Closing Remarks #54: The Endings Pipeline

Wow, what a week, y’all! Those of us on the left are looking forward to a new year that brings us a shift in leadership, while currently basking in the glow that comes with smashing the fash. As a radical who has been burned by electoralism (yet still reluctantly participates!), I am giving myself a week to feel hope and enjoy this victory lap before I go sliding back into worry and skepticism.

For better or worse, that worry and skepticism will be seasonally-appropriate, as this is also typically the time of the year is also when I start fretting about the new year. As a consultant, I get to Q4 and my brain starts swirling in my head, “Why didn’t I hustle more? Who did I forget to follow up with? Which events did I FOOLISHLY miss? Whither my PIPELINE!! 😱”

The nature of being a consultant is consistent uncertainty and the message from the Consultant Industrial Complex is that you gotta Always Be Closing. However, the truth of the matter is I’ve always hated sales people and being salesy. I never wanna push products or services on people that don’t want them or can’t afford them. This approach might be me leaving money on the table, but I am probably always gonna just be going where my curiosity takes me and where people are genuinely excited about what I bring to the table. I am not sure how to fashion a pipeline out of that, but I guess I’ll keep trying!

Here are the links:

For 22 years, Oregon’s Trauma Healing Project has helped to promote and develop trauma-informed practices in health care, education, behavioral health, victim services, child welfare, public safety and community organizations across the Eugene region. However, changes in the funding landscape for health and social services forced this untimely sunset.

True to its mission, it is working to find partners who can carry the work forward so that they can transition out in a way that does the least harm.

North Carolina’s Buncombe County Rescue Squad grew from a 1964 search for a lost child into six decades of neighbors volunteering to support neighbors through medical crises and even hurricanes. However, a strengthening of local government and nonprofit resources and services means that their help is no longer needed.

“This is not a story of failure. It is a story of a mission fulfilled,” the squad said.

As they wind down, the squad plans to donate as much equipment as possible to local nonprofit emergency service agencies affected by Hurricane Helene. Leaders are currently accepting requests from organizations in need and plan to make decisions shortly after operations end.

On 7 October 2026, Vladimir Putin’s 54th birthday, the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was found dead in the elevator of her apartment building. At the time, she was covering the war in Chechnya for her employer, the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Last week, the paper announced that after decades of repression and the loss (murder!) of many of their colleagues, they have finally succumbed to the state’s pressure campaign..

Beaten as they may be, the editorial team minced no words in their announcement:

They killed us. On November 9, we will turn off the lights in the home where we have lived for 30 years, shut down our servers, and leave. The newspaper no longer exists. Russian authorities and Russian security services forced the editorial staff to stop working.

As part of this unfortunate retreat, the Anna Politkovskaya museum, which is located in her former office at Novaya Gazeta, will also close.

“Hell on Hall Street is the story of how we closed a hellhole jail here in St. Louis. It’s a story that is hopeful and ambitious and more than anything, motivational. For me, the whole point of the story is: How do we inspire other people in other cities to close the hellhole jail that is impacting their communities?“

Another banger from The Marshall Project, this time an interview with Inez Bordeaux, a formerly-incarcerated local activist, who led the fight to close The Workhouse. Last year, the community succeeded in closing (and demolishing!) that vermin-filled hellhole, where people too poor to make bail were warehoused for mostly petty crimes while they awaited trial.

Click here for the Hell On Hall Street trailer. It looks so inspirational!

“Historically, ‘every group founding a town — before they had clean water, before they had public schools — they would seem to build a college,’ said John Thelin, an emeritus professor at the University of Kentucky and author of A History of American Higher Education.’It gave a legitimacy, a stature, a sense of purpose.’”

I’ve long written here about the seemingly unending wave of college closures — by some measures, over 25% of U.S. private colleges could be gone in the next decade. While the impact of the learning facilities alone is devastating, the stories and stats don’t often give us the full sense of how hollowed out these towns become in the aftermath. A recent piece in Governing journal explores the dent all these empty campuses leave in their cities.

“Part of what makes many university museums so vulnerable to cuts and closures is their funding model. According to data from the AAMG (the American Association for Museums and Galleries), the typical academic museum receives about 60 percent of its operating budget from its academic institution, making some attractive targets for administrators looking to close budget gaps.“

An additional aspect of the college closure avalanche is all the centers and programs that get the axe in the desperate flail to keep the core university to close. Museums are especially crunchy things to shut down because not only is it a building and staff but you are sitting on valuable artifacts that can’t just be piled up on the curb.

“We live at a time when endings are all around us. But endings are never straightforward. An ending may be made up of many moments. Sometimes, we don’t know when things have truly receded from our world, and it can be difficult to determine what to care about, how and when. Questions about what to save become terribly real.”

In this beautiful photo essay, writer Kat Hill explores responses to and sacrifices made in the face of climate change along the coastlines of the UK.

Yours in the end,
Camille