Read, Listen, Watch, And Use To Design An Impactful Closure

Things to read, watch, listen to, and use to design your closure

Tools

Workbooks & Guides

When We Fall Apart – A workbook about endings from the fine folks at Interrupting Criminalization
Sensing An Ending Toolkit – a toolkit for nonprofit leaders to help decide, design and deliver better organisational endings by our friends at The Decelerator
Considering Closure – a companion to the Sensing and Ending Toolkit (by Stewarding Loss/The Decelerator in UK)
Staying Close to Loss – a set of tools for tending to organisational cultures so loss is explored as part of life (also by The Decelerator folks!)
Strategic Sunsetting – guide from nonprofit consultancy Propel
Nonprofit Dissolution: What to Do When Closing the Doors – great NPQ article that goes pretty deep into how bequests are handled when the mission is no longer pertinent or the organization no longer exists.
Dissolving a Nonprofit Corporation – guidance from the National Council of Nonprofits
Closing the Doors – guidance on closure and strategic merger from The Power of Possibility coalition (includes a handy PPT deck!)
Closing Chapters, Opening Futures: Working with Philanthropy for Better Endings (The Decelerator) – a quick, practical guide for organizations to maximize the support (financial or otherwise) from their networks of funders.

Checklists

Good Endings: A Cheat Sheet for Boards and Staff – checklist from Katya Fels Smyth of WellLeaving. who also successfully closed her own nonprofit in 2025.
How to Create a Checklist for Nonprofit Exit – guidance from the directors of Water for People, a global water access nonprofit that frequently has to face exits from certain projects or areas once they’ve hit their targets.
Winding Down: A Risk Management Checklist (Nonprofit Risk Management Center)
SeaChange Capital’s compendium of wind down resources

Articles

A Good Death: In Search of Developmental Endings by Doug Reeler of South Africa’s now-defunct Community Development Resource Association(this downloads a Word .doc file)
Considering Closure – An article from members of the Sustainable Collaboration Network in the US
Good Endings: Reimagining Success Beyond Organizations – the story of the Full Frame Initiative’s careful and considered sunset from the perspective of its fabulous executive director
Working at the Sharp End of Programme Closure: EveryChild’s Responsible Exit Principles (intrac for civil society) a great breakdown of how EC devised guiding principles for executing a deliberate and humane wind down
If We Care About Justice, We Have to Care About Endings – As executive director Katya Fels Smith closed Full Frame Initiative, she shared her emerging thoughts about closure and endings. This article is just one of many great pieces!
Ending Well: Evaluation of EveryChild’s Responsible Exit Process (intrac for civil society) – this is the “retrospective” of the process outlined above
Exit To Open – guidance for preserving and sharing your digital assets in the wind down process
Graceful Degradation Survey: How Do We Manage Digital Humanities Projects Through Times of Transition and Decline? – Nowviskie & Porter
Social Movement Stages: Emergence, Coalescence, Bureaucratization & Decline
Exit strategies and sustainability. Lessons for practitioners (intrac for civil society)
When Sunsetting Your Nonprofit is the Hardest (and Best) Option by Kristina Gawrgy, Monisha Kapila, Angela Romans (former board members of the now-defunct AchieveMIssion)
Exit Strategies – by Geoff Revell former of World Bank and WaterSHED, a deliberate 10-year initiative to expand access to clean water in Cambodia (THIS IS A FANTASTIC, AMAZING READ!!)
The Art of Exit by The National Endowment for Science, Technology, and Art: In Search of Creative Decommissioning
“Sufficient Death Preparedness Correlates to Better Mental Health, Quality of Life, and EOL Care” (Journal of Pain and Symptom Management
Why We Need Ritual: Inviting Ritual In (from the INELDA website)
Zombie Missions: Organizations that should close but won’t – A great post from nonprofit leader Vu Le’s fun and irreverent blog
Life, Death, and Zombies: Revisiting Traditional Concepts of Nonprofit Demise by Elizabeth A.M. Searing of University of Texas (wherein I learned that “unlike countries with lists of deregistered charities (e.g., Canada), the United States (US) does not have a definitive source of information regarding nonprofit demise”)
The coming storm: A stronger civil society future needs us all to embrace better endings today by Iona Lawrence of The Decelerator
There Is No Better Time Than Now for Philanthropy to Spend Itself Out of Existence – Co-written by the executive directors of the Stupski Foundation, The Compton Foundation, and The Whitman Institute
We Need a Strategy for Spending Down – written by the folks who sunsetted The Chorus Foundation
On the Power of Sabbaticals and Intentional Endings – a post on the the Community Foundations of Canada website from an ED who decided to put her whole organization on sabbatical
Why One Charity Chose to Wind Down While Still Flush With Cash – A Chronicle of Philanthropy article about Full Frame Initiative’s decision to close
Tune In, Spend Out: A record of peer learning with time-limited grantmakers – In Autumn 2024, a group of UK trusts and foundations gathered together for some structured learning and collaboration work focused on their similar-but-different plans to ‘spend down’ their available resources.
The Myth of Perpetuity in Foundation Strategy – A pandemic-era article arguing for spend downs as a way for philanthropy to place some big bets
The Whitman Institute used their blog to share earnestly and do brutally honest thought leadership for the wider field of philanthropy.

Books

Listens

Camille Acey of The Wind Down (me!) on Conscious Nonprofit Endings and Closures (The Leaving Well podcast)
Ask a Death Doula
Anarchist activist Cindy Milstein on grief, mourning, and building institutions for care in anarchist movements (The Final Straw Podcast episode)
Death doula and lawyer Alua Arthur – How Do I Live Presently and Die Gracefully? (New Day Podcast episode)
Sounds of Mourning – Amazing sounds from mourning traditions around the world

Videos

Closing well. Composting our network when it’s time – a discussion with The Decelerator’s Louise Armstrong and Sophy Banks of Grief Tending (YouTube)
Making the Hard Decision to Sunset a Nonprofit Organization – a session with the folks who supported the wind down at AchieveMission (session was part of the Upswell 2021 Nonprofit Summit, see their blogpost above in the articles section)
The world doesn’t need another new non-profit | Kirk Bowman | TEDxPeachtree
How to Kill Your Charity (Yes, That’s a Good Thing): Eric Stowe at TEDxSeattle – Eric is the founder and director of Splash, , an international nonprofit dedicated to clean water for kids living in urban poverty. Splash is keenly focused on making sure their projects last by “killing their organization” in every country they work in and building the local businesses and support that will replace their charity for the long haul.
Poverty, Inc. – From TOMS Shoes to international adoptions, from solar panels to U.S. agricultural subsidies, drawing from over 200 interviews filmed in 20 countries, Poverty, Inc. unearths an uncomfortable side of charity we can no longer ignore.