives to other more thriving organizations, or even just share your story with other people in the space. In addition, alienating external partners and funders can result in the loss of critical contacts who could support you in the development and funding of future endeavors.

Reputational Damage

While the name you built up during the time you were in operation may not live on, a bad ending can severely tarnish the legacy of your efforts and everyone affiliated with them. This is particularly critical if you are shutting down a project but the umbrella organization will continue on. Treating employees, members, or service recipients callously can make a bad ending worse as you struggle to juggle the operational aspects while fighting a battle in your community or even in the media.

Service Vacuum

If your work involved providing critical support to vulnerable populations, a bad ending can mean that people go without access to crucial resources. In 2012, UK NGO EveryChild made the decision to shut down operations and transfer funds to a new international alliance that they felt could more successfully achieve EveryChild’s mission. EveryChild described itself as “an international development charity working to stop children growing up vulnerable and alone. Working with local partners we keep children safe when they are alone and at risk. We protect children in danger of ending up on their own by keeping families together. And we get children back into a safe and caring family, wherever we can.” As part of the process of winding down the charity, the programme management team came together to define principles that would help them make hard decisions about how and when to shutter operations to ensure that they did as little harm as possible.

In the report Working at the Sharp End of Programme Closure: EveryChild’s Responsible Exit Principles, Lucy Morris, formerly of EveryChild and now of INTRAC (the International NGO Training and Research Centre) outlines the three guiding “responsible exit principles”:

1. As far as possible, ensure the work we have done is sustainable – this could be continuation of services or lasting changes in children’s lives.
2. Ensure that exit does not have a detrimental effect on the children and communities where we work.
3. As far as possible, ensure that expertise and momentum for
   change in the country is not lost.

As she goes on to note, “Having exit principles helped our partners to understand the rationale behind decision making and provided reassurances that EveryChild would not suddenly withdraw.”

Loss of Traceability

Finally, if your organization employed people or involved anyone as a volunteer or intern, those people may want to list your organization on their resume and CV. However, if there is no trace of your organization in the digital space, it can lead to an awkward situation where the veracity of the position can be called into question. Websites that lead to 404 error messages and dormant LinkedIn pages can look dubious.

Additionally, if someone is simply interested in gathering information about the organization — perhaps for a research project or a new initiative — and no one can be found, a critical opportunity may be missed to breathe new life into your old works.

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This is by no means an exhaustive list of things that can go bad at the ending of a project, but it should give you a good idea of what you might want to think about and plan for. If you are interested in exploring what a good ending could look like for your effort, definitely reach out!

“We discovered that exits can also be creative moments, and can generate new opportunities in terms of staff development. They can also catalyse critical thinking about development, and help people to focus on which activities will be most sustainable in the long-run rather than continuing with the status quo.”

– Lucy Morris, EveryChild’s Responsible Exit Principles (Praxis Note 70) © INTRAC 2015

It All Started With Death

One of the things that was a stumbling block for me in launching The Wind Down was what language to use to describe what I was doing. For the first few years when I was just talking to my friends about the idea, I used the language of “organizational death doula”.

In the circles I am in, people have a pretty good sense of what a birth doula is, and the idea of a death doula is also coming into greater awareness. So I figured that adding the word “organizational” would not be such a far leap. However, I soon found that people thought I was planning to offer death doula services that an organization could make available to their staff, almost, say, as an employee benefit. Things were definitely getting lost in translation!

Furthermore, I think the language and idea of death more and more began to invoke something too sad, dark, and negative. The more time that I spent learning about not only death but endings and closure, the more I realized that there was an opportunity here to lift the “heavy cloak” surrounding the winding down of projects and organizations and destigmatize the reality that most things do come to a close.

So I decided to move away from death.

At A Loss For Words

Many of my friends in closure in the UK have been using the language of loss and grief to speak to these ends. From Stewarding Loss to Grief Tending, there has been a bit of a focus on sorrow and the idea that something is being taken away. While loss — loss of job, loss of purpose, loss of attachments to community and coworkers — is undoubtedly likely to be a part of the experience of closure, I didn’t want to put too much focus on negative emotion.

If I want people to want to come to me (and eventually, hopefully pay me!), I want to provide a sense that it isn’t all just tears and gloom. So, despite my deepest appreciation for the work that those other groups are doing, I decided to steer away from that language in talking and thinking about the practice I am trying to build here.

Tending To What Is

Love is a willingness to attend to what is already occurring with a newfound attentiveness.”

– Nicolette Polek (from Heavy Traffic magazine III)

The loose group that my above-mentioned British friends have pulled together is meeting regularly under the moniker of Practice of Composting and Hospicing, and a lot of our discussions — such as the one by the folks working on peat lands! — circle around cycles in nature. We talk about planting seeds, nurturing, growth, recession, death, repurposing, and rebirth as possible parts of a healthy natural or organizational cycle. Additionally, I felt the idea of hospicing evoked a sense of care and a succumbing to the natural end of something.

So in thinking about more appropriate language for this project, I gravitated towards the ideas of intentionality, care, focus, attention, and an overall willingness surrender to what is happening, while also thinking about what you and your participants might leave behind. I like the idea of shifting from death, doom and gloom, and sadness to the possibilities that emerge when we bring in care, creativity, consciousness, and maybe even celebration to these ends.

This remains a work-in-progress, but I feel really good about where I have landed in terms of the overall “elevator pitch” for The Wind Down. It aligns very much with where my friends from Stewarding Loss have now landed with their Decelerator project — we are all focused on slowing down unto a stop with intention rather than a jarring slam of the brakes. It is an exciting time to be working in closure…. and, with that, I draw this post to a close.

In October 2022, I traveled to the UK to visit family and see some sites. During that time I also had the great opportunity to meet Louise, Cassie, and Iona of Stewarding Loss, an organization focused on supporting civil society organizations through mergers and closures. At that time we talked briefly about bringing together more people who have been thinking about and working on how to structure more graceful exits.

In January of this year, Cassie published a lengthy Medium post in which she shared (among many things!) the intention to create this community of practice, and in April 2023, the Practices of Composting & Hospicing group had its first official meeting. We meet once a month with a different, fantastic facilitator. Topics have included:

• death and the collective imagination;
• lessons learned from the closure of charity organization EveryChild (great report on that here); and
• peatlands and death (by the team at RE-PEAT)

In October, I had the great pleasure to present the what and why of my own developing project. The full slide deck is here, but the TL;DR is below.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been through a lot of bad, sloppy organizational endings and the more I went through them the more I began to feel like there must be a better and more caring way to end. I have been craving tools and language to help people inside and outside of the group, project, or organization understand:

1. what was going on and why
2. what was going to happen next
3. where everyone was in the process

In addition to the practical aspects of a shutdown, there are all the messy emotions — confusion, anger, fear, grief — that often accompany and ending. I am thinking of this as the linear/structured stuff on one side and then the amorphous/”squishy” stuff on the other. These two sides, of course, can and do often bleed together — and that isn’t a bad thing! At the center of this work is a desire to destigmatize, normalize and maybe even celebrate ends as part of a healthy organizational lifecycle. Stop being embarrassed; show us your ends!

In the presentation I shared about two ends that probably had the biggest impact on my thinking in this area. The first was the end of The Ada Initiative (TAI). TAI was an advocacy and education organization for women in open source, open culture, open knowledge, and sci-fi/slash spaces. It was in operation from 2011 until its shocking closure in 2015.

I served as an advisor to the organization from May 2014 until June 2015, when I stepped down to concerns about transparency. In August 2015, a surprise, clandestine board meeting was convened after which it was announced to the world that TAI would be closing down. Many people in the space were devastated to hear this decision has been taken despite the ongoing need for the group’s work and more than ample funds in the bank.

In the haste to close, a lot of voices were silenced and many relationships were irreparably broken. There was no discussion (to my knowledge) of seeking someone else to run the organization or transferring the funds to another group that could carry forward the mission. The group did, however, leave a respectable archive of resources up on their webpage underneath the announcement of their closure (more on closure announcements in a future post!).

The second closure that really impacted me was that of the Lefferts Community Food Cooperative, a small community food shop that I helped to open in my community of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn here in New York City. The shop was volunteer-run and, as such, could only be opened a few days a week. From the outset, we struggled to keep it sufficiently staffed with volunteers and stocked with enough different food items to keep people interested in patronizing the store. We juggled the challenges of staying in compliance with city health and safety requirements alongside concerns of making our (meager) rent and controlling pests.

After 3 years of service to the community, the store could no longer last and the board made the tough decision to close down. However, while keeping volunteers around enough to keep the store open was a challenge, ensuring there were enough volunteers to close the store down proved even tougher. The closure and loading out of foodstuffs and fixtures dragged on for months, during which the community was uncertain whether the store was open or closed. The metal rollgate outside the store that had been painted with the vibrant store logo remained on the outer rollgate for years after the store finally, completely shuttered — a reminder of the promise of fresh, healthy food in a community starved for good options.

Bad endings have so many things in common. They often feature:

• feelings of confusion, misdirection, upset
• untied/loose ends
• knowledge loss
• broken friendships and bad feelings

So when I think about good endings, I expect that they will hopefully deliver the opposite, if not something even better. I don’t think a good ending will nullify “negative” emotions but I do think they can drive up alongside with happier emotions such as pride in the work that was accomplished, gratitude for the relationships that were fostered, and hope for the future of the overall mission.

A strong ending should have structure and transparency around that structure. An organization that wants to end its work well needs to have an understanding of who all the stakeholders are in the organization’s work (Joe MacLeod of AndEnd talks about “personas“) and an open line of communication to them all. An ending is not usually going to be a democratic process, but keeping people in the loop goes a long way towards fortifying relationships.

Finally, organizations that are dying/have died have a lot to share with others not only about how to keep an organization alive and healthy, but also (in the spirit of composting!) nutrients that will seed new efforts. When an organization can take the time to close down with intention and shared knowledge, they leave behind breadcrumbs that will lead the next generation in carrying forward critical mission-driven work.

In order to move my work forward, my asks at the moment are for:

• More stories about all sorts of organizational endings
• Opportunities to work with (or even just observe!) groups that are going through endings
• Connections to people who can help me think through options for digital knowledge sharing/ long-term data stewardship

Over the past two decades, I’ve been a part of many companies, campaigns, and organizations that eventually came to an end either due to inertia, attrition, acquisition, or conscious decision. No matter how or why it comes apart, the process of ending a formation that you have given your time and energy to is difficult and emotional, and there is almost never any formal space to collectively share and process the feelings of guilt, grief, fear, and sometimes even relief that come up.

Recognizing that gap, I am now in the early stages of developing practices for how we might better facilitate the end of organizations.