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.
- Reflections from a Strategic Sunset – When Student Experience Research Networkannounced in September 2022 that it was beginning a strategic sunset, many of its partners were both surprised and disappointed. SERN had become a valuable field-builder and a go-to resource for the growing body of evidence showing that how students make meaning of their experiences in school – and whether they feel respected as valued people and thinkers – influences their learning and well-being
Checklists
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
Videos
