7 lessons from leading our ending, that might be useful for yours

Written by Zoë Stanton

In November 2022, after 10 years, Year Here stopped delivering social innovation Fellowships and all operations ceased.

The case study (viewed here). is designed to be the ‘how’ of ending Year Here’s Fellowship and operations. Why? Because leading the ending of something is one of the most mysterious undertakings everyone involved had ever embarked on. They want to shed light on their experience so that if you find yourself considering closure, you can gain a sense of what it will involve, how it might feel and how you can do it as well as possible.

Written in 2023 by Zoë Stanton with Shady Bajelvand and with guidance and support from Iona Lawrence and Emily Horton.

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I finished my role as Year Here CEO at the end of last year. As a leadership team, we intentionally choose to stop delivering a well loved, long standing programme and end organisational operations. As a team, we successfully managed a steadily paced, positive close. More here on why and how we ended. It was not the role or ending I expected, but one that I am very proud to have been part of because we were leading with intention, courage, integrity and care.

I’m now six months into a new life, in a new country (which I’m loving) and things feel clearer. Time and distance have created space for further reflection and new perspectives to emerge. It now feels important to share learnings and experiences for a number of reasons:

• To crystallise the learning and insight we have taken into new jobs, organisations and lives.

• To share back to those who may be tussling with similar questions and challenges; considering intentional endings to programmes or organisations they lead.

• For myself, to bring closure to an important experience in my life and to make space for the new and different.

• For Year Here, to honour and capture its past as it moves into an new phase as a community movement.

• We’ve captured a very detailed account of the experience in a case study hosted on the Stewarding Loss toolkit for those who would like to explore in depth. And below we have drawn out 7 key learnings.

7 lessons from leading our ending, that might be useful for yours:

1. Share leadership: Finding ways to share and grow leadership capacity made all the difference to the quality of decisions we took and the emotional experience of everyone involved. For us, this was building in-depth Board understanding and engagement in the business and harnessing co-leadership models at board and exec level.

2. Prepare for the emotions and to hold your space: The emotional work involved in closure was huge. We experienced fear, guilt, anxiety and deep concern for others. While there was plenty of support and words of encouragement, there were people who were, understandably, not comfortable or accepting of the decision. To help, we were clear on our boundaries (such as who you engage with and when) and worked together with trusted colleagues to support each other to retain our boundaries.

3. Doing two (or more!) jobs at once: For large swathes of the closure we were doing two fundamentally different jobs at the same time: keeping an organisation alive to deliver its remaining commitments while also preparing for its operational ending. This was exhausting work and added to the emotional burden. We took care to look after ourselves and others as it was a marathon not a sprint.

4. It’s a wiggly process, not a linear one: We felt like if we made the right plan, the ending would be a manageable and linear process. This is an appealing fantasy. Curve balls, dead ends and blind spots were all part of the daily and weekly journey of closing an organisation. We weren’t prepared for these at the start but became used to dealing with them along the way.

5. Agreeing 2–3 goals, or principles for our ending brought ambition and clarity: Writing down principles helped us communicate a vision for ending. They ensured we were all aligned. They informed the countless decisions needed, often at pace, that upheld our ending.

6. Communication planning is critical: We knew to end well we needed to maintain the trust and admiration of our community, audiences and allies. Exacting communications planning around core messaging, audiences and channels communicating in the right way at the right time was essential to ensure people felt respected along the way.

7. Choosing to proactively and intentionally close allowed us to set a pace and it was a journey of learning and growth: People assume closures are frantic, chaotic, crisis-laden processes which need to be rushed. This says as much about our discomfort around endings and the stigma of failure all too often attached to them, as it does about the endings themselves. Choosing to end enabled us to set our pace and create room for reflection. We found ourselves engaged in a process full of learning, intent and care.

You can read the full case study here. These learnings and detailed case study were written in collaboration with Shady Bajelvand. We are very grateful for the support and contributions of Iona Lawrence, Emily Horton, Zoe Whyatt, Sneh Jani Patel and Cat Drew.

The Decelerator For Civil Society

In the third and final in blog in this series, Iona Lawrence outlines The Decelerator for civil society — a project emerging from the work and learnings of Stewarding Loss since 2019.

Work on the design of the Decelerator will begin in earnest in June 2023. Please complete this form here to let us know if you’d like to be involved, share your experience or just stay in the loop on progress.

“This is structural, if things ended well in the sector, the sector would be healthier overall.” A participant in Stewarding Loss’ research

The Decelerator in a nutshell

After 3 years of Stewarding Loss work to support better endings for 100+ organisations, we are ready to build The Decelerator. The Decelerator would support organisations and individuals to consider and design closures, mergers, CEO transitions, programming ends, and all sorts of endings as part of the everyday life of organisations and inevitable cycles of change in civil society.

Our 5 year plan for a 20 year transformation

Take a moment to think about the accelerators, funding schemes and leadership programmes that help new ideas, leaders and organisations emerge. And how little exists to support the hospicing or transitioning out of old ideas, organisations or leaders and the start of the next chapter.

In the next 5 years we hope to build The Decelerator to offer the practical support civil society leaders, funders and stakeholders at all levels need to open their hearts and minds to endings and be comfortable actively anticipating and designing endings of all kinds as an everyday part of leading ambitious impactful organisations and projects.

We are interested in better endings, for better beginnings. It’s only through attending to endings that we will create the conditions for the emergence of the projects, organisations and movements needed to drive change in these uncertain and complex times.

Why now?

Our communities and societies are in the throes of a sustained ‘polycrisis’. Many of the organisations and movements which exist to drive change and enable human and planetary flourishing are creaking under the pressure of possible endings — of organisations, of projects, of programmes and of business models, of leadership tenures — and are being held back by a lack of support for endings and stigma around them. Uncertainty is on the rise in organisations and we know that the desire and need for good endings is growing.

An initial sketch of how The Decelerator could work…

ONE: The better endings hotline and direct support

We could continue to offer an Endings Hotline — building on the support we have prototyped over the past 2 years. This free-at-the-point-of-use coaching service would offer one-off, one hour coaching support to organisations who might be considering a closure or ending of some kind — from mergers to ends of programmes, from the end of a team to the ending of a leadership chapter.

This could be run as a collective of skilled coaches and advisers who would be paid per hour from a central pot to offer support and guidance. They could signpost to:

• A directory of skilled closure experts and designers: There are many skills consultants but they can be too hard to find for organisations in need of their support. This could be a one-stop shop for organisations anticipating or designing an ending and looking to find paid support to help them to do it well.

• A library of resources: This free-at-the-point-of-use library could host resources and signpost to further advice for organisations looking to close well.

TWO: Peer support via Decelerator Cohorts

We could test Decelerator Cohorts. Cohorts would be small groups of organisations or individuals going through closure at similar times and stages. Organisations could be provided the direct support outlined above, in addition to peer networking and support to build confidence, compassion and courage through the process. Building on the support we offered Campaign Bootcamp and the Small Charities Coalition in 2022 (read more here), the initial two cohorts we have already explored prototyping are:

• Organisations or substantial programmes looking to end well via closure, merger or acquisition.

• CEOs / Founders looking to step down and make space for new leadership.

THREE: Advocacy and influencing

Influencing the practice of regulators, infrastructure organisations and funders: Using the approaches and expertise generated through direct support, we will seek to influence the approaches and practices of critical stakeholders whose work and decisions can promote or impede good endings, better beginnings and regeneration in civil society.

Equipping leaders and future leaders with “ending skills” and confidence: By partnering with civil society leadership trainers and courses, we will put excellence in endings on the list of essential capabilities that leaders need in civil society.

Making the case for farewell funding: Organisations need funding in order to design and deliver good endings. Meaningful change requires resources to be allocated for endings throughout the lifecycle of organisations.

Interested?

Are you an individual with expertise in endings and interested in joining us? We are looking to build a small core team (part time) alongside a bank of associates to design and build The Decelerator. We think a few of the key skills we need include:

• Legal, financial and governance expertise to support with the operational side of endings;

• Emotional and relational expertise to support these components of good endings. Likely some therapeutic / counselling skills;

• Expertise in delivering high quality consultancy services;

• Expertise in partnership development;

• Conflict mediation or resolution experience;

• Influencing and advocacy expertise to ensure that this work impacts wider practice in funders, infrastructure, regulators and wider civil society.

Are you a funder interested in funding core costs to get this idea off the ground? Or perhaps you are keen to explore these sorts of themes in your grantmaking.

Are you an accelerator looking for ways to support your accelerator cohorts to develop the skills and confidence for deceleration and loss alongside acceleration and growth?

Do you have experience to share? If you have experiences of endings to share that could inform this work, we’d love to hear from you.

Are you an organisation that could act as a fiscal and legal host for The Decelerator in its development phase (in exchange for reasonable hosting costs, of course!)?

Work on the design of the Decelerator will begin in earnest in June 2023. Please complete this form here to let us know if you’d like to be involved, share your experience or just stay in the loop on progress.

With The End In Mind*: Building the infrastructure for better endings in civil society

In the second of a series of three blogs, the team behind Stewarding Loss (Louise Armstrong, Cassie Robinson and Iona Lawrence) share a list of all the things needed to create a vibrant ecosystem for better endings in civil society.

*ref: Kathryn Mannix

Previously: Deep within all of us working hard in civil society is the assumption that the brave, bold, ambitious thing is to start something new, to chart uncharted waters, to grow something. But what if it’s time to grow a more nuanced, sophisticated version of what bravery looks like? What if the bravest thing trustees, leaders, staff or volunteers lead their organisations with the same energy, tenacity and vigour whilst holding the end in mind?

In the past month alone Stewarding Loss has heard from infrastructure organisations and charity leaders alike that they can sense a wave of closure and endings is on its way. CEOs exhausted from the past 3 years (and the 10 of austerity before that) are on their knees, recruitment is harder than ever as charities compete with profit making companies to offer workers a good deal, fundraising is tougher than ever in a time of constrained funder budgets — we can’t leave or wait for this to happen in an unthoughtful way, that will create further harm. Support and resources are needed now — this year — to prevent bad endings and — this decade — to start to invest in support for cyclical organisational patterns where growth is considered as readily as endings in the everyday life, leadership and governance of nonprofits.

In the next decade we need a paradigm shift in how endings are considered as part of the lifecycle of organisations across civil society and beyond. Underpinning this shift would be a transformation of mindsets and cultures that is commensurate with the scale of societal transitions underway. Civil society leaders, funders and stakeholders at all levels would have open hearts and open minds and be comfortable actively anticipating and designing endings of all kinds. People and communities would see closures, mergers, CEO transitions, programming ends, and all sorts of endings as just part of the cycle of change. A ‘growth at all costs’ mentality that places survival of an organisation above other considerations would be replaced by a continuous inquiry of loss and endings, as much as opportunities for growth and expansion.

The need for a thriving endings ecosystem

We’ve been considering what components of a thriving ecosystem could look like. One that is on par with the vibrant and supportive startup ecosystem, is itself part of an investment to the seeds of a new system we know needs to exist. The currently absent infrastructure that is needed to support ambitious and transformative work.

To make this ecosystem a reality, there are two key strategic areas that need investing in now::

1. Practical support and proper resourcing for well designed endings

These are based on the support Stewarding Loss has prototyped and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. Arguably many of these things just make good organisational sense, but they are particularly pertinent for those on the cusp or in the midst of a closure, ending or transition.

2. Funders understanding the role they play in endings and shifting their own practice

These shifts are focused on how funding is distributed, how resources shape beginnings and endings in organisations, as well as how funding can entrench things that are no longer working. It also extends into funders themselves considering when they might need to consider endings as part of their own organisational life cycles. .

Elements of a thriving ecosystem

To realise this vision of a flourishing ecosystem, we’ve started a list of elements, practical steps and offers to civil society that would usher in this new era of civil society leadership. This list is a starter for 10. We’re sharing it not because we believe we are the people to bring these to life nor host all of these things — but because we, via Stewarding Loss have been a catalyst for some of this work. This vision will need many people, groups and organisations to both embed some of these things into existing ways of doing things — and in some cases some new infrastructure and dedicated support.

These ideas have been generated through our work with over 100 people and organisations considering and designing an ending: a closure or merger, the end of a founder CEO’s leadership period, the end of a funding cycle, the termination of a programme. These ideas have also been informed and co-developed by 18 different funder representatives as part of a round table hosted on the 20th October to share the experience and testimony of closing of 2 organisations: the Small Charities Coalition and Campaign Bootcamp.

In an attempt to help you see what this work could look like in the real world, we’ve named possible partners or leaders for this work too

Civil society support:

1.Create a (resourced) community of practice to develop practice and learning for those supporting people to end well — Cassie will be hosting a monthly space for those wanting to explore this topic more. If you want to sign up, the first one will be on 20th April at 4pm. Register here.

2. Create a directory of support that those in the process of closing can access and ensure it’s easily discoverable through the channels that civil society orgs already us.

3. Active engagement and meeting with the Charity Commission to update them on where the work is. We spoke to them back in 2020 and a lot has changed since then. It’s important to understand their role in organisational endings.

4. Supporting good endings training- adapting existing Stewarding Loss content for different contexts and make that available to anyone wanting to bring this lens to their work.

5. A closure hotline: first point of call coaching conversations for those thinking about endings — currently offered pro-bono by Iona.

6. Offer strategy framing and narrative building / coaching for those looking to distil and reframe lessons from their endings, our experience is it really helps to have fresh eyes to support you to do this.

7. Mentorship scheme — for those experiencing closure- to be matched with those who have lived it before — taking inspiration from the Rotary Charities Systems Change coaching model.

8. Experiment with a dedicated ‘decelerator’ space for those closing to be held and tended to — bringing all of the above elements together it one place (sing up to hear more / get involved here).

9. Capacity building for infrastructure organisations — who are often the first point of call for groups struggling to make this part of their existing offerings and support.

Supporting groups and organisations to evolve before closing:

10. Normalise conscious constituting — don’t assume legal organisations are needed and are the only way to do the work and access resources.

11. Invest and make space for designing healthy operational structures and cultures needed to deliver on equity and diversity ambitions that an organisation may have — Read more about the Campaign Bootcamp closure story for why this is so key.

12. Enabling upstream governance transformation and the capita for groups and organisations to evolve, before they have to close — the Transformational Governance learning cohort and community are one of the groups who are exploring this.

13. Transforming boards — opening up board conversations about succession, and endings with a format/toolkit for supporting people to have these conversations — work with the Young Trustees Movement, Association of Chairs and OnBoard to do this. Or experiment with a group of funders willing to prototype this.

14. Care-ful /radical HR Lab — a focused and time bound space to develop the templates and operating policies fit for the 21st century/ that centre people and care, alongside legal work. Our experience shows that the constraint of legal requirements and fixed policies relative to relational approaches that feel appropriate create lots of tension at the end of organisations. Beyond the Rules are doing some brilliant prototyping of parts of this and groups like RadHR are paving the way for more.

15. Continue to socialise the Stewarding Loss tools and canvas that are focussed on supporting organisations to pay attention to relevance and purpose as an ongoing strategic enquiry.

Collective spaces

16. Listening and sharing sessions for people looking to explore the language and practise of talking about endings out loud- like Death Cafe meets Spaces for Listening, but for civil society. Places that bring the skill and holding for an emerging community of grief tenders to the fore.

17. For people who’ve come to the last steps in their organisational ending. A ritual where their last testimony is borne witness to by those in the ecosystem for whom the stories, experiences and seeds of the lessons will live on (naturally making sure this isn’t performative or extractive) — we prototyped this with a recent event where the Small Charities Coalition and Campaign Bootcamp had their stories witnessed by an influential group of funder representatives.

18. A ritual for your ecosystem — marking the end of the organisations journey, with those you’ve journeyed with and will continue to work with — the equivalent of a funeral for the organisation, like Small Charities Coalition closing event.

19. A list of people and groups to work with if you want to design a ritual or memorable moment/experience for your organisation — groups like Community Rituals accessing the burgeoning grief tending community or freelance facilitators who hold space for groups.

20. There are learning groups gathering around the book Hospicing Modernity which offers a range of activities for shared enquiry into civilisational endings. Or the Life x Death Huddle hosted by Christina Watson kicking off in May.

Wider advocacy: Communications / narrative shifting work

21. A campaign to shift the taboo around endings being a bad thing and the need to move away from a growth–at-all-costs mentality.

22. Work with sector press to do a series that challenges the negative frame around closures and offers alternative perspectives.

23 A high profile book- to bring focus to the topic and open the dialogue/conversation about the importance of this topic — Malkia Devich-Cyril is writing a book about Radical Loss.

24. A curation of stories and experiences from those who have experienced closure — an equivalent to the book ‘With the End in Mind’ by Kathryn Mannix, but going far beyond human endings.

25. Find new framings for endings that suggest how being well-practised in them is important for many things e.g climate preparedness and rehearsing loss that might come from different aspects of the polycrisis.

26. Tracking how the narratives around loss, death and endings are shifting overtime. Louise has started a substack publication Living Grief: Living Change to explore this.

Research

27. A closure tracker / index of endings, research that demonstrates the scale of the need and tracks organisational closure trends — like the NCVO almanac but for endings. Spotting trends and insights into where further support might be needed.

28. Research into what can be learnt from the startup ecosystem and what that means for the ending ecosystem.

29. Research and learning from other industries and sectors that have and are experiencing closure e.g. failed startups, mining communities, obsolete technologies, fossil fuel industries.

30. Research into the role of founders and founder syndrome, the difficulty of letting go and how that correlates to organisational closure and endings. Supporting people to leave roles well as Naomi Hattaway does.

Where investment and funding is needed

31. Moving beyond project and restricted funding towards more unrestricted funding in movements, communities and organisations, but ensuring unrestricted funding is seen as being ‘alive’ — skilled practices of adaptation are crucial for core or unrestricted funding.

32. More cross sector collaboration to invest in un-constituted groups.

33. Funding the field: developing a new model for funding and investing in new infrastructures for this work. Paul Hamlyn Foundation have seeded this work to date, who will follow?

Funder practices to support this

34. An intro session for funders about designing endings well and ways to open up a conversation about why this matters both internally and with partners — we prototyped this with EsmeeFairbairn in Nov 2022. Could one of the funder networks like the Funders Collaborative Hub offer this to those they work with as the first place we tested the ideas with funders back in 2020.

35. Develop a short training/learning offering (of 2–3 sessions) with practical application — something that ACF, the Environmental Funders Network or Ariadne network might want to instigate.

36. Philea’s new Philanthropy in Transition Lab that will focus on ending’s as an important area for funders to pay more attention to. It’s happening on March 23rd and 24th.

37. A cross funder action learning set on where endings are showing up in their work.

38. Start to explore what good exit strategies for place based work looks like — Local Trust, LocalMotion and Place Matters are all starting to explore this.

39. Practising ending grant relationships well.

40. Prototype good endings for programmatic and collaborative work. Gill Wildman from Plot Studio has prototyped some work in this space.

41. Pay attention to the trends and practices associated with a foundation spending out and down.

42. Funders considering what mergers or closing could look like for themselves.

43. Dream about what the next models for organising funding and investments and what community wealth building could be and look like.

Bringing all of this to life will itself take a rich and vibrant ecosystem of people and practice and resources committed over the long term. Naturally there are pockets of practices and people already doing some of these things,some which we’ve referenced — others we’re yet to know about . We need to further grow and nurture this capacity for civil society and beyond. It will take time to realise the full potential and ambition of this work — but an investment in this is an investment in a healthy and thriving civil society in the longer term. If you are creating or have energy to develop any of the things we’ve explored here — we’d love to hear from you.

Next steps for us will be to do the next stage design work for the Decelerator idea in June 2023. If you’d like to be part of that journey, get in touch.

Fortune Favours The Brave: The case for better endings

In the first of a series of three blogs, the team behind Stewarding Loss (Louise Armstrong, Cassie Robinson and Iona Lawrence) share their vision for a civil society that embraces better endings.

Civil society is trapped in a game. This is a game in which nonprofit leaders, funders and stakeholders fuelled by deep passion, belief and hope, have been led to believe that the brave, bold, ambitious thing is to start something new, to chart uncharted waters, to grow it relentlessly and to survive at all costs.

This is a game in which none of the incentives are in place within or outside of us to reflect or be honest about what isn’t working, or what has served its purpose and now needs to move aside. And resources and power move in a way that underpin and drive this growth at all costs agenda.

What if it was “business as usual” to ask ourselves what might need to end in our organisations if we are to have the impact we long for? What if we expected ourselves to attend to endings better in order to release the energy, resource and passion for the next chapter of change, renewal and impact?

This matters now more than ever as communities and societies grapple with the sustained ‘polycrisis’ — austerity, the climate emergency, the cost of living scandal, pandemics, democratic deficits, renewed austerity. Many of the organisations and movements which exist to drive change and exist to promote human and planetary flourishing are creaking under the pressure of possible endings — of organisations, of projects, of programmes, of services, of business models, of leadership tenures and of whole systems — and are being held back by a lack of support for endings and by the shame, fear, avoidance and stigma associated with them.

What if we widened our concept of bravery, courage and ambition? What if it was considered brave for our civil society to be led with energy, tenacity, ambition and vigour whilst holding the end in mind? Starting as soon as tomorrow by asking ourselves ‘what needs to end?’ Not because this question determines that something will inevitably end, but because staying open to the possibility of it unleashes purpose, conviction and a relentless pursuit of what is absolutely necessary and most impactful.

Over the past 3 years Stewarding Loss has supported 100+ organisations to consider and design all sorts of endings: closures, mergers, programme terminations, CEO / founder successions and many more. This work has shown us that with sufficient time, care and funding, these are moments of true growth: lessons are learned, transformation is ushered in and a new, bold, ambitious chapter commences.

We are interested in better endings, for better beginnings. Take Campaign Bootcamp, whose closure after 10 years and decision to share learnings with our support meant that there are promising signs that the wider sector is building on their experience. We’ve heard of countless trustee boards giving dedicated time to reflect on and discuss the learnings report which sought to capture the invaluable perspective of an organisation reflecting in its final chapter. Meanwhile the birth of the Civic Power Fund — whose strategy and vision builds directly on the learnings of Campaign Bootcamp — is showing promising signs of success.

Next in the series:

In blog 2 we sketch out what we see as the components of practical support and infrastructure that the sector needs urgently in order to steward in this new era of leadership and organisational design.

And in blog 3 we share our early sketch of The Decelerator for civil society.

Please complete this form here to let us know if you’d like to be involved with the next stage of this work, share your experience of endings in civil society or just stay in the loop on progress.

The coming storm: A stronger civil society future needs us all to embrace better endings today

Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash

In 2019 Stewarding Loss set out to support civil society at all levels to dedicate the time, energy, care and resource to endings that it does to beginnings, uninhibited by fear, stigma or prejudice and rooted in best practice. Today we are gathering funders together to witness the testimony of 2 organisations who recently closed with our support, because we believe we’ve identified some immediate, medium and long term actions that are needed. But we can’t build or maintain them on our own. Blog by Louise Armstrong and Iona Lawrence.

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When it comes to endings, the instinct for many of us is to look the other way. That goes for the ends of relationships, jobs, partnerships or collaborations, the loss of loved ones and yes: the ends of beloved charities and non-profit organisations.

There are some good and understandable reasons for this. Organisational closures or mergers are tricky processes which involve complicated logistical, legal and financial considerations. They are also marked by complex emotions for staff, trustees, beneficiaries and wider communities. Anger, despair, relief, shame, guilt, fear and grief are just a few of the countless experiences that come up time and again as people share their experiences of organisational endings.

So if they’re so difficult and painful, why do we need to pay attention to them? Well partly because we need to: endings look to be on the rise.

Data from the Charity Commission showed fewer charities closed in 2020–2021 than in previous years yet early signs from infrastructure organisation NCVO’s membership statistics for 2021–2022 suggests that the number of organisations closing is on the up. It isn’t hard to guess why. The perfect storm of cost of living, rising energy bills, the long tail of covid-related pressures, decreased funding governmental and philanthropic sources, and staff shortages are all hitting at a time of increased need for services and support in communities. In the words of one charity leader recently: ‘running a charity currently feels a bit like being in charge of a pressure cooker’.

Since 2019, the Stewarding Loss project has explored how and what can be done to design better organisational endings: responsibly, intelligently and compassionately. Stewarding Loss believes endings matter because they are part of the natural cycle of growth, change, renewal and innovation within the charity sector. Over 2.5 years our inquiry has involved: 74 interviews with leaders who’ve closed organisations, 42 pro bono coaching conversations with people considering an ending, and paid consultancy with 5 organisations as they’ve undertaken their ending. We are proud of the impact of this work and the reach it’s had. But don’t just take our word for it:

‘Thank you for stepping in — for offering to help, being a compass and a calm voice reminding us that a good ending is possible and to be aimed for. I think that we always knew it was possible from a practical, financial “don’t hit the buffers” perspective, but your holistic approach added so much. People were losing something of value to them, and you helped us mark that by helping us find our story, our rituals and our closure’. — Recipient of 3 months of consulting support from Stewarding Loss in 2021–2022

‘We couldn’t have done this without your Sensing an Ending toolkit. Everytime we felt lost we returned to it and it helped us prioritise. No other resources or tools came close.’ — An organisation who closed in 2022

‘I can’t thank you enough for the hour we spent on the phone. Having a safe space to talk everything through and test ideas helped me see what it is we need to do. I’ll tell anyone who needs to hear it that this sort of support should be available to all charity leaders.’ — An organisation who benefitted from a pro bono coaching conversation in 2021 and later decided not to close.

Over the course of all this work it has become increasingly clear that there is growing need for this work, an increased awareness of how important it is and proven ways of meeting the need. But there is still a very long way to go if we are to get anywhere near our vision for a more cyclical civil society where endings are embraced and harnessed for the good of people, communities and the planet.

Despite our efforts, too much of the work and impact we’ve delivered has needed to be pro bono and therefore limited in reach and scale. Despite repeated experimentation, we have been unable to identify viable models for delivering this work in an adequately funded way and at a scale that meets the need. We have resisted the temptation to set up an organisation in order to take the founding intentions to the next level — doing so would allow us to access more funds and resources for the work. But it was hard to ignore the irony of needing to set up a new organisation to support organisations to close. It felt funny at best, and antithetical at worst.

Therefore we’re sharing this blog today, and gathering funders together this afternoon to witness the testimony of 2 organisations who recently closed with our support, because we believe we’ve identified some immediate, medium and long term actions that are needed. But we can’t build or maintain them on our own.

AN ACTION PLAN FOR BETTER ENDINGS

This plan builds on the learnings and ideas that have shaped our work since 2019. The change that’s needed is systemic and will take time so we’ve broken it down into stages to show you how we believe actions in the near term can build towards a better, fairer future where endings and loss are considered as readily as growth throughout civil society.

A vision for a loss-centred civil society: In the next decade we need a paradigm shift in how endings are considered as part of the lifecycle of organisations across civil society and beyond. Underpinning this shift would be a transformation of mindsets and cultures. Civil society leaders, funders and stakeholders at all levels would have open hearts and open minds and be comfortable actively anticipating and designing endings of all kinds. People and communities would see closures, mergers, CEO transitions, programming ends, and all sorts of endings as just part of the cycle of change. A ‘growth at all costs’ mentality that places survival of an organisation above other considerations would be replaced by a continuous inquiry of loss and endings, as much as opportunities for growth and expansion.

In the next 2–5 years: Concerted and collaborative action and investment is needed to build an ecosystem of support for endings. Think about the investment funds, leadership schemes, accelerator programmes and all the other support that is poured into new organisations. Well we need that for endings. Because without better endings, we aren’t going to get the quality and quantity of new projects, organisations and movements needed to drive change in these uncertain and complex times.

What can be done next week? This work can start next week with investment and collaboration to create the supportive infrastructure needed for endings. This infrastructure would offer the sort of support that we’ve tried and tested as being effective. The interventions we lay out below could stand on their own, or be hosted by an infrastructure group but should not be behind a paywall if they are to reach the organisations who need this support the most.

1. A directory of skilled closure experts: There are many skills consultants but they can be too hard to find for organisations in need of their support. This should be a one-stop shop for organisations anticipating or designing an ending and looking to find paid support to help them to do it well.

2. A closure hotline: Think Samaritans but for organisations who are considering their options. This free-at-the-point-of-use line would offer 1-off, 1 hour coaching support to organisations who might be considering a closure. This could be run as a collective of skilled coaches and advisers who would be paid per hour from a central pot.

3. A library of resources: This free-at-the-point-of-use library would host resources and signpost to further advice for organisations looking to close well. More widely infrastructure organisations could update their resources using the learnings Stewarding Loss has generated last year.

4. Dedicated farewell funding: All of the above needs funding. And organisations need funding in order to design and deliver good endings. Funders need to dedicate a % of their annual budget to contingency funding to support endings.

What can we all do now? We can all play a part by committing to encouraging and modelling better conversations about endings from today. We’ve heard countless times in the past 3 years that there is often a paralysing fear of raising a possible ending to fellow trustees, your boss or your funder. The paradigm shift needs all of us and all of us need to start having better, more honest conversations about endings! From CEOs, to staff, to trustees, to funders.

If we consider funders specifically: When funders acknowledge the power they have and take proactive steps to encourage ‘courageous’ conversations with grantees, the quality of the relationship improves immeasurably. Having a funder listen with compassion at all stages of the grant making cycle can be the difference between an orderly or disorderly / more traumatic ending. If you’re a funder and you aren’t sure how approachable you are, you could ask former grantees or trusted friends for their thoughts. The same goes for trustees, CEOs and all of us working in or around civil society.

A better, stronger civil society can start today if we start having better conversations and embracing endings as a part of everyday life.

—————-

The work of Stewarding Loss is on-going. Check out the website for more information or get in touch.

Why were we wrong about Covid forcing a wave of nonprofit organisations needing to close. And what next?

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash

One year ago civil society was hot with warnings of widespread forced organisational closures as a result of pressures of the pandemic. Yet a year on, fewer nonprofits are closing than ever before. This Stewarding Loss blog explores why this might be and what this means for nonprofits and all those who care about them — especially those of us who believe that not all organisational closures are the end of the world.

When Covid 19 arrived, communities, businesses, nonprofits and government scrambled to put in place the finance and resources needed to mitigate the pandemic’s catastrophic impact on lives and livelihoods in a society already ravaged by inequality.

In the first 6 months of the pandemic, there was an estimated 72% increase in requests for support, advice and services from nonprofits up and down the country. Trusts and foundations moved swiftly to offer up emergency funding to plug gaps in income but financial shortfalls were widely reported in organisations of all sizes. Nonprofit leaders, infrastructure groups and funders moved quickly to calculate an estimated £4 billion price taglooming over the sector as a result of the pandemic and the #NeverMoreNeeded campaign swung into action to make the case for nonprofit specific handouts to cover this. The Government responding by allocating just £750 million to the sector.

Nonprofit sector commentators warned that the pressures of the crisis could prove too much for many organisations and stark warnings were issued including that 1 in 10 nonprofits were set to close within a year. Alarm bells were sounded of an incoming ‘tidal wave of nonprofit closures’. As with all of Covid’s implications, the impact was expected to be disproportionately piled onto organisations already left behind with 9 in 10 BAME led small organisations facing deeply challenging times as a result of limited reserves and unrestricted funding.

Yet 18 months on, these apocalyptic outcomes for the sector haven’t materialised, or at least not yet. Despite the sector being allocated substantially less support that it advocated needing, the wave of closure so many feared simply hasn’t transpired.

From the energy sector to retail — the news over the past year has regularly been dominated by stories of collapse and closure in a range of sectors. Yet research by Third Sector Research Centre and the University of Stirling commissioned by the National Council of Voluntary Organisations published in the summer of 2021 revealed there were fewer nonprofit dissolutions in 2020 than previous years. Insolvencies were slightly up amongst charitable companies compared to previous years — but that was from a very low base. It’s said that the sector’s regulator has noticed an increase in trustee — executive conflicts monitored in part through Serious Incident Reports from charities which could be a telltale sign of financial distress and impending closure. But it’s simply not yet clear what the long term impacts of the pressures of Covid will be on the health of civil society.

In a time of so much pressure on civil society, what is sustaining organisations in the midst of so much existential change and challenge?

Well of course there’s the lifeline of furlough funding which along with other Government grants and loan schemes have offered thousands of organisations the chance to keep staff and money in the bank even where income streams have been dramatically reduced.

There’s also the emergency support from trusts and foundations, which has further made up for lost income for nonprofits.

There’s also the courage and resilience of civil society and its leaders with thousands of organisations pivoting staff and programmes overnight in 2020, supported often by flexible funding arrangements, and redirecting efforts in ways that have propagated new work, new impact and critical new income.

In addition there’s a chance that resource and staffing shortfalls have been made up for by staff and volunteers working unpaid to deliver much needed services and programmes. It’s hard to verify this but if true means the sector is surviving on borrowed time. This places the threat of burnout and an intensified wellbeing and mental health crisis looming when the price of this stretch catches up with people and organisations.

Across our informal conversations with funders, regulators, civil society leaders and infrastructure groups there is a resounding and consistent belief that the current state of closures is a stalling, not a reversal, of the original warnings around nonprofit closures. As the furlough scheme and other financial support to organisations come to an end, foundations move into non-emergency funding mode and the impact of the large shortfall in public spending money looms on the horizon, we have heard time and again that people are estimating a gradual mounting of financial hardship for nonprofits and a crescendoing of closures and mergers towards the end of 2021 in and into 2022. Less the cliff edge that was predicted this time last year and more a slow lapse into insolvency and closure.

This presents a number of challenges for all who care about a healthy, thriving civil society. The world is fundamentally changing and shifting — in ways we can’t yet predict and that stretch far beyond pandemics like Covid. Civil society groups and organisations must be able to adapt and augment. If we leave these endings to ‘business as usual’ we run the risk of a wave of unsupported, costly and damaging closures and a weaker civil society.

Over the past 2 years, Stewarding Loss has heard time heard time and againcivil society tends to do organisational endings pretty badly. Without thought to legacy, programmes and hard earned intelligence of organisations disappear overnight; without time for emotions, staff go out into the world and to their new organisations carrying the burden and trauma of a bad ending; without careful planning, the money and assets left are inefficiently dispensed of in the haste of a poorly designed ending; and without knowledge of the complex legalities, well-meaninged mistakes leave staff and trustees the wrong side of the law. We wrote more about the costs of bad endings in this blog here, as part of our publication of our 7 principles for better organisational endings accompanied by a toolkit.

So Stewarding Loss sees this delay in closures and likely protracted period of closure and loss as an opportunity to prepare to manage the endings when they do come as best as they can be. We see this delay as a crucial moment for civil society, particularly organisational leaders, trustees, funders, regulators and infrastructure groups, to get their ducks in a row and be prepared to support and enable better endings when the time comes and where time and money allows.

Whether you’re a funder, a nonprofit CEO, a trustee, an infrastructure body or anyone else who cares about civil society, you have a part to play in laying the foundations for better endings. Here are a few things we’re doing that you might want to dive into or get involved with:

• Sensing An Ending shares our first draft of 7 principles to steward better organisational endings, with an accompanying guidebook. This was an important trajectory to take, as it is responding to the context of the present, and the impacts of Covid-19.

• Staying Close to Loss is an introduction to the idea of continual enquiry in an organisations’ life span — where loss is considered within organisational strategy as ordinarily as ‘growth.’ This is explored through a series of canvases.

• The Care-Full Closures Fund (from Stewarding Loss and Deeds and Words, funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation) is open to nonprofit organisations of any size who are considering closure or merger and are wanting to explore their options carefully, intentionally and with a design-led approach. To find out more or have an initial informal confidential conversation with the Stewarding Loss and Deeds and Words team about this opportunity click here.

If you have ideas for what needs to be done now, so that organisations facing closure in the future have the support and resources they need to do so as well as possible, we’d love to hear from you.

Check out our website or get in touch.

An update on the Care-Full Closures Fund

In May 2021 Stewarding Loss and Deeds and Words were delighted to announce the Care-full Closures fund. This is an update on what we’ve learned so far and a call for you to get in touch if you think closure or merger could be on the table for your nonprofit organisation.

Do you think you need to have some honest, tough or challenging conversations about a future merger or closure for your nonprofit? We might be able to offer some support. Stewarding Loss have partnered with Deeds and Words on The Care-Full Closures Fund which will work with up to four organisations to support internal and external stakeholders through merger or closure processes. We are grateful to The Paul Hamlyn Foundation who have funded this work making it possible for us to offer grant funding to four participating organisations.

The last 18 months have made us all think a bit more about endings, whether that’s about losing loved ones, relationships or our livelihoods. The pandemic has made us confront loss in a way that we normally prefer to avoid, and as well as facing abrupt and difficult changes personally, we may have to say many collective goodbyes in the future. Across civil society, charities, social enterprises, community businesses and non-profits, many organisations are finding that the pressures of the pandemic have left them facing an uncertain future, creating additional sadness and anger among beneficiaries and the workers and volunteers that have kept them going. You can read more about the thinking behind the fund in this blog here.

Since launching the Care-Full Closures Fund we’ve heard from a handful of organisations interested in the opportunity who are not quite at the right stage for this support so we have not yet allocated our funds. In short, we believe this is because the full impact of Covid has not yet hit civil society.

One year ago Pro Bono Economics warned that pressures of the crisis could prove too much for many organisations and stark warnings were issued including that 1 in 10 charities were set to close within a year. But these apocalyptic outcomes for the sector haven’t materialised, or at least not yet. In fact research published by the National Council of Voluntary Organisations last month revealed there were fewer dissolutions in 2020 than previous years.

With furlough and other government support due to end in September and trusts and foundations moving away from emergency funding strategies, we believe a significant number of organisations will shortly be realising that closure or merger might be the situation they’re facing. We want to be there to support organisations from the beginning of the ending journey and are ready to stand alongside organisations before a final decisions has been taken. We know that having conversations early on helps keep time on your side and enables organisations to stay in control of a possible ending. So we’re here to help organisations to start having these important early conversations.

So, even if all you have is a sense that your organisation might be facing significant change, we’d love to hear from you. Please email stacey@deedsandwords.co.uk briefly explaining what your situation is and, discretion assured, we’ll organise an informal chat with you and then discuss possible next steps and the support we can provide.

About us:

Since 2019, the Stewarding Loss project has been exploring organisational endings. Our work is rooted in the belief that endings and new beginnings are a part of the natural cycle of growth, change, renewal and innovation within the nonprofit sector — and a signifier of necessary systemic shifts. We are committed to supporting and enabling better endings in civil society — and by better we mean endings that are designed proactively, intelligently, responsibly and compassionately.

Deeds and Words are a small and tight knit team of seven people. We believe inclusive cultures and collective working benefit everyone and that how we treat each other is key to organisational success, team morale and well-being.

Announcing the Care-full Closures Fund

Stewarding Loss is pleased to be announcing a new pilot fund: ‘The Care-full Closures Fund’. This fund will deliver ground-breaking support to 4 organisations to support them to consider and design an organisational closure or merger. This blog outlines where this work came from, the questions we’re asking as we embark on this important next step and an invitation to get involved. This fund has been made possible by the generous support of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

We often don’t have or make time to reflect on endings, either individually or within our communities. Over the last 12 months, loss has been a recurring theme for many of us and something that continues to be difficult to process.

From an organisational perspective, endings can signal failure, loss, crisis and controversy. It doesn’t have to be this way. Endings in civil society can signal a healthy ecology — if something is no longer needed then it may mark that the desired outcomes have been achieved. Endings can provide opportunities for individuals, organisations and civil society more broadly. More than this we believe better organisational endings are vital for all of us in civil society, to embed a healthy learning culture that challenges the myth that all endings are inherently bad and acknowledges the vibrancy of a healthy civil society which is in a state of constant cyclical renewal.

Since 2019, the Stewarding Loss project has been exploring organisational endings. Our work is rooted in the belief that endings and new beginnings are a part of the natural cycle of growth, change, renewal and innovation within the nonprofit sector — and a signifier of necessary systemic shifts. There is little talk of loss and endings throughout the life cycle of nonprofits and there is all too limited resource for and ambition around what better endings looks like for organisations. By better we mean endings that are designed proactively, intelligently, responsibly and compassionately.

What we’ve noticed

Over the course of hundreds of conversations in the past year, organisations have shared with us a range of things that stand in the way of better organisational endings. These include:

• A lack of open conversation about endings in the sector means that endings are often a ‘taboo subject’

• A ‘survival at all costs’ mentality can set in amongst some trustees and staff which prevents decisions around endings being taken early enough for closures or mergers to be designed and planned carefully and intentionally

• There are lots of coaches, facilitators, advisers and organisations who can support organisations to consider and design better endings but these people can be hard to identify as there isn’t a public community of these people

• Nonprofits need time and money in order to benefit from the skill and expertise that is available

In the words of a nonprofit leader interviewed in 2021: “This is structural, if things ended well in the sector, the sector would be healthier overall.”

How we’ve responded

Rooted in what we heard, we developed first versions of some resources to stimulate discussion and action on better organisational endings. First, we created Sensing An Ending: a resource for those organisations that need immediate support with how to face closure centred on 7 principles for better organisational endings. Second, we’ve published Staying Close to Loss which is an introduction to the idea of continual enquiry in an organisations’ life span — where loss and endings are considered within organisational strategy as ordinarily as ‘growth.’

What we still want to know

As we look ahead we’re now in a position to work alongside organisations considering closure or merger so we can test what support and approaches might be most useful and meaningful. We’re still holding many questions including:

• If an organisation is anticipating an organisational ending, what do they need to start considering, and when?

• What role can design play in this journey?

• What practices and resources can help?

• What are the conditions (and perhaps even incentives) in which organisations and their leaders feel comfortable to raise their hand and say ‘we’re thinking about ending’ in a way that offers enough time, enough care and doesn’t necessarily mean they will definitely close?

• What experiences do people have of going through an organisational ending and what support and resources do they find helpful and valuable? What else do they need?

• What is being learned about well designed organisational endings? What can those who are leading an organisational ending today learn from those who have been in their shoes before?

The Care-Full Closures Fund

As we now turn to testing our thinking in the real world we are pleased to announce that the Paul Hamlyn Foundation has provided funding for up to 4 organisations to be supported to anticipate, consider and design an ending.

Who is this fund for?

This fund is open to nonprofit organisations of any size who are considering closure and are wanting to explore their options carefully, intentionally and with a design-led approach.

What do we mean by the ending or closure of an organisation in this context? We mean simply that an organisation in its current form is considering coming to an end. This means it might merge with another or it might close while handing over certain programmes or services to another. (This fund is therefore not for those looking to design the ending of individual projects or programmes).

What stage should you be at?

We are open to organisations from across the various stages anticipating an organisational ending.

As outlined in our Sensing an Ending Toolkit, if you are anticipating an organisational ending perhaps all you have at the moment is a shared sense that your work might need to stop or change. Or this might be something you and your colleagues or trustees might have had at the back of your minds for many years but recent events have hastened the idea.

If you’ve only just begun thinking about how to take those next steps and aren’t sure what they might look like, that’s a good starting point. As an organisation you might have:

• Achieved your original purpose or feel that the need for it has reduced;

• Lost the funding and resources you need to carry on but would like to keep that purpose alive in some capacity;

• Be considering a merger with an adjacent organisation and want to help design a bespoke strategy to deliver it well for all parties involved.

Whatever it might be, we want to help you start a conversation with your stakeholders, both externally and at all levels internally, to navigate that process well.

In particular, we’d love to hear from you if you’re a civil society organisation that:

• Is interested in collaborating on a considered and reflective process of ending or evolving

• Would like that process to be inclusive of all stakeholders, especially across hierarchies

• Can identify a core internal group to work with Deeds and Words on a strategy around that change or closure.

• Is interested in working with a range of external partners and practitioners

• Would benefit from a library of resources and shared learning on designing and delivering ‘good endings’

• Could be ready to start this work in the next 4–5 months (in the autumn / winter of 2021)

What support will you get?

We are in a position to offer up to 4 organisations paid for time with experienced consultants. Alongside them Iona Lawrence, co-lead of Stewarding Loss, will also support. Organisations will also be given a grant of up to £4,000 to fund staff time and associated costs for this work. Due to the bespoke nature of this work, each of the grantees will work with Deeds And Words to develop an agreement of how they want to work together.

In time the knowledge and learning from these grants will be shared in our Care-Full Closures community of practice to inform wider practice in the field of organisational endings and closures.

Interested? Here’s how to register your interest

We are considering applications on a rolling basis. So please complete this form to tell us what position / stage you and your organisation are at.

Other ways to get involved:

This funding programme is part of a wider emergent body of work to test our thinking and support organisations facing closure imminently along with those looking to explore possible endings in an upstream way. This work includes:

• Care-full Closures: A community of practice — a network of practitioners who can support organisations to design their endings

• Ongoing listening — a new series of peer-to-peer circles to create space for conversation about organisational endings facilitated by Janice Johnson

• A series of events — that will bring this work into the wider consciousness of civil society organisations curated by Ivor Williams (keep your eyes on our social media for more information)

• Partnerships with networks and umbrella bodies to share our work and support with them and their members

• An enquiry specifically for funders

Get in touch with iona@ionaconsultancy.com to find out more about all this work.

Stewarding Loss Toolkits Event

When we published the first iteration of the Stewarding Loss work in early November, we knew there was a lot there. It was a large body of work in terms of research and content. Earlier this month we hosted an event specifically to talk through the different tools in more detail, in the hope we could help start to unpack them, gather feedback on them and see them being put in to practice.

Here is the video of the event. We hope it’s useful.

Transitions Talk

The slides and imagery for this talk can be found here.

Whenever I talk about the Stewarding Loss work I start by acknowledging that talking about organisational endings at this time, is happening in the shadow of the enormous loss of human life. So many lives have been lost over the past 9 months, and continue to be. I just want to take a moment to consider that.

The strain on organisations is of course being felt too, and organisations are anticipating closures and reduction of services.

And as we know, so much of the experience of the pandemic is an unequal one — demonstrated in the work Ubele did at earlier in the crisis, that highlighted how BAME-led organisations were especially at risk of not surviving.

Loss is everywhere.

A short introduction to me. I currently run the UK Portfolio at the National Lottery Community Fund. We’re the largest grant funder in the UK, distributing £600 Million every year. In the UK Portfolio we have 8 funding programmes, that include our Climate Action Fund, Digital Fund and Emerging Futures Fund. We’re also the portfolio that explores new approaches in funding practice. I should say that the work I am speaking about today is not part of my role at The National Lottery Community Fund — but was funded before I took on my role there, by a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Ideas + Pioneers grant. However, of course, in the work I do at The National Lottery Community Fund, in particular through the work we’re doing on how to support civil society, means that we do recognise the predicament that many civil society organisations are in.

I’m also a Policy Fellow at the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL, I teach on the Ecological Design Masters at Schumacher College and I am Co-founder of the Point People. The latter was set up in 2010 specifically to work on systemic change. This was at a time when a lot of organisations were focussed on redesigning services, or setting up social enterprises. At the Point People we recognised that complex social challenges needed multiple sectors, multiple disciplines and a more holistic approach to change.

It was in my work with the Point People that I became familiar with new frameworks and theories — transition design, systemic design, emergence. These continue to be relevant and useful in my work but over this last decade, I became increasingly aware that something was missing.

During this talk, I’m going to cover —

• the overlooked part of transitions work

• why it’s important

• and what we’re trying to do about it

I’m going to start by just touching on a few frameworks that people use to design for transitions.

These look complex so don’t worry about trying to read them!

This is Geels socio-technical transitions theory, which is incredibly useful and is definitely having a renaissance right now. And whilst I don’t expect you to be able to read all this, maybe you can notice how much of it is about forward movement, it’s all about transitions. How we get from A to B. But nothing about what doesn’t come with us, how you leave behind what is no longer fit for purpose.

In the Carnegie Mellon Transition Design Framework, also very useful, they set out visions for transition — theories of change, and new ways of designing. In those new ways of designing there isn’t anything about designing for what needs to be left behind in a transition.

In the Ecological Design Framework, they recognise that there are degenerative aspects to the work, but this is often to show what is fragmenting or extractive rather than about the intentional design of ending things.

What I especially value about The Regenerative Design framework in relation to what I’m talking about today is that it recognises how regenerative work — the cycle of endings and renewal builds systemic vitality.

And the Adaptive Cycle at least puts ‘release’ onto their model, others’ have used this and called it the creative destruction phase, but it tends to be referred to as either a dramatic change that alters the system drastically, or someone being the creative destructor by challenging the status quo. There’s little about the practice of intentionally initiating and designing for creative destruction.

It’s the Berkana Two Loop model, that I was introduced to 10 years ago that does talk about the need to hospice organisations in transition work, and they make this role explicit.

This model shows a dominant system that is dying, and an emergent system that has the potential to become the system of influence. In our current pandemic context, the dominant system starting to collapse feels much more alive as a possibility.

The model shows many different types of work that need to happen in this context. New pioneers emerging, building alternatives that need connecting together. Illuminating this work helps show a path for transition from the dying system to the alternative, emergent system.

There are people that help keep the dominant system stable as it dies — this is important because there is still a lot that is dependent on that system. Others work to help people and organisations transition from the existing, dominant system — helping make tangible how to do things in a new way and showing them what is happening in the emergent system. I always picture these people as doing hand-holding work — walking alongside organisations to cross the “transition bridge.”

But it’s the last role, right in the middle of that image, that I’m particularly interested — the Hospice Worker, and the need to acknowledge death and composting in transition work. As the dominant system starts to decline, the Hospice Worker provides care and compassion for those that are dying and alleviate the pain. They address the need to close things down, dismantle them, end things, as if it is a natural part of change. This is not something we do well, organisational endings are something we rarely design for.

So why hasn’t more work been done on how to design for this?

Having previously done work as a designer with the NHS and with hospices, looking at things like end of life care, I know how culturally here in the UK we find death and dying difficult to face up to, to talk about.

There have been a lot of analogies and practices that I’ve drawn from those contexts — hospices, palliative care, grief therapy etc and applied them to this work.

There’s also our cultural relationships to old and new, the care (or lack of) that surrounds people and things that are dying in comparison to the emphasis and attention we place on the new (babies and start-ups).

And I should say, other people have been and are thinking about this too. Joe Macleod in his work on Ends, Laura Bunt and Charlie Leadbetter in their Art of Exit work with Nesta back in 2014, and Vanessa Reid and her conscious closures.

Unlike these pieces of work, I’ve been focussing solely on civil society, and at an organisational level — not just the decommissioning of a service.

In Laura and Charlie’s work — focussed on public services — they were looking at how you could do endings creatively. I’m interested in how you can do them ethically and intelligently — with compassion.

And why are endings important, required?

I believe that for us to transition, from an old system into a better alternative, something needs to give.

Endings can be a natural consequence of growth — when organisations or a whole sector, reach a point when there is too much going on, and insufficient resources to go around. Civil society organisations which have grown very rapidly and expanded their services, can end up losing their focus and effectiveness. Even if a sector is needed more than ever, and has a lot of demand, it can get stuck. It can experience too much activity and too little progress.

Looking at the landscape of civil society what would it mean to identify which parts of the landscape, which organisations have become unnecessary and no longer contribute meaningfully to the transitions that are needed?

I’ll use several metaphors from the natural world and the first is the idea of pruning — when trees and plants that grow quickly they need to be “pruned” in order to focus their nutrients. This pruning process also helps to remove disease or excessive growths.

Another reason it’s important to be more prepared for and consider organisational endings is because so much is changing, all of the time.

If organisations haven’t been able to recognise, or adapt to make the shifts needed and learn new ways of operating, they are unlikely to be fit for the future.

And these changing contexts are going to change more often, and more dramatically.

For a start, there is the climate crisis and what that will require of us all.

This is unlikely to be the last pandemic we’ll experience.

The power of big tech will continue to change public expectations, displace things and make things redundant. The biases in algorithms will continue to create new social injustices that require entirely different approaches and capabilities from civil society. Our needs as a society are evolving more quickly — as we try to adjust to a data-driven world. Are organisations in civil society showing they can keep up?

And it’s not enough to just keep increasing the supply of promising ideas to address these kinds of challenges, this needs to be matched by just as sophisticated an approach to dismantling things and closing them down.

Considering endings is important for the whole ecosystem — the whole landscape — the whole field. We’ve seen through the pandemic how interdependent many things are. This is about the health of the whole system.

This is where the idea of composting is important.

Composting improves soil. It provides nutrients. It stimulates the ecosystem. It builds health.

If we don’t consider organisational endings we lose the chance to leave things in a better way than when we found them. We don’t consider what would make better compost.

When the natural cycles of renewal, or collapsing are deterred, because we haven’t stopped doing the things we should have, or we’ve kept our head in the sand — negative patterns can be perpetuated. It doesn’t make for good compost.

And this is also a time when we need bold, new ideas.

We need to be able to take great leaps forward.

We need new things to be able to emerge.

This is a time to divest in the status quo.

To refresh the soil.

This is a quote from one of the people who took part in our work over this year and I think highlights the idea that it’s about a healthy ecosystem. A sector needs renewal, and that renewal comes in part from some organisations ending, and some new ones emerging. But we can bring more intent to this — some of this can be better designed.

This is what we’ve been looking at for the last 9 months.

We’ve done interviews with over 100 people.

People that have closed down organisations, and those that are anticipating closing an organisation down. We’ve spoken to end of life care practitioners, hospice workers, ritual designers, death doula’s, grief therapists, lawyers, the charity commission, and so forth.

I’ll now share some of what we’ve learned and created.

1. Endings need reframing.

2. Make a distinction between the different ways this can be approached.

3. Keep alive to it in the organisation’s culture.

4. Make use of design.

5. Consider equity and care.

So how might we reframe organisational endings?

And consider what becomes available if we think about closure or endings in a different way.

It was important for us to make a distinction between the enforced closing of organisations brought on by external events (like Covid) versus encouraging organisations to keep engaged in an active enquiry about when it might be the right time to die.

One of the guides and sets of tools we’ve created is related to this — Staying Close to Loss. This is about how we develop an ability and capacity to be in an ongoing relationship with the potential of loss — to continually anticipate it, know how to respond to it, to design for it, and have distinct roles for supporting and delivering it. As I have spoken about earlier, this feels important to familiarise ourselves with given the many crises ahead.

Civil society is also going to need to (and quite urgently) shift resources out of the old, no longer fit-for-purpose system to fuel the growth of an alternative system. An ability to do this, and to do it well, will be vital throughout the developed world in the next decade.

This is all part of the processes of change, adaptation and transitions.

The canvases to use are here.

Central to all of this work is the role of design. Design is about intent, and that’s what we want to encourage more of. If you design for organisational endings you can consider the whole journey, with different touch points, and of course it’s not linear.

In this guide we’ve divided the tools into 4 areas.

Care

As you bring an ongoing inquiry about loss into your organisation, it’s helpful to lay a foundation of shared narrative about who the organisation is, what brought you each here and what holds you together. Holding a space for enquiring about endings needs different kinds of skills and behaviours so there is also a canvas to help you consider the kinds of roles you might want to assign to people in the organisation, and wider.

Tuning in

This section is about building a practice of regularly tuning in to what is emerging, and designing for that. This is a way to design what to tune in to, so as to help decide whether to exist or not. And then other resources for how to do ongoing enquiring and the anticipation of loss.

A shared view

One of the most important parts of this work is how to keep making sense of the organisation together, in a participatory way so that everyone is doing regular temperature checks on the organisation. Having a shared view is a helpful canvas to keep referring back to.

Composting

If the organisation does decide to dismantle itself, too unravel and too close, then these tools help consider four aspects of that journey. Stories, artefacts, rituals and relationships. Paying attention to the process, to what makes good compost, is important for laying foundations for what’s next.

That is why we have also created a practical resource that is useful now — if an organisation is at that point of knowing it needs to close. We worked with some other experts on this who understand the legal, HR and regulatory context too.

These are the seven principles we’ve created in the first iteration of this practical guide for endings in the the near future.

We didn’t find many (well hardly any!) useful guides or tools available for this kind of work, and the few we did find really didn’t account for the emotional journey of the work. All transitions work goes through phases that have a distinct emotional field. This is the Managing Transitions model by William Bridges and broadly we’ve mapped our tools onto this.

Equity is also vital to consider — it’s not just about when is the right time to close something down? But who gets to decide?

These are some of the things we are doing in the next phase of the work. Join us!

My last slide is actually where this started. The Farewell Fund as a provocation, and the name of which we changed to Stewarding Loss because it didn’t feel appropriate any more in the current context. But it is what I am returning to as a next step.

Working with a group of other funders we are exploring what a dedicated fund for organisational endings could look like. It feels like the fund could be the ‘trojan horse’ we need. An application to the Farewell Fund could set the tone that moves this kind of work into a different frame.

Can it give people a sense of permission, of acceptance and therefore create a willingness in people to hold up their hand and say “this is no longer working”? To admit that they no longer know what to do and it’s an endless struggle to survive. I have a fantasy that there are organisations in civil society that might feel a real relief if they were able to say that, and to know that there was a way out.

And can it be done in a way that is responsible — considerate of all potential consequences, kind — people feel respected, cared for and valued, and intelligent — the history, the learning, the wisdom and the assets have been successfully absorbed in to the new.

Watch all the talks from Transitions on Youtube and sign up to our newsletter to find out about all future events.

Stewarding Loss — a care-ful infrastructure for organisational endings.

“This is structural, if things ended well in the sector, the sector would be healthier overall.” — A participant in one of our Loss Circles

In summary

Since the start of this year, the Stewarding Loss project has explored how and what can be done to design better organisational endings: responsibly, intelligently and compassionately. Pre-dating the pandemic, this work is rooted in our belief that endings are part of the natural cycle of growth, change, renewal and innovation within the nonprofit sector. Since March this work has also focused on understanding the urgent and growing need of the thousands of organisations facing closure as a result of the pressures of the pandemic. In this blog we share what we’ve learned through our inquiry so far, where it’s felt necessary to take two paths simultaneously -

Sensing An Ending shares our first draft of 7 principles to steward better organisational endings, with an accompanying guidebook. This was an important trajectory to take, as it is responding to the context of the present, and the impacts of Covid-19.

Staying Close to Loss is an introduction to the idea of continual enquiry in an organisations’ life span — where loss is considered within organisational strategy as ordinarily as ‘growth.’ This is explored through a series of canvases.

Following on from this initial work we are setting up:

• A community of practice — creating a network of practitioners who can support civil society organisations to design their endings, and intelligently and carefully dismantle them.

• Ongoing listening circles — a new series of peer-to-peer circles, with 3 different focal points to choose from: one for people going through organisational endings, one for people anticipating an organisational ending and one for people that want to explore the wider systemic and regenerative practices that need developing in relation to loss, across civil society

• An enquiry specifically for funders — funders who want to better understand and define the appropriate roles that they can take in resourcing wise and dignified organisational endings can join a growing community of funders are exploring this.

• A series of events — curated by Ivor Williams, that will bring this work into the wider consciousness of civil society organisations — to encourage a cultural shift in how organisational endings are perceived, designed for and experienced. Alongside positioning this work in a longer time frame, connecting civil society work to the losses other crises will bring, like the ecological and climate emergency.

If you are interested in any of the above please fill out your details here. The events series will go live soon, so look out for that.

Read on to understand more about our journey to date and what we’ve learned.

Anticipating organisational endings in a time of great loss

2020 has been a complex and challenging year for nonprofits. On the one hand our work — broadly that of charities, social enterprises, community businesses and nonprofits — has never been more needed. From hospices to community shops, from care providers to foodbanks, nonprofits are the infrastructure millions of people have relied on this year, more than ever. And this is set to remain with a recent survey showing that 72% of organisations predict growing demand for their work over the next six months, compared to pre-Covid expectations. And yet 1 in 5 charities are anticipating not being able to deliver adequate services over Christmas.

Yet in this time of great need the outlook for the sustainability and survival of many nonprofit organisations is uncertain. Everyday brings news of redundancies in the charity sector with latest figures suggesting 60,000 jobs will go (this Redundancy Calculator from New Philanthropy Capital paints an eye wateringly stark picture) whilst 1 in 10 charities face having to close within 1 year.

The story of organisational loss, as ever, is an unequal one. The Ubele Initiative estimates as many as 9 in 10 BAME led organisations are facing closure having been cut out and cut off from the resources and power reserved for their peers not just this year but over decades. All in the shadow of the great and ever growing loss of lives.

Our journey so far

The origins of the Stewarding Loss project reach back to pre-pandemic times. Enabled by an Ideas and Pioneers grant from Paul Hamlyn Foundation, this work is rooted in our belief that endings and new beginnings are a part of the natural cycle of growth, change, renewal and innovation within the nonprofit sector. Yet despite this there is little talk of loss and endings throughout the life cycle of nonprofits. And there is all too limited resource for and ambition around what better endings looks like for organisations — by better we mean endings that are designed intelligently, responsibly and compassionately. We set out to explore what role funders in particular could play in designing better organisational endings.

However when we set out with this work we couldn’t have anticipated the scale or depth of loss and endings that would be catalysed by the events of 2020 so far. Therefore since March we have sought to understand if and how we might be able to help support those facing endings now. To inform this work we have interviewed over 30 people, listened to the experiences of those who have led organisational endings and sought to witness where nonprofit leaders are anticipating loss now and in the months and years ahead, through hosting 6 Loss Circles, with the support of Thanatologist Cass Humphries-Massey.

What we’ve noticed

Of the leaders we spoke to who have navigated organisational endings ranging from those which had been actively chosen through to those whose circumstances required involuntary closure — we heard that it mostly felt like they were ‘walking around in the dark’. We heard that there is a lack of language, intent, design and best practice for organisational endings which places leaders of nonprofits of all shapes and sizes considering closure in a very difficult position.

The cost of bad endings is etched wide and deep into our nonprofit landscape. Without thought to legacy, programmes and hard earned intelligence of organisations can disappear overnight; without time for emotions, staff can go out into the world and to their new organisations carrying the burden and trauma of a bad ending; without careful planning, the money and assets which are left are inefficiently dispensed of in the haste of a poorly designed ending; and without knowledge of the complex legalities, well-meaninged mistakes can easily be made leaving staff and trustees the wrong side of the law.

Endings involve complex logistical, legal and financial considerations. The work of infrastructure organisations like NCVO and SCVO along with many organisational change and design practitioners do a good job at offering advice and guidance on this and many leaders we’ve spoken to speak highly of this support where it can be afforded. But we were struck that endings are also marked by different experiences and emotions by all those involved and these are rarely designed into endings.

Anger, despair, relief, shame, guilt and grief are just a few of the countless experiences that come up time and again as people share their personal stories of organisational endings. Not just because of the scale of the loss, but perhaps especially, it’s essential that in designing better endings the practical, technical and emotional elements of the ending are planned for and stewarded throughout.

Three offerings for better endings

Rooted in what we’ve heard through this work, we are publishing three initial offerings to stimulate and catalyse energy and discussion on better organisational endings. Together this initial work is an exploration of the idea that within civil society there are, and have been for sometime, organisations that, in the natural cycles of death and renewal, have had their time.

This work is rooted in our believe that we need to establish a relationship with loss if we want to better understand our context and invent from within it. These three publications make a distinction between the enforced closing of organisations brought on by external events versus encouraging organisations to identify the right time to die or vacate the stage.

First, we have created Sensing An Ending: a resource for those organisations that need immediate support with how to face closure. Rooted in what we’ve learned and heard, we propose 7 key principles which could be used to guide nonprofit leaders considering endings of all kinds whatever their circumstances at this time:

Second, we are publishing Staying Close to Loss which returns to the original intent of this work before Covid took its toll. This work addresses the idea that within civil society there are, and have been for some time, organisations that in the natural cycles of death and renewal, have had their time.

Third, the accompanying Stewarding Loss Canvases are a set of tools for tending to organisational cultures so loss is explored as part of life. These canvases have been created to support organisations to develop an ongoing relationship with loss — to continually anticipate it — know how to respond to it, and have distinct roles for it, feels important to familiarise ourselves with in the next couple of years before crises happen on a wider and more regular scale.

So our first ask of you is: we would love you to take a read of this work and share your thoughts, reflections and challenges with us. Please get in touch with Cassie and Iona through the website.

Following on from this initial work we are setting up:

• A community of practice — creating a network of practitioners who can support civil society organisations to design their endings, and intelligently and carefully dismantle them.

• Ongoing Listening Circles — a new series of peer-to-peer circles, with 3 different focal points to choose from: one for people going through organisational endings, one for people anticipating an organisational ending and one for people that want to explore the wider systemic and regenerative practices that need developing in relation to loss, across civil society

• An enquiry specifically for funders — funders who want to better understand and define the appropriate roles that they can take in resourcing wise and dignified organisational endings can join a growing community of funders are exploring this.

• A series of events — curated by Ivor Williams, that will bring this work into the wider consciousness of civil society organisations — to encourage a cultural shift in how organisational endings are perceived, designed for and experienced. Alongside positioning this work in a longer time frame, connecting civil society work to the losses other crises will bring, like the ecological and climate emergency.

And our second ask is: if you are interested in any of the above please fill out your details here. The events series will go live soon, so look out for that.

And finally, some thank you’s

Thank you to Paul Hamlyn Foundation who made this work possible through an Ideas + Pioneers grant to Cassie.

In each of the pieces of work we’ve shared above there are acknowledgements to those who’ve shaped our thinking, taken part in the research, and worked with us on the guides. In particular we want to say thank you again here to Sonia for her design work, Vanessa Reid, Graham Leicester, Ivor Williams, Cass Humphries-Massey, Dr Dawn Langley, Caroline Lien, and point to past work that explored some of this by the Berkana Institute, Mission Models Money and The Art of Exit.

Finding our bearings - a skim of the literature

By Iona Lawrence.

This blog shares just a few of the ideas and people that we’re drawing direction from as the Stewarding Loss project develops. We’d love to hear from you with your suggestions for reading around loss and ending things well - responsibly, intelligently and with compassion. 

To recap

When first conceived, the idea of the Farewell Fund was rooted in there being so little conversation, let alone action when it comes to the idea of renewal in civil society. By renewal we mean the natural cycle of life and death - things fade in their relevance. What was once seen as vital can lose its place. The purpose or reason for something existing can shift as the wider context shifts too. 

Cassie wrote a couple of things in the early stages of this project. In one piece she explored the question of How We Help Organisations To Die rooted in her reflections on the Berkana Insitute’s Two Loop model born out of her work in the digital arena and having witnessed the impacts of technology on society. Through this she came to think about ways to ‘hospice the old’ - to help things ‘die well’ in order to pave the way for the transition to a new system. 

On top of my own experiences of the birth, growth, renewal and decline of organisations I’ve worked in throughout my career in civil society, another lens I bring to this project is (as is often the way with grief work) my personal journey through loss and renewal when I established the foundation in memory of murdered MP Jo Cox in 2016. 

As Covid-19 devastates lives and communities across the UK, it is also devastating civil society. We know that some organisations won’t survive. The Farewell Fund framing for this work is no longer appropriate. Our focus now is to identify ways to cope with this loss to support the sector to have honest conversation about what needs preserving and what doesn’t, and to ensure that loss is stewarded with intent -- that it is designed. 

Casting our net wide

Perceptions and understanding about endings and death reflect the social climate in which they take place so  we are drawing on other perspectives and influences from across the social sciences and culture. What are the analogies and practices we can draw on from end of life care, grief therapy, our relationship to endings more widely, our cultural relationships to old and new, the care (or lack of) that surrounds people and things that are dying in comparison to the emphasis and attention we place on the new (babies and start-ups).

Building on what’s come before - loss and civil society

Charlie Leadbetter and Laura Bunt wrote a report in 2012 called the Art of Exit. It’s one of the only pieces of work we know that directly deals with how to decommission things that are no longer working. Their work was focussed entirely on the public sector. We’re interested in what this looks like for the social sector and civil society. 

The Sustainable Funding Project was an initiative of NCVO back in 2011 which emerged from NCVO’s assessment that there was too little support available to organisations considering their future. It drew on examples of organisations that had closed including Merseyside River Trust whose founder set up the mission accomplished website to share her experience of winding up the Anglo-German Foundation after 36 years. 

Both these projects looked at ways to approach endings creatively and pragmatically. We’re interested in building on this and particularly by asking how you can do it ethically and intelligently — with compassion.

Wider context

The International Futures Forum presents a cyclical view of time which helps to shift the sense of an ending - which is always an echo of our fear of death. We need to complete, to close well — understanding that this is what makes space for the next cycle. A second Enlightenment perspective pays attention to endings as much as beginnings (‘start-ups’), hospice work for the dying culture as much as midwifery for the new. Other seminal writing in this arena includes Ernest Becker’s ‘Denial of Death’ in which Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie: man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality and Stanley Keleman’s ‘Living Your Dying’.

End of life 

The work of Ivor Williams designing end of life care with the Helix Centre is illuminating and contains myriad lessons when considering loss. In this blog here he shares his thoughts after 4 years of designing end of life care. Amongst his reflections is that he sees the dying process as a holistic one: a uniquely emotional, psychological and often spiritual period of life - something also seen in the work of Professor Scott Murray at the University of Edinburgh. Beyond the medication regimes, form-filling, consultation conversations and visits, there is everyday life. Ivor also presses that death should be a predominantly social, rather than clinical, experience. All people surrounding a dying person — be it friends, family or wider community — can deliver incredible care if supported in the right way, because good end-of-life care is everyone’s business. Initiatives such as Compassionate Neighbours and Coach4Care reflect this approach. 

Ivor’s third reflection is that if we are to provide genuinely holistic care for people, we need to actively acknowledge these wider systems and design within them. Cassie wrote about the Shine Project in Fife in this piece here which presented a comprehensive ‘systems change’ approach to change the culture of care, which started with a shift to ‘grown up conversations about living and dying.’ Meanwhile the ReSPECT process creates personalised recommendations for a person’s clinical care in a future emergency in which they are unable to make or express choices.

Grieving and loss - what we can learn from psychotherapy 

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,” Joan Didion

In Kubler Ross and Kessler’s seminal On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss (2014) they present their 5 stages of grieving. Kubler Ross describes how grief has taught her that she can survive. ‘I used to be afraid that if I experienced grief it would overcome me and I wouldn’t be able to survive the flood of it, that if I actually felt it I wouldn’t be able to get back up. It’s taught me that I can feel it and it won’t swallow me whole. But we come from a culture where we think people have to be strong. I’m a big believer in being vulnerable, open to grief. That is strength. You can’t know joy unless you know profound sadness. They don’t exist without each other.’ Kessler’s 2019 book adds another stage to the process, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Kessler is the founder of www.grief.com, which has over 5 million visits yearly from 167 countries. 

In Julia Samuel’s Grief Works (2017) the renowned psychotherapist and founder of Child Bereavement UK shares stories from those who have experienced great love and great loss - and survived. Stories that explain how grief unmasks our greatest fears, strips away our layers of protection and reveals our innermost selves. Samuel says: ‘Grief doesn’t hit us in tidy phases and stages, nor is it something that we forget and move on from; it is an individual process that has a momentum of its own, and the work involves finding ways of coping with our fear and pain, and also adjusting to this new version of ourselves, our “new normal”.

There are countless theories and frameworks for grief which form an extensive knowledge base for loss practitioners more broadly. The Mapping Grief tool from Keele University is a good place to start getting your head around them. A theoretical framework which has been developed by Linda Machin, the Range of Response to Loss model, uses the language of grieving people heard in her practice and research, which also echoes the concepts of other theoretical perspectives.  

Surfacing authentic language and rituals

We’re interested in the contemporary and ancient language and rituals around loss that create meaning. Just a few things that have caught our eye: Maleena Pone and Saima Thompson’s Fresh to Death podcast on the BBC in which they explore British Asian experiences of death and dying. In this podcast on Canadian National Broadcast radio, indigenous approaches to loss and grief in Canada are explored through multiple interviews. London based Funeral Director Poppy Mardall shares her and the Poppy’s Funerals’ team’s reflections on mourning, rituals and remembering in the Talking Death blog here. And this article here shares reflections on death in First Nation people. Whilst deep and rich in their own way - what these have in common are the claiming of language and ritual around loss in context specific, creative ways. 

Understanding the power of narrative and stories

Building on the idea of authentic language, in the Art of Exit Charlie and Laura explore how “decommissioning could be understood as a process of service improvement, driven by a search for better outcomes for the public. It should be as strategic and integrated a process as commissioning, and absolutely linked to it.” Cassie noted in an earlier blog that if you change the words “service improvement” to “systemic health” or “systems change” and it highlights how a process of renewal is healthy and necessary. It is clear that the language we use and the stories that emerge are key to the processing of loss. In this recent New Yorker piece here Kim Stanley Robinson explores how The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations. 

Covid-19 and loss

Our work is being undertaken in the shadows of a far greater loss - that of human life during the Covid-19 crisis, which is disproportionately affecting People of Colour across the UK. Covid-19 is seeing an emergent commentary, analysis and imagining on loss during Covid 19. The twitter account Death in the age of Covid is a useful contemporary archive of articles, comment and resources on all sorts of loss emerging through the Covid-19 crisis. 

Other articles that have caught our eye include this interview with David Kessler for Harvard Business Review. In this piece for the Guardian, Yuban Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, explores whether coronavirus will return us to more traditional and accepting, attitudes towards dying – or reinforce our attempts to prolong life? This New Yorker diary of 24 hours in the crisis. These reflections from a bereavement nurse in the New Statesman on the ways grief is being shaped by Covid-19. And this New Yorker piece by Lauren Collins on her experience of losing her father during (but not due to) Covid: ‘We are left to face this with what we have: our hearts, beating sadness and love, and our imaginations, this underused magical power.’

This Human Moment from a collective including On Being has hosted a series of weekly online gatherings to help organisations and their teams regain access to their highest capabilities as human beings, and discover the resilience, calm and creativity we’ll need to move through the COVID-19 crisis—and walk together to make the future. Sessions have fused the powerful storytelling from beloved media brands with proven human change practices—interspersed with moments of artistic performance and inspiration. Their tools here are a valuable tool for all those looking not just to navigate this time but to find and create flourishing on the other side. Each session tracks to the stages of collective trauma, grief, and ultimately renewal - ‘reckoning with darkness’ is of particular value for those considering loss at this time. 

Alex Evans, Casper Ter Kuile and Ivor Williams’ This Too Shall Pass is a powerful call to step towards loss. ‘Although grief is painful, we must recognise the importance of honouring it, both individually and collectively, and of allowing it to unfold in its own time rather than holding it to a timetable. Seeking to avoid it only makes things worse… Our ability to grieve well and discern these gifts is helped enormously when we are able to draw on shared myths, rituals and practices that assist us in making sense of life even as we grapple with loss and despair.’

If you have thoughts on what we should be reading / listening to / understanding as we seek to understand how to steward loss in civil society, we’d love to hear from you. Join a loss circle for civil society practitioners and leaders here; complete our survey here; or contact me if you’d be up for being interviewed on this topic

I was given an Ideas & Pioneers award!

Late last Summer, when I was anticipating my contract at The National Lottery Community Fund to be coming to an end in March 2020, I applied to the Paul Hamlyn Foundation for an Ideas & Pioneers Award to scope out my idea of a Farewell Fund.

I’m very grateful that they awarded me one! Thank you to Jake and the whole Paul Hamlyn team. The award was confirmed early in January this year and I hadn’t announced it yet because it was then to become part of the Foundation Design Lab which I shared news of yesterday.

Obviously since I sent in my application and designed the work we would do, the wider world has changed dramatically (and I also have a new job). It now feels wholly inappropriate to call this the Farewell Fund given that many organisations and groups in civil society will not survive the impacts of Covid-19, not just in the immediate term but as the consequences play out over time.

The work still does feel important though, and differently relevant in this Great Unravelling.

“We will be asked to decide what we want to preserve about our world and ourselves, and what we want to discard.”

Nick Cave

It’s too early to quite know where to land this work now, but some of the questions that I’m thinking about are —

• We know that in the recovery and rebuilding of civil society some organisations will be left behind — this will be painful, and is there something we can do with this work that helps support that loss?

• Generally there already is, and will continue to be, a swell of grief all around us. Is there something we can do with this work to make that grief visible and more of a shared experience across civil society? Are there public, sector-wide type rituals that this work could help develop?

“We’re feeling a number of different griefs. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air. we’re also feeling anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain.”

HBR article.

“There’s a term to describe the kind of loss many of us are experiencing: ambiguous grief. In ambiguous grief, there’s a murkiness to the loss. Ambiguous grief can leave us in a state of ongoing mourning.”

NYT article.

• Covid-19 will ultimately contribute to multiple forms of bereavement and loss. People are already talking about recovery and rebuild, but it’s very likely that unless there is support to process grief people and organisations could enter a ‘non-recovery’ phase. Can this work help with processing that grief across civil society to make recovery possible?

• Whilst some loss will be painful, there will be things we want to leave behind. Can we use this work to design how to do that well? This feels most similar to my original proposal. This might include behaviours and beliefs we want to leave behind too, not just organisations.

• Similarly, there will be organisations that whilst painful to lose, we may also recognise have had their time — were flailing in some way already, perhaps because their place in the world didn’t quite fit anymore. Could we use this work to create space for people to come to terms with loss, to find acceptance, and most importantly to help build a legacy from the work they’ve done?

“Acceptance, as you might imagine, is where the power lies. We find control in acceptance.”

• We are already seeing a lot more cooperation in parts of civil society, and recognition of interdependencies. Is this a time for more organisations to fold into each other and could we focus this project on that?

Lastly, I wrote about the importance of compassion in my original blog and as Scott Berinato says about this time — “ It’s a good time to stock up on compassion. Everyone will have different levels of fear and grief and it manifests in different ways.”

If you have ideas about any of the above, and how we can reframe The Farewell Fund to be useful in the crisis, then please do get in touch with myself or Iona — she’s now on board to help deliver the work.

As a side note, I’d like to share that as an application process this was one of the most straightforward and supportive I’ve ever come across and if anyone wants any help to submit one to the programme, I’d be happy to give advice.

How do we help things to die?

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I don’t mean people, I mean organisations.

It’s been on my mind for a while now. How do we close things down that are no longer working?

Thinking so much about the impacts of technology on society for the last few years, and especially the longer term consequences, I’ve become even more aware of what’s being displaced by technology, being made redundant because of it and how it’s changed public expectations. It’s also laying bare that our needs as a society are evolving — as we try to adjust to a data-driven world.

“In all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it” — The impact of the internet on society.

But it’s not just because of technology that things change and some things continue to exist even if they no longer serve a purpose or are fit for purpose.

It’s a painful realisation, a hard truth, but from where I’m standing, we can’t possibly make the kind of giant leaps we need to make without letting go of some things. And to really understand what we now need, and especially what the social sector now needs to provide, it might only be through clearing space, that we’re able to see and understand that.

Charlie Leadbetter and Laura Bunt wrote a report way back in 2012 called the Art of Exit. It was ahead of its time. It’s one of the only pieces of work I know that directly deals with how to decommission things that are no longer working. Their work was focussed entirely on the public sector. I’m interested in what this looks like for the social sector and civil society. They were looking at how you could do this creatively. I’m interested in how you can do it ethically and intelligently — with compassion.

I’m especially interested in how to design a fund that exists solely to close things down responsibly, kindly and intelligently — in the social sector.

We are going to need to (and quite urgently) shift resources out of the old, no longer fit-for-purpose system to fuel the growth of an alternative system — see my previous post. An ability to do this, and to do it well, will be vital throughout the developed world in the next decade.

It’s not enough to just keep increasing the supply of promising ideas, this needs to be matched by just as sophisticated an approach to dismantling things and closing them down.

This is going to be an enquiry for me this year and I’ll be researching it, designing it, prototyping different elements of it — and then who knows, maybe eventually we will be able to raise some money to start the first ever Farewell Fund.

Approaching this as a design enquiry as I’m really interested in the how as much as the what, these are some of the questions and areas I’ll look at.

Wider social context

Perceptions and understanding about endings and death reflect the social climate in which they take place so I will be drawing on other perspectives and influences from across the social sciences and culture. What are the analogies and practices we can draw for the Farewell Fund from end of life care, grief therapy, our relationship to endings more widely, our cultural relationships to old and new, the care (or lack of) that surrounds people and things that are dying in comparison to the emphasis and attention we place on the new (babies and start-ups).

The cyclical view of time helps to shift our sense of an ending, which is always an echo of our fear of death. We need to complete, to close well — understanding that this is what makes space for the next cycle. A second Enlightenment perspective pays attention to endings as much as beginnings (‘start-ups’), hospice work for the dying culture as much as midwifery for the new.

From the International Futures Forum.

Recognition that it’s time

When is the right time to close something down? And who gets to decide? I’ll be looking at what it takes for that realisation to happen, what that feels like, and how an application to the Farewell Fund could help with that.

Aspects of this will include what gives people a sense of permission and a willingness to hold up their hand and say “this is no longer working”? To admit that they no longer know what to do and it’s an endless struggle to survive. I have a fantasy that there are organisations in the social sector that might feel a real relief if they were able to say that and know that there was a way out.

It’s also interesting to think about what would be needed to make the case? What would an application to the Farewell Fund look like? In Art of Exit they talk about “often evidence is not substantive enough to make decisions to disinvest in what is currently provided” but what if it was more like an ‘Invitation to Participate’ rather than a calling out?

Framing and narrative

In the Art of Exit they talk about “Decommissioning could be understood as a process of service improvement, driven by a search for better outcomes for the public. It should be as strategic and integrated a process as commissioning, and absolutely linked to it.” They also viewed change through a service lens — “decommissioning could be understood as a process of service improvement, driven by a search for better outcomes for the public. It should be as strategic and integrated a process as commissioning, and absolutely linked to it” — but you could change the words “service improvement” to “systemic health” or “systems change” and it highlights how a process of renewal is healthy and necessary.

What is the language and what are the narratives that help, prompt and honour endings to happen? Is it the idea of renewal and making space for something new or different? Is it acknowledgment of your contribution to the sector or field of work? When I was doing my ORSC training I read a book called Working With Loss and Grief and there are a lot of useful, practical exercises that could be redesigned from their focus on individuals to be used with organisations.

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Preparation

How do we prepare for closing things down? So that it is not prompted by short-term crisis but designed in a way and in a timeframe that is compassionate and respectful. Can we help people anticipate it and even rehearse it? What does good preparation look like?

Designing the transition — emotionally

Running through this whole enquiry will be a focus on the practical design of the fund as well as the psychology of it. When doing my MSc in Positive Psychology we learnt about what helps people meet adversity — resourcefulness (qualities of flexibility, courage and perseverance), positive perspective (hope — and a capacity to make sense of the experience), social embeddedness (where support is available) and where events are attributed to external factors, not the self.

“Choice my not prevent uncertainty or ambivalence in facing change but it is likely to reduce the sense of powerlessness that comes with loss.” — Working With Loss and Grief

Psychologically it’s also important to acknowledge people carrying around a feeling of unfulfilled potential, which comes with loss.

“Unfulfilled ambition may be carried as private loss over a long period of time. Morley (1996) calls it ‘grieving for what has never been.”

Care will be necessarily designed in all the way through. Care with the relationships, care with all the people — I love the poem below by John Smith, called The Gift.

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Designing the transition — practically

On a practical level there are all kinds of things that need understanding and designing. What would it cost to close something down well? What are those costs? What kind of timeframes? What happens with all the ‘assets’?

The wisdom and legacy

A core part of the Farewell Fund will be to ensure that any organisation that is closing down is resourced to really draw out all of its wisdom. In any organisation there is all kinds of learning and stories to tell. What would a process look like that drew out this wisdom, made it useful to the wider social sector, and left those involved feeling proud of their work and engaged in its legacy?

Recognising power

Power is definitely a part of this too — from the initial question of who decides when something ends? To in whose interest are we keeping something running? In the Art of Exit they made this excellent point — “there is a risk that services that provide for a less visible or vocal constituency or a smaller demographic can be vulnerable to pressures for decommissioning.” So that would also be something to be aware of.

The consequences

I know I should’t underestimate the consequences of closing things down.

Given the adverse effects of closure, exit and decommissioning decisions — the costs of redundancies, risks to service users and consumers, the impact on providers and communities — this aspect of innovation has been neglected, and holds strong, negative connotations. Our aim in this research was to shed some light on how this can be a part of a more constructive process of change, geared towards improvement.

Is there a way to mitigate for some of these consequences? To situate them in to a more constructive, hopeful and creative process of change? And can it be done in a way that is responsible (considerate of all potential consequences), kind (people feel respected, cared for and valued), and intelligent (the history,the learning, the wisdom and the assets have been successfully absorbed in to the new)?

Healing

Lastly, what happens afterwards? How do you design a process of healing and restoration? For the people involved and the wider set of relationships and systems of which it was a part. How do you help people adjust, to cope and to make sense of the change?

What’s next ?

I’ve already been doing some reading, revisiting end of life work I did with Doteveryone and thinkpublic, the Uncomfortably Alive projects I was doing back in 2014, keeping in touch with Being & Dying and digging in to some articles (listed below)and books that Graham Leicester recommended — Ernest Becker’s ‘Denial of Death’ and Stanley Keleman ‘Living Your Dying.’ Graham described them as “offering equal and opposite cultural views: the one that we live our lives unconsciously avoiding the reality of death, the other that everything we do is unconsciously shaped by that knowledge. If all change is also loss, it matters which unconscious pattern is in play in any ‘change’ process.”

Each week I will write a short post as I undertake research, do interviews and start the design and prototyping work of imagining the Farewell Fund. If you want to get involved or have any suggestions for reading, people to meet with and interview etc, then please do get in touch.

Graham’s list.

• The critical one is the link to the ‘five principles for a second enlightenment’, specifically the ‘shift in our relationship with time.”

• I wrote about death and dying and end of life decisions in a blog post here. Note the reference to the SHINE programme, our comprehensive ‘systems change’ work to change the culture of care, which started with a shift to ‘grown up conversations about living and dying.’

• And balancing the twin tasks of hospice work and midwifery is the first of the ‘ten critical characteristics of transformative innovation’ in this essay for the Singapore Civil Service College on the policymaker of the future.

Hospicing The Old

In 2010 I was introduced to the Berkana Institutes’s Two Loop model, and I come back to it again and again. As I’ve moved across different projects and jobs, it’s still the best way I’ve found to place myself in the system and what kind of role I’m playing. At Government Digital Service and the Co-op I was working in the dominant system trying to do the transition work. At Tech for Good Global, our whole purpose was centred around illuminating the pioneers and trying to build community so that the field grew in coherence. And a lot of the Point People’s work has been about connecting, building and nourishing networks across both systems.

It’s worth watching their short video that I’ve linked to above but I’ve also tried to sketch it out below, as I understand it.

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In essence it shows a dominant system that is dying, and an emergent system that has the potential to become the system of influence. As the dominant system reaches its peak, new pioneers emerge (1), recognising that the dominant system (however impossible and far away that might seem) is beginning to decline.

The emergent system

It’s important that this new, emergent system is named and that the pioneers, the people and organisations building alternatives are connected together (2), and the work they are doing, illuminated.

Through this illumination and nurturing they form communities of practice (3)and grow more coherence as a field. As they do, more people and organisations join.

Illumination is also necessary to show a path for transition from the dying system to the alternative, emergent system. I also marked on here those people that create an alternative system but remain on the edges or disconnected from the main influence of the system(4). These are the people that take themselves off to build new communities, living in alternative ways, but turn their back on any responsibility for anyone else.

The dominant system — but a system in decline

Of course a lot of what goes on in the dominant system is trying to crush the alternatives that are appearing in the emergent system.

It helps when there are people in the dominant system who work to protect and enable those alternatives as they emerge, whether through funding, new policies, different kinds of commissioning etc — holding the space for pioneers to do their work.

There are people that help keep the dominant system stable as it dies — this is important because there is still a lot that is dependent on that system.

Others work to help people and organisations transition from the existing, dominant system — helping make tangible how to do things in a new way and showing them what is happening in the emergent system. I always picture these people as doing hand-holding work — walking alongside organisations to cross the “transition bridge.” Some make it, others don’t.

But it’s the last role that I’m particularly interested in at the moment. The Hospice Worker role. As the dominant system starts to decline, they provide care and compassion for those that are dying and alleviate the pain.

The need to close things down, dismantle them, end things, is a natural part of change, but I don’t think we do it very well. I don’t think there is a well designed practice around it. And that’s the start of a new enquiry for me — The Farewell Fund — introduced in my next post.