Since April 2024, I have been the facilitator of the Practices of Composting and Hospicing community. Next month, we will be joined by the team behind the Tending To Endings card deck, a tool to help groups and individuals design and have better endings. The cards are inspired by concepts from nature and are absolutely…

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These past few weeks have been rife with the abrupt shuttering of government programs, firings of thousands of government and nonprofit employees, and the long tail. knock-on effect on everyone from aid program employees to dock workers and rural farmers. The topic of endings has been front of mind across the globe, so people have…

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I was honored to speak with my dear pal Naomi Hattaway on her fantastic Leaving Well podcast. It’s relatively short and I hope you will listen! The link is here, and it is available on ALL the places where one can find podcasts.

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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,…

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As part of my work facilitating the Practices of Composting and Hospicing community under the umbrellas of Stewarding Loss and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Emerging Futures Initiative, I was invited to participate in this collection of writings from amazing facilitators and world builders. My piece is here and the entire edition is available to download.

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As part of my work developing The Wind Down, I have been bookmarking the websites of sunset nonprofits for the past few years. As my list grew, someone suggested that maybe we needed a “museum of closed nonprofits“, (hat tip, Kyle Soo) so I went ahead and created one. And then a few months after…

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In talking to people on the hotline, I meet them where they are in their closing journey. While some of them are certain they are closing, others are entering a period of deep discernment around the future of the group. When I hear a large amount of uncertainty, I will often suggest that they consider…

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Hi friends! I started a newsletter. It’s called Closing Remarks and it’s gonna be a semi-regular (maybe twice a month?) roundup of links related to non-profit closures and the assumed connection between longevity and impact. You can see the first issue and sign up for it below or here.

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One of the major goals of The Wind Down is to help shift the discourse around non-profit endings so that the immediate assumption isn’t that the organization or project closure is the result of loss or failure. Not only is it too often the case that outsiders hold this belief, sometimes people inside the organization…

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Though closures of projects in the civil society/non-profit space are nothing new, it still can be a bit tricky to know how to be supportive and show empathy when someone is going through this life-changing experience. A few friends of mine recently went through personal tragedies and as I was thinking about how best to…

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These last few months of building this practice have been some of the most satisfying of my life. With every passing networking call, I feel a stronger sense that what I am doing is needed, and every closure hotline call fills me up with an almost-overwhelming sense of purpose. The other day, as another hotline…

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This month has been positively revelatory. I have had so many dynamic conversations with people who are/have been thinking through what it means for projects to come to an end. Here are some of my biggest takeaways this month. AHA! #1: There Are So Many Things That (Need To) Close! When I initially conceived of…

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