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 beautiful and inspired.
Curious?
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 been reaching out to basically say, “Wow, everything is closing! This must be your moment!”
It is so very much NOT my moment.
This is basically everything I don’t ever want to see happen. Cruel, callous ejections of people that THE WORLD STILL NEEDS — all while we have more than enough money to keep them working — is nothing like what I prescribe or want to occur.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I am a person who stands very far to the left — miles away from the left of the left of congressional chambers, and no great fan of the state or representative of representative democracies. But you know what I detest more than any of that? EVIL. My opposition to humans bringing misery to other humans or the planet solely for their financial and political gain (or because they think it is a fun game!) is at the heart of my political convictions and also at the heart of the work I am continuing to develop here at The Wind Down.
In a previous post, I wrote about what is lost when things close down poorly. Just to recap, that list includes:
In yet another post, I also wrote about reasons why projects and organizations close. Having to close suddenly usually happens when an organization suddenly runs out of money, finds itself in a dangerous situation such as an actual warzone, or when the/their work finds itself in say a hailstorm of controversy. While the institutions are under attack, I’d say it’s not quite the same as a warzone situation. An artificial warzone has been created, which, ironically, is now endangering the lives and well-being of many people in actual zones of war, disease, and famine and likely contributing to their increase.
Needless to say, these closures represent the kind that are not prominent on my BINGO card. It is just about the nightmare scenario of total failure and loss, and the consequences are likely to reverberate for years — if not decades — to come.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou
So what do I recommend when you are in the absolute worst case closure?
Well, first of all, let me say that I am IN NO WAY implying that the people in this situation have any responsibility to do anything more, this is just if people are at loose ends and want to explore how to maybe make a splash of lemonade out of lemons. Feel free to do nothing but plot revenge, if you wish. Lord knows these devils deserve it. But for anyone who wants to continue on with me and this thought experiment. Here are a few ideas*:
SCENARIO 1: THINGS ARE BAD, BUT YOU STILL HAVE YOUR JOB.
If you can, back up contacts, important (non-proprietary) documents, and start taking some of your desk stuff (if you work onsite) home. Also, I know a lot of people end up using the work computer as the personal computer, but if they demand you give it back you will lose a lot. So, look into getting your own device or backing up bookmarks and whatever else you need to the cloud. Get phone numbers of some of your co-workers and give them yours.
Ask around for names of labor lawyers now just in case. If you can get a free consult just so you know your rights, take it!
SCENARIO 2: THINGS ARE BAD, AND YOU’VE BEEN TOLD YOU MAY SOON BE LET GO.
See above and do everything listed there. Take home EVERYTHING (if you work onsite). Wipe your computer of anything personal NOW.
SCENARIO 3: YOU’VE BEEN LET GO BUT THE ORGANIZATION IS STILL OPEN
If you weren’t able to get your physical things, first try to reach out officially to see if they can put your things in the mail. It sucks because they may miss stuff, but it can be better than nothing. If they refuse, you can see about getting a lawyer to write an official letter. If you can, hold off on signing your separation paperwork until you got your property returned.
As for documents, you might try reaching out to a trusted co-worker via phone, email, or LinkedIn. DO NOT write them on work email. You might jeopardize their job and make things worse for both of you. If that person can safelyget documents to you, they should download and send via a non-email address. Sharing via GDRive or some other work system is NOT THE MOVE.
SCENARIO 4: YOU’VE BEEN LET GO, EVERYONE WAS LET GO, AND THE WHOLE ORG IS CLOSED.
Find the others and get creative. If there is legal action you can take, take it! I particularly love that the former employees of (now-shuttered) 18F swarmed on a website the day they were fired and had it stood up in under 4 hours.
The other day, I attended a really beautiful, early morning, grief circle hosted by Fearless Project for people that worked with and through USAID. It was valuable for people to just see each other and not feel alone. I heard so much confusion, loss, fear, grief, love, and resilience. People are disappointed and heartbroken, but no one was talking about giving up or going corporate. However, I was moved by how much they still wanna find a way to do the do-goodery stuff that drew them to charity and public service.
What did I miss? What have you seen that has been effective in salvaging a bad ending?? Lemme know in the comments!!
*GIANT DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer. None of this is legal advice. I HIGHLY recommend you get a lawyer if you are in a bad situation in any organization. Lawyers have saved my professional bacon many times, and I can’t suggest enough that you work with them when things get (or even feel!) bad.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 !
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.
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 that, I started my newsletter Closing Remarks where I cover all sorts of pauses and endings in the public sector.
Although a news article or an email from a friend often alerts me to the impending closure, I often have to visit the organization’s website to gather details that help me color the story. As such, I have perused the websites of hundreds — if not thousands! — of shuttered and shuttering civil society organizations.
Even when an organization is open and in good health, a website often has so much work to do. It needs to be a place to share your message, collect donations, entice funders, spread news, attract job candidates, and often much more. While a well-funded and growing group can often turn to a professional to craft their messaging and build their website, the work and language of drawing that work to a close in a meaningful way usually requires a slightly different mindset and skillset. No more is the focus on search engine optimization and flashy graphics, now the site needs to be a time capsule, a signpost, and a monument.
In my travels across the internet of wound-down, well-meaning organizations, a checklist has begun to form in my head of critical elements that need to be added, removed, or finalized on a website before the lights go out. My hope is that these building blocks can help you erect a tombstone site that you can be proud of for years to come.
Why did your group start and when? Inquiring minds want to know! With the cessation of your operations, your About page really should be a History page instead, outlining the when, how, and what of your organization. This is your time to brag about your accomplishments! Not only will this be informative for curious souls like me, but it can also be a resource for your former employees who might be able to share the information there as they look for their next roles.
One foundation that did a beautiful of sharing its history is the Kendeda Fund; their “visual garden” features numerous highlights from its 30 years of giving.
You will also want to add information about why you decided to shut down, what went into the decision, and maybe any advice or valuable learnings for groups that might find themselves in a similar situation. By being as transparent as you can about the wind down, you:
The 2024 conclusion of the annual Allied Media Conference was preceded by two “in chryalis” years of pause followed by one final conference and a loving writeup of why the Allied Media collective decided now was the time to end it.
If your group provides services to a public that is likely to be somewhat left in the lurch by your disappearance, you should also do your best to point people in the direction of organizations who they can turn to, to fill the gap. You will, of course, need to try and make sure those other agencies and/or nonprofits have the capacity to help by connecting with them to let them know the situation. You certainly don’t want to overwhelm another group who might already be on the ropes, but trying to provide a soft landing for those that relied on you goes a long way to protect your reputation and abide by your mission until the very end.
When the administrators of The College of St. Rose in Albany, New York realized they would have to cease operations after nearly 80 years, they realized that the first order of business was ensuring the well-being of current and past students. They created and shared a “Teach Out Plan” to help everyone understand the timeline and their options for either transferring to a new university or obtaining important records that they might need in order to pursue future work and/or educational opportunities.
Over the life of your work, you will likely generate many resources, reports, and tools that could be helpful to whoever comes along to drive forward the mission. As part of the effort to “tombstone” your website, you will want to think about how and where you might want to organize and place these digital resources so others can get their hands on them.
As activist collective The Rules worked to put a bow on their efforts with meticulous archiving of all their resources, they decided to upload their open source “culture hacking” tools to public code-sharing site GitHub so that others could use and improve.
The Rules gets bonus points for putting those tools up in a more public place than their website so they are protected against the possibility of their own website going down. Websites going down because of unpaid web hosting bills is a sad but true fact of nonprofit endings.
While this likely won’t be easy, when done with time and care, turning your site into a tribute to the work you did can be transformative and healing. As each team member contributes to finalizing the website, you can move closer to crafting a narrative that will be valuable to many in the future.
If your organization needs support building your tombstone site or simply supporting you through a closure, don’t hesitate to reach out!
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 the possibility of pausing operations.
Pausing operations can give the organization time to:
Over the years, I’ve collected a few examples of inspirational nonprofit pauses. Here are a few I really like.
In 2018, Allied Media Conference decided to take a year (2019) off to think about how they wanted to move forward after 20 years of operation. As part of the “chrysalis” period, they decided the conference would shift from annual to biannual. 2020 was the first virtual conference, with 2022 marking the final gathering.
In 2023, the parent organization Allied Media Projects announced that the conference would be sunsetting.
New Constellations’ Pause
New Constellations is a time-bound global initiative to support transformative community building. They announced their pause in 2024 after five years of operation.
SAALT’s Year of Chrysalis
South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) announced a pause in late 2023. The group offers programs to support new immigrants, gather South Asian American leaders, and develop youth leadership. Their focus during this time of discernment is to try and tackle caste-ism in their ranks.
While every pause is unique to the group and context, there are a few elements that make for a considered and successful pause period. Here are the aspects I have observed.
Structure the Pause
Determine Operations Level
Before you declare that you are in an organizational pause, you will need to define what pause will actually mean for your group. It can vary depending on the size of your organizations and the nature of you current commitments.
At Allied Media, their pause period did not mean bringing all operations to a stopping point. They operate as funders, facilitators, and fiscal sponsors, and that work needed to go on.
In another case, a community nonprofit noted that a possible pause could mean simply letting the existing programs, which were in partnership with a local school, run through the end of the school year and then not renew for the coming school year.
Your team will need to decide what can be stopped completely, keep running at a low hum, or remain functioning “as normal”.
Plan Some Activities
You will also need to develop arough outline of what you want to actually do during this time. Will you do a staff or board retreat? Will you have strategic board meetings?
You should consider connecting with a facilitator to explore how they might hold space for your group to have these necessary tough discussions. While the executive director or board president may be the person that normally facilitates gatherings, bringing in outside help gives them the permission to put their energy into group in a new and necessary way.
The pause is also a good time to consult with your funders and strategic partners. These people could have useful guidance for you, and in some cases, strategic partners might be able to help take over some of your programming or even be able to facilitate a merger or acquisition.
Set A Timeline
In addition to agreeing on how much to tune down operations and what you want to do during this time, you will also want to time-box your pause. It important to give yourself a reasonable deadline to make decisions. Aim to set a timeline that is sufficient to accomplish the tasks you laid out in the previous step with a little padding to accommodate the normal rhythms of life.
Communicate the Pause
Once you’ve determined the rough outlines of your pause, you need to let everyone know what is going on. In many communities, word travels fast so it’s important to make sure that internal people know fairly early on and don’t feel blindsided. You also need to communicate this shift to your fundraisers, your partners, and the greater public. Make sure to put a notice and explainer on your website and any social media your organization uses.
Note: You don’t have to use the word “chrysalis”!
Reporting Back
During and after your break, sharing what is going on/ went on can help foster transparency and trust within your community and the larger ecosystem. The challenges your organization is facing are likely not unique to you, and the lessons you learn can offer up a path forward to others who are facing similar situations. Update your blog and social media to let everyone know what’s up!
After Allied Media ended its chrysalis year, it shared its takeaways in several places, and it even cited conversations from the chrysalis year when they decided to transition their executive director two years later.
Take Action
Finally, after you’ve exited your own organization’s “cocoon”, it will be time to embark on actions to either spin back up operations to the new level, make staffing changes, articulate a new mission, or shift your focus to winding down operations. While you will have reported back via public channels, the same people who you communicated the pause to will also need to be informed of what the plan and direction will be moving forward.
While there is power in the pause, it is important to note that the pause is not a time of inaction, it is a time of active inventory and introspection. You will need to be available to meet, assess, brainstorm, and have deeply honest conversations about where you are now, how you got there, and possible paths forward.
If you don’t have a critical core of people on board to do this, it might be a sign that a considered closure is a better way forward. Saying “paused” when you mean “closed” can cause confusion and engender mistrust amongst your funders, partners, and the community you serve.
If there is only a little bit of gas left in the tank, I’ve found that it is better used to give the organization a respectful sunset. Using those final pushes to tie up loose ends, can ensure that you leave behind an honorable legacy and useful breadcrumbs for whoever picks up the work in the future.
(For more on this topic, check out the article “Permission To Pause” by The (now-defunct) Whitman Institute)
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.
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 are guilty of it too. People will dissuade themselves from even considering closing because things are “going well”.
The truth of the matter is that there are all sorts of reasons for an organization to stop existing, and the more people know about them, witness them, or take part in them, the more they can (hopefully!) move away from a knee-jerk negative reaction to sunsets. Here are a few reasons I’ve come across along the way.
This might be my favorite closure reason. If an organization accomplished what they set out to accomplish and can neatly close down, what a win for everyone! One of my favorite examples of this is the We Charge Genocide campaign that ran from 2014-2016 in Chicago. Inspired by the 1951 We Charge Genocide petition to the United Nations, they were able to raise funds to send 8 young Chicagoans to Geneva to charge genocide against the United States for protracted police violence.
Upon return they created an informative report and organized in their communities for a short time before slowly winding down in 2016. They came to charge genocide, they did, and then they stopped!
Another fantastic example is the WaterSHED project, which was created as a 10-year initiative to help expand access to clean water in Cambodia. The goal from the outset was to support capacity-building on the ground and then leave. And despite many challenges , they left when they said they would. WIN! (Seriously, read former-ED Geoff Revell’s article about it. It’s so good.)
Social change work is not one size fits all. If the organization is too small or too big to do the work, it might be time to either change shape or shut down. In addition, sometimes an organization — or an organization’s headquarters — are too far away from where the service is needed or can best be delivered. One example that relates well to this is EveryChild’s closure.
EveryChild was a UK international development charity formed in 2001 that operated field offices in Eastern Europe and the developing world. In 2011, the organization intiated a series of strategic changes that devolved power to local agencies and eventually resulted in the creation of a new international alliance, Family for Every Child. Thus the decision was taken to close EveryChild and all its field offices from the period between 2013 and 2016, and leave the work to the people who could more effectively make an impact in the lives of the children and families they wished to support.
“Concerns about lack of sustainability may be financial (loss of funding or a growing cost base), a loss of key people (staff, volunteers or trustees), a lack of shared direction, recognition that others doing similar things, there are duplications or inefficiencies, or a growing concern that your work is no longer viable or relevant in a changing wider context.”
– Sensing An Ending: A Toolkit for Nonprofit Leaders to help decide, design and deliver better organisational endings by the Stewarding Loss Collective
Adjacent (and maybe overlapping?) with success is the idea that the organization just isn’t needed or won’t work anymore. Many initiatives and groups in the civil society space are started with the humble vision of “working themselves out of a job”. Sometimes this happens! And then sometimes the situation on the ground just changes. In this 1999 Guardian article, the writers outline how war in former Yugoslavia quickly put an end to a flourishing network of NGOs committed to growing civic society in the wake of political change. In the blink of an eye, the terrain changed and the groups could no longer function as the vision of a free and flowering Yugoslavia was no longer viable.
Many organizations grow out of the vision of a single inspired leader or group of leaders. Oftentimes when a founder or team of founders decide to step away, they can leave shoes entirely too big to fill. Sometimes it isn’t necessarily the founder, but just a really strong leader who the board struggles or is unable to replace. Stories of such transitions can be found on Naomi Hattaway’s excellent Leaving Well podcast.
So now we are getting into some of the stickier ones. Organizational dischord is certainly at the heart of some pretty epic closures. Conflicts and the inability to functionally tackle them are a big part of what led me to start asking whether these endings could happen better than I’d seen them happen.
One well-documented and notable example of such an ending was UK-charity Campaign Bootcamp’s sunset, which was sparked by difficult and, ultimately, irreconcilable issues around race, class, privilege and power. Campaign Bootcamp, an organization that had been a darling of the UK charity sector was formed to support people in gaining the skills they needed to launch successful campaigns for social change. However, when the change that needed to happen was “inside the house”, the leadership was unable to reach an equitable and just resolution.
Lack of funds is very often a reason that an NGO will shutter its doors. Whether it is a lack of foundation funds, money from individual donors, or tuition related to enrollment (a challenge facing many US universities as of late), cash-strapped organizations struggle to meet the needs of their employees, partners, and the communities they aim to serve. Low funds and inability to cover costs are extremely valid reasons to close up shop.
In a future post, I plan to cover how this sort of ending might be managed, particularly from a fundraising and fundraiser’s perspective.
An organization is only as good as its people and if you can’t hire and retain capable people to do the work, you will struggle to fulfill your mission and realize your vision. Non-profit staff members are frequently overworked, underpaid, and highly prone to burnout. While many non-profits profess lofty values of care, far too often they fail to realize them in their employment practices.
Even when your organization does offer great benefits and a manageable workload, competition for talented workers can be challenging when competing with opportunities in government and private sector. If your group or initiative can’t offer the sort of salaries and/or job security those others can you may struggle to hire the people you need, attract good volunteers, and/or build the capacity to drive forward your mission.
This by no means an exhaustive list. What other reasons have you seen for NGOs to die? Lemme know in the comments!
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 be there for them I got to thinking about how we might show up better for people going through organizational endings.
People often assume an organizational closure is the result of some big failure , blowup, or catastrophe. The thinking is often that there is some salacious story or else some agonizing tale of woe that caused the organization to come crashing down. However, the truth is that lots of groups close for mundane reasons and some even close intentionally and triumphantly (see the story of WaterSHED’s closing as one example).
Rather than getting into the details of the organization, why not meet your friend where they are and check into what is coming up for them. Do they have any immediate needs that you can assist with? Are there any milestones coming up where you might be able to check in with them? Mark your calendar and set reminders to be there for your friend and colleague when and where they actually need you.
The non-profit funding landscape is tricky and getting trickier every day, but you know who likely knows that best? Your friends working at non-profits. Bringing up articles you read about how things in their industry or area of focus are “particularly bad”, is not really going to be useful when they are already face to face with the end.
Part of what lead to the organization’s demise is likely to be related to lack of support from funders and other stakeholders and was often painfully out of their control. Mentioning macro trends when someone is facing an urgent and acute issue smacks of blaming the victim.
NGOs close in so many ways and for so many reasons. In the short time, I have been talking to people about these endings, I have heard stories ranging from the disastrous to the positively jubilant. So when you hear someone’s organization is closing, you don’t need to immediately need to go into condolence mode. Even in the disaster situations there may be people who are excited and eager to move in, and, similarly, even a well-planned, intentional program or project end can have its rough edges. When faced with news of a shutdown, be neutral, polite, and curious.
An organizational closure can bring up a lot of emotions, even when the ending is mostly positive. So it is better not to try and put a “silver lining” on it. Mentioning to the person going through the organization closure that at least they “won’t have to deal with [INSERT ANNOYING COWORKER NAME HERE} anymore” is not particularly helpful. If they bring it up, it is fine to agree with them, but it’s not the most helpful thing to try to put a positive spin on the situation if your friend is not feeling particularly positive about it.
Similarly, you don’t have to try and reassure the person that something better is going to come along. Life is long and mysterious and we don’t know what is going to come next. While it is good to be supportive and hopeful about the future, if the person you are dealing with doesn’t feel like anything good is on the horizon, allow them the space to sit with that feeling rather than trying to divert them because you are uncomfortable with the situation.
If you find you aren’t able to hold space for the big feelings that your friend is holding, you can certainly send this website along to your friend and let them know I also offer free closure calls to people closing or in discernment around closures. I’ve been through it, and I am happy to be a listening pair of ears!
The person or people who are facing down the end are likely struggling with feelings of regret about what they didn’t do or grief for the dreams and goals they weren’t able to achieve. Whether they were part of the founding team or a later addition, people who often pay the “passion tax” to join a mission-driven organization are looking to come away with a feeling that they are making a genuine impact on the planet. When their organization must close — usually due to no fault of an individual employee — that sense of purpose is abruptly wrenched from them.
Why not be the one who reminds them of all the good they were able to achieve during their time in operation? Thank them for their service and remind them that, no matter how long they existed, they did make a valuable contribution. When possible, find examples of other people thanking them for their work and let them know there is likely still more time for them to be of service on the planet.
The ending of any type of project or enterprise is full of various loose ends (no pun intended!) that need to be tied-up. As the final days of an organization draw near, it is often the case that there are fewer and fewer people around to sort out the crucial tasks necessary to completely close out. Why not offer a helping hand? Even if there is nothing specific for you to do, sometimes just being present and bearing witness is enough.
Worries for the future coupled with sadness about the past and present can easily cloud the mind and make it hard for your friends facing closure to focus. Sometimes just being a body double is enough to lift people’s spirits, shake feelings of isolation, and assist in getting them on track.
Alternatively, your friend/colleague may just want someone to distract them from what is going on. Whether that person is generally relieved or even happy the organization is closing or if they are feeling woeful, they may find that the work of shuttering the organization is just occupying too much of their mental space. Take them out for a drink or invite them to a movie to get their mind off work.
Finally, if you’ve been through a closure of your own, do share about it. So many organizations shutter every year (see our Museum of Closed NGOs for some!), and the more we talk about these organizational endings, the more we can normalize the idea that nothing lasts forever and good things can come from people gently releasing their work back into the wilds.
In addition to the free hotline I offer, I also have some self-assessment questions that I suggest people go through with a friend or colleague. You can be that friend or colleague!
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 call was coming a close, I asked the person if they had any questions for me and they blurted out, “So, what are you doing?”
She was not the first person to ask this and certainly won’t be the last, so I figured I had better write this up in the hope that it would clear things up for people — and maybe also (a little bit!) for me.
According to Wikipedia, the idea of a hotline or helpline originated in the early 1950s in the UK as a means for trained, caring volunteers to be available to people who may be in the midst of a crisis. Since that time they have spread around the world to address such pressing issues as suicidal ideation, assault, and drug overdose*.
I came to the idea of offering a “closure hotline” from my friends/collaborators at Stewarding Loss and The Decelerator who have been offering this service to organizations facing closure in the UK for over 5 years now. My hope was that I could use it as a way to: (1) determine whether what I was doing even made sense, (2) start to train myself in deep listening, (3) start to identify patterns in organizational endings, and last but not least, (4) hopefully say or offer something that might help someone else who is struggling with a closure.
Unlike a traditional helpline, I am not here to stop anything from happening. I am, in fact, only attending to discussions of people actually looking at endings. If people are trying to figure out how to save things, I tell them something akin to “come back when you think you are ready to die.”
My role, then, is to listen deeply, probe carefully, and reflect the person and their situation back to them in a way that — I hope! — gives them valuable perspective. So far the response has been deep appreciation.
“So, what are you doing?”
In addition to speaking with people in the throws of closure, I am also chatting with people about endings gone by and also practices of winding down. Some of the fascinating people I have recently met include:
I have also been fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity to take over the Composting and Hospicing Community of Practice under the umbrella of the Stewarding Loss and the generous funding of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Emerging Futures Initiative. I have participated in this group in the past, and I am proud to now be at the helm of strategizing about its future!
Moving forward, I am focused on:
I plan to do this by writing and speaking about closure a lot more and trying to connect to funders and nonprofit incubators to begin instilling a stronger “lifecycle”/systems change focus in activism and movement spaces.
Longer term, I’d love to be part of some sort of ongoing “festival of endings” and bring together people who are looking at this across many different sectors. This is, by no means, a one-human job, but I am feeling increasingly confident about the magnitude of the contribution that I can make.
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.
When I initially conceived of working on conscious organization closures, I was thinking more narrowly about traditional, staid non-profits that do things like provide people with food resources or teach children how to read or whatever. However, this month as I kept chatting with other practitioners, I realized there are so many other organizations that are included here — such as schools, museums, cooperative grocery stores, even jails and prisons! And each of these types of containers have a myriad of laws governing how, whether, and when they can close.
As I think about how I want to scope this work, I am already humble(d) enough to know that there will be no such thing as mastery across such a wide swathe of practices. There are lawyers and accountants and other people who can handle the intricacies of paperwork; that can’t be work that I do. However, I can be part of the team that ensures these things happen! Closure is probably not a one-person job — even for the smallest of closures.
When we are lucky, the idea or realization that the project needs to close comes from internal discernment, but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes the organization will be pushed to close either because of controversy or simply because the community needs to make way for something that will better serve it in the moment.
In one conversation this month, I was reminded of water and how it is sometimes ice and other times steam and other times liquid. It is still made up of the same things, but it shows up differently. Something that was something is hard to make nothing. It can dissipate, but traces remain for a long time….
In another chat, I was made aware that the Rubin Museum in New York City, announced that it would shutter its doors and become a “global museum”. The executive director’s statement expressed the organization’s desire to “effectively use our collection, knowledge, creativity, networks, and financial resources in order to best serve you, the public, for the long term and with the greatest impact.” The world didn’t need them to be a fixed location anymore; so they won’t be!
In his book, Endineering, my pal Joe Macleod shares the idea of the “crack of doubt” from the book Becoming An Ex by former nun Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh. The crack of doubt emerges when a person experiences a dramatic organizational shift and begins to feel the stirrings of burnout. The burnout leads to cuing behavior. If others around the person pick up on the cues, they will often affirm the initial doubts and widen the crack. If the issues that lead to the initial doubts are not addressed, additional events will only further stress the crack until it becomes a gaping hole.
While a crack can spell the beginning of the end for a person working in an organization, it can take many individuals with many personal “widening cracks of doubt” putting pressure on the organization — by either staying or leaving — before the organization’s leadership begins to see that the organization might no longer be viable. The amount of time this takes could be days, months, or even years. And with some organizations’ incredible ability to continue raising funds regardless of internal turmoil, some organizations can keep the lights brightly on despite their otherwise sort of walking dead state in relation to their staff and the communities they are meant to serve.
To those organizations and the people that work in or with them, I quote the great Bone Thugs N Harmony by saying, “See you at the crossroads.” The practice I am building here is not about telling anyone their organization is terminally ill. I am not an organizational Grim Reaper. I only want to work with people who want to work with me. For the others, I am here if and when they are interested and ready.