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Author: camilleacey

  • Closing Remarks #45: Beyond Inventory

    It has become cliché to compare various life experiences to dating, be it job hunting, looking for a roommate, picking a real estate agent or whatever. However, the cliché (as clichés do) often falls pretty flat in most situations because there is a clear power imbalance — someone has the power to give or deny you a job you want, a room in an apartment you like, money to fuel a project you want to pursue. Sure, you can ask a few questions and try to sniff out a few red flags but you cant go rifling through files or linen closets doing a top to bottom inspection.

    You’re kinda at their mercy.

    I’ve been thinking about this as more and more ties to philanthropy are revealed in the Epstein email tranches. There is Bill Gates doing (super!)unsavory things but also less bolder faced names thanking each other for charitable contributions and inviting each other to fundraising galas. It all really stinks not only to have proof of our suspicions about these people but also see it spilled in black and white. And what is even worse is the way it might tarnish some of the very worthy causes linked to these unsavory men.

    However, the fact of the matter is we’ve been here all along. The exchange of virtue and fig leaves for funds has under-girded this sector since the beginning. With every drop of documents and files, many pray for a reckoning but a reckoning is just an inventory. It helps to know what’s there. But change comes from shifting and taking power, not just knowing where it lies.

    1) Beloved SF cultural center buckles

    After almost a half-century of lively Latino dance, theater, film, education, and other arts-related programming, San Francisco’s Mission Cultural Center for the Latino Arts has closed. Despite brave attempts to downsize and even closing the space for a time to stabilize things, the group continued to hemorrhage funds and could not hold on. The building, which was already scheduled for retrofitting due to flood damage, has been ceded back to the San Francisco Arts Commission; while their vast collection of political screen prints is being temporarily archived by partners. Meanwhile, the remaining board leaders have vowed to regroup and chart a course forward.

    2) School created as provocation ordered closed

    Riverstone Academy was opened in August 2025 as a rogue attempt to siphon government funds for religious education in Colorado. The school has been embattled since the start with the state threatening to withhold funds and the kooks at Riverstone threatening to sue for religious discrimination (what the actual?).

    Ultimately, the county found that the industrial building where the “school” was located was unable to meet the building, fire, health, or zoning requirements and needed to be vacated. It remains to be seen whether these people try to move the operation elsewhere or online. Ayiyi.

    3) Royal-related charity collapses under controversy

    These days, many of us here in the US are looking across the pond and around the world to the ways they are holding their leaders to account for corruption and collusion (hat tip Brasil! Korea! Norway!). One of the latest to fall is Sarah Ferguson, the former Dutchess of York, who was found to have been communicating with Epstein while he was in prison for child abuse; Ferguson’s charity, Sarah’s Trust, has announced indefinite suspension and her companies have been dissolved. This comes on the heels of Fergie being dropped as a patron or ambassador from a series of charities last year.

    Here’s to actions having consequences, folks!

    4) Youth jails stay open despite long-standing order, brighter future envisioned

    In 2017, then-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie ordered the closure of two youth lockups, the New Jersey Training School in Monroe and the Female Secure Care and Intake Facility in Bordentown. However, seven years later the two buildings remain stubbornly open as they wait for replacement facilities to be constructed.

    Recently, a youth justice working group lead by the state’s outgoing attorney general released a report envisioning how the government might use the sites once they are finally vacated. Their suggestions include a school, vocational and career training, reentry programming, affordable housing, recreational uses, a heritage center that tells the story of the sites, or a New Jersey Center for Peace and Restorative Justice modeled after the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama, which are part museum and part memorial.

    The group was insistent that the locations should no longer be used for correctional purposes.

    5) Road crash victim support charity slams the brakes

    For over three decades, RoadPeace offered a peer support network for people who’d lost loved ones through crashes and also did advocacy for survivors and road safety. Founded by Brigitte Chaudhry MBE following the death of her son in 1990 and her shock at the casual attitude shown to road casualties and their victims.While the organization’s leadership expressed sadness at the closure due to financial sadness. Many staff members and other stakeholders state they were blindsided by the suddenness and felt like it could have been done with more care.

    6) How To Shut Down A Business

    “When it’s time to unwind, you literally need to take off all of the Legos one by one . . . If you take them off in the wrong order, that can also cause issues.”

    Big thanks to Emily Goligoski for including me in this fantastic article in the Financial Times about the rise in services and service providers for winding down businesses and nonprofits. It was an honor and so cool to discover a few new peers in the space!

    7) How To Close Your Worker Co-Op With Dignity

    Thanks to my comrade, Mike Strode, and the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives for including me in this guide for worker-run cooperatives facing closure. My roots in activism are in housing and worker cooperatives so this feels like a full-circle moment.

    Yours in the end,
    Camille

  • Closing Remarks #44: Field or Guild?

    After the day wrapped at the Deceleration Assembly last year, I snaked through the chilly but bustling evening streets of beautiful Birmingham, UK with a tight group of colleagues. After hours in deep discussion with other endings practitioners, we were concerned. So many of the fantastic people we met were bright and full of great ideas but they were almost always ever outside consultants, carpetbagging from engagement to engagement. They were making a small impact here and there, but mostly living without the security of a steady paycheck and struggling to effect the field-shifting impact that most of us were hoping for. We wondered to ourselves, “Does closure consultant need to be a job? Is that the way endings should happen?” Despite all doing this work, we weren’t quite sure we should be in the business of field building. We parted ways still chewing on the question.

    A few months later — still chewing — I spoke to one of the friends I’d walked with and confessed to her that I really didn’t think that building an army of closure consultants would be the way to get these ideas and practices embedded into organizations. I’d like to see founders and operations people and compliance teams working on ending things in careful and conscious ways. I’d like people to have more examples of great sunsets and for fewer leaders to have to hang their heads in shame and speak in hushed tones about their struggles to keep their organizations going or their decisions to close.

    But how do we get from here and now to then and there? Well, I think that is gonna take communities of practitioners and thinkers and writers sharing amongst ourselves and also across sectors. Less field building and more guild building. In nature (yes, I know, oof another nature analogy but bear with me!), a guild is “group of species that exploit the same resources, or that exploit different resources in related ways.”
    So by this I mean, instead of building a professional field that we want to see and grow into perpetuity, we focus on the creation and dissemination of practices. While some of us will (like me!) be working independently as consultants, others will come from organizations and foundations, contributing some of their on-the-clock time to build a common language, share resources, define best practices and also to use our collective might to push these ideas forward. The work would be in building the systems and standards and fostering their adoption, rather than trudging from company to company as outsiders merely accompanying bespoke wind downs. It would ultimately be training and enablement work that ensures these ideas are always in the building, in the waters we swim, in the arm we breath.

    But don’t hold me to any of that. I am still chewing.

    Here are this week’s links:

    1) 100 Year-Old UK charity makes it biggest — and perhaps only –impact by closing down

    The National Fund was established in 1928 with £500,000 (£40 million in today’s money) and the intention of helping Great Britain pay off its national debt incurred during World War I. The fund managers continued to collect funds for the cause for another almost 60 years, but no funds were ever paid out! An investigation in 2021 revealed the existence of this strange horde, and this year the government was finally able to get the group to hand over the money — which had grown to over £600 million — to the national treasury – and finally fulfill its original purpose.

    2) As a nursery goes, a garden grows

    After 45 years of business, Shades of Green plant nursery in San Antonio, Texas is going out of business. However, as it winds down, it is ceding the land to a non-profit to be turned into permanent green space for the community, a sprawling metropolis that is increasingly short on gardens and parks.

    3) Woman voter group wanes

    Since its founding in 2019, Supermajority has worked to rally American female voters around Democratic candidates. Despite big name founders like BLM’s Alicia Garza and Cecile Richards, the late former president of Planned Parenthood, a shift in political winds has forced the group to disband. The group is laying off 22 staff members and sending their community in the direction of more grassroots-based efforts.

    4) New podcast alert! Good Bye The Myriad Series

    Join friends of the newsletter, Alison Lucas and Lizzie Bentley, as they expand on the themes from the best-selling 2025 book Good Bye. Every episode they focus on a specific ending and the challenges and opportunities that come with it. (listen here!)

    5) Strike delivers a heavy sentence for PA newspaper

    The Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper Pittsburgh Post-Gazette descends from the Pittsburgh Gazette that was established in 1786 as the first newspaper published west of the Allegheny Mountains. The paper formed under its present title in 1927 from the consolidation of the Pittsburgh Gazette Times and The Pittsburgh Post. In 2022, staff walked out of the newsroom and held strong in a strike until late 2025, when they emerged seemingly victorious from the longest strike in US newspaper history as well as the longest employee strike ever in Pittsburgh.

    However, the celebrations were short-lived. Just as few weeks after the newsroom spun back up, PG’s (Pro-Trump) owners Block Communications announced that they were putting the paper out of business. While owners claim the decision was due to financial losses, this Drop Site article paints a more complicated picture.

    6) Long-running California arts college bids a mournful goodbye

    The California College of the Arts, Northern California’s last-remaining nonprofit arts school, has announced that the 2026-2027 academic year will be its last. After over a century of operations, the school’s leadership have found themselves in too much of a hole to paint a new picture for the failing institution.

    When they depart the campus, the space will be taken over by Nashville-based Vanderbilt University.

    7) Cyber breach brings down a housing group

    In announcing that they were folding, Vermont’s Randolph Area Community Development Corporation stated an all too familiar cause — a significant decline in federal funds. However, a deeper dive revealed that part of their woes stemmed from a major cyber-financial crime. When scammers infiltrated RACDC’s email system through a phishing attack, exploiting vulnerabilities in their Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, the organization not only lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, they also lost the confidence of their donors.

    Yours in the end,
    Camille

  • Closing Remarks #43: On Being The Light

    Do we owe endings solemnity?

    Recently a friend recounted to me the story of going to see a relative who was in end of life care. My friend and her partner arrived to the facility, unintentionally dressed in bright colors. Bounding into their relative’s hospital room, they regaled the patient with stories of a joyous recent trip. At a certain point they caught themselves, wondering whether the way they were dressed, acting, speaking was inappropriate. They wondered,“Do we owe this moment solemnity? Are we defiling this moment with our joy and laughter?”

    As the two visitors walked out of the room for what would sadly be the last time, the nurses beckoned the two to the nurses’ station. It turns out they wanted to thank the friends for coming and bringing an energy and levity that was very often missing in what was, of course, a very somber place. Though some lives were nearing the end, the two energetic visitors’ light was shining into the situation — bringing joy to those whose lives would keep going on.

    This isn’t to say there isn’t a respect and seriousness that we need to bring to endings — there certainly should be! However, when we have the time to end with care, there should always be room for levity, humor, and light.

    May you have a little of all of it in the coming year!

    1) Community-run bookstore closes its own books
    Malvern Book Cooperative was established in 2012 when patrons of the St. Ann’s bookstore in Malvern (Worcestshire, UK) came together to save the town’s only bookstore from going out of business. However, after 14 years, the group felt it was time to wrap things up. Though the store will close in March, the group promises to continue to support community literacy events and festivals in and around the town.

    2) Bitter pill for beloved Chinese Pharmacy in Manila
    Lui Chuon was opened in Manila’s Binondo District in 1951 by Chinese immigrant Ng Tong. For years it retained its family ownership and old-world charm as the neighborhood around it grew and modernised. However, deaths, retirements, and disinterest from the new generation forced the decision to close.

    The family is now in discussions to donate some of their old relics to a neighborhood museum. (BTW, the pictures in the article really make it worth the click!)

    3) Former inmate buys closed North Carolina prison, plans to convert to rehabilitation center
    While we’ve all heard the old chestnut about the “inmates running the asylum”, in this case we’ve got a formerly incarcerated businessman, one Kerwin Pittman, who has purchased the decommissioned Wayne Correctional facility. Pittman was locked up in this very system, and he is repurposing this prison in order to support other folks transitioning back into civilian life. The site is about 19 acres and sits across the street from the Neuse Correctional Institution.

    I don’t know how this will go, but the model is intriguing and I wish them a lot of success!

    4) Indigenous education nonprofit wins bid for shuttered university
    When the trustees of New York’s Wells College voted to shut down the school after nearly 160 years, it set off a fierce bidding war for new owners of the sprawling campus. Early this year, it was announced that the deed had been sold to The Hiawatha Institute for Indigenous Knowledge (HIIK). HIIK is an educational entity established in 2011. Its mission is to create a fully accredited university which is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Native technologies, sciences, languages and arts of the Nation’s first peoples.

    HIIK has an ambitious plan to bring economic revitalization, vibrant community space, and affordable housing to the land, which will be held as a community trust, along with the establishment of the new university.

    5) Portland loses beloved paint recycling depot
    For over 30 years. MetroPaint provided the people of Portland, Oregon with a place to safely dispose of old paint and also buy recycled paint — sometimes in exciting new colors! However, the rollout of a statewide paint recycling initiative meant that Metro was no longer necessary.

    6) Civic tech incubator changes form
    Since 2018, CivStart has promoted government tech enablement and the growth of startups developing tools for local governments. In December, the board determined that retaining their 501(c)3 status was no longer in support of their mission. The group will spend the next few months winding down the non-profit and pulling resources into their for-profit Civic Ventures platform.

    7) ARTICLE: Do you know where your exits are?: Why responsible charities are always thinking about closure
    “Planning for closure does not weaken a charity’s commitment to its purpose. It strengthens it. It recognises that impact is not only about how an organisation grows, but also about how it ends. A charity that closes well protects people, preserves trust, and honours the work already done. Journeys end whether we plan for them or not. The question is whether charities choose their exits, or pretend they do not exist until the road runs out.”

    Great LinkedIn article     by two charity sector professionals in the UK who I hadn’t heard about until a good pal tagged me on their post. Thanks, good pal! It is always so cool to find The Others.

    Lui Chon was also a chill place to hang in the neighborhood.

  • Careening Through Year Two

    My word, how is it 2026 already? It feels like just yesterday, I was a little babe in the woods pestering everyone I know about whether there was someone — anyone — out there thinking about how to do endings well in civil society. And here we are, two years into this project and every morning I wake up and the response keeps being, “The work is still on you, boo, it’s on YOU!”

    Fortunately this past year was another amazing one of continuing to find the scattered others out there who are working on wind downs, sharing about shutterings, and seeking out sponsors for sunsets. So I wanted to take a second to capture a brief rundown of The Wind Down’s second year of operations — the highlights, the low points, and what is on the horizon for this bright year 3 of its life.

    The Bright Spots

    The People

    As mentioned, I met so many fantastic people this last year. Between hosting the monthly community sessions and attending the fantastic Deceleration Assembly, I met and got to deepen relationships with so many fantastic people who incepted new ideas into my gray matter and pointed me in cool new directions or even just went along with me on wild goose chases and flights of fancy (I am looking at you, Tess!).

    Some of the folks I am most grateful for are all the fantastic folks in the Slack community, Jessica Meyerson at Educopia, Katya Fels Smyth (who fearlessly shuttered Full Frame Initiative this year), Naomi Hattaway, and the intrepid Kate Harris, Nonprofit Merger Mistress Supreme, who saw my museum and decided to close hers. If you’re looking at this and thinking I should have named you here…I did! It is in *invisible ink*. Yup.

    I am also grateful for the leaders who contacted the hotline or worked with me on longer engagements,shared so openly. and insisted that I (finally!) start charging for this work. I wasn’t sure when the time would be right, but folks just told me. They were like, “We are giving you money, and you can’t stop us.” Thank you for helping me put a dollar (or pound or euro!) amount on this work.

    The Places

    In 2025, I was able to take my work and ideas to the streets. In June, I was honored to sit on a panel for the great Women’s Leadership Council. In September, I facilitated a session at The Sidebar event that the Skoll Foundation supports on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

    Then in October, I hopped across the ocean to Birmingham, UK for The Deceleration Assembly hosted by our UK frenz at The Decelerator. I was stoked that my good (above-mentioned) pal Katya was there too. It was way too short but marvelous (my full review is here). I love being out and about amongst the people!

    The Things

    When I started working on The Wind Down, I jotted down a dream list of publications I would love to write for or be written about in: Stanford Social Innovation Review, Devex, and Nonprofit Quarterly. This year, I was in ALL THREE! What a thrill. I was even mentioned in Chronicle of Philanthropy. Look at me, ma, I;m in the papers!

    Last year, I invested in my tech stack, upping my game to use bespoke tools like Harvest (for invoicing and time tracking), Bigin (for tracking opportunities), and also moving over to Mailpoet for my newsletter. I also totally overhauled this here website. Hat tip to the great Joshua Christman for the website and the snazzy logo and the unwavering friendship and support (hire this man, y’all!)

    The Hard Knocks

    The Money

    This was probably one of the toughest years for me, financially. I just didn’t make much money on this and this was pretty much all I worked on last year. I had hoped my engagement with Joseph Rowntree Foundation would grow into something more fruitful, but they cut me and the Community of Practice project they were supporting off in February. It was a hard pill to swallow, but I soldiered on.

    Previous to this project, I spent more than a decade in tech where salaries and benefits and snacks (!) are a-flowin. The precarity in the social sector has been hard to wrap my mind around and I refuse to get used to it.However, I did have to accept it last year and do my best to live a full life on my savings and resourcefulness.

    The Supportive Community

    In 2024, the launch of TWD was coupled with the launch of another group called the IMMA Collective, an organization founded to give social impact solopreneurs a sense of community, support, and accountability. Being a part of IMMA gave me colleagues, cheerleaders, and people to share resources with and bounce ideas off of. Unfortunately, in April of 2025, I hit a wall with the group and couldn’t work things out. I stand by my decision to leave, but I also ache for the community I lost. I am a member of many groups, but none of them have (so far) filled the hole that IMMA left in my days and my heart.

    Hopes For Year Three

    I took my lumps this last year but also had some solid wins to build on. Moving into this new year, I am already entertaining some interesting opportunities.

    • Speaking – I have two speaking slots already, but I did have to turn another cool looking one down because they didn’t offer much in the way of travel support. Like I said, I love the peoples and the streets, so I will be out amongst them one way or another
    • Writing – I hope to post more here on this blog and also continue writing for civil society publications (and even publications not in this sector!). In a move that hearkens back to my punk rock youth, I am exploring doing some zines with a friend. I look forward to sharing those with you and leaving them at conferences and libraries and stuff!

      Hit me up if you wanna do in-person or virtual writing sessions. I need accountability partners!
    • Video – I started experimenting with video last year and still really believe the format has potential for spreading the word I am hoping to mess around with shorter form, especially if I can find some open source/non-algo-driven platforms to post them to.
    • Get paid or grow increasingly exasperated trying – Nothing more to really say here. I am gonna keep putting myself out there both for closures work and also non-closures paying work.

    What about you? How did it all turn out last year? What are you up to this year? I wanna know!

  • Closing Remarks #42: The Case of The Abandoned Mansion

    An abandoned old mansion

    Hi Friends!

    The other day I was talking to a friend about an organization that she had heard closed. We both stopped and looked at their website. It very much looked like the website of a going concern. It had a donate button and a mailing list signup and pictures from fairly recent events.

    Sliding over to the LinkedIn pages of some of the org’s leadership, they all seemed to be still working there. However, my friend said she had it on good authority that they had been closed for a little while now. This sort of thing happens to me not infrequently while writing this newsletter. I get a HOT TIP about a sunsetted org and I go trekking around the interwebs looking for confirmation that is indeed shut down, only to find no concrete proof of this allegation. It is like a house with all the lights on and a clean car parked in the driveway, but I can’t quite tell . I don’t usually go so far as to reach out. I have enough to write about here (and on the Museum of Closed NGOs page) that I don’t need to all go ringing doorbells to get any kind of “scoop”.

    That said, these situations do always get my mind spinning on the question of whose responsibility (if anyone’s!) it is or should be to flag that these are no longer operational My friend and I started chatting about beloved nonprofit sector gadfly Vu Le’s blogpost on “zombie missions”. Vu describes a zombie mission in this way

    “These orgs have missions that were once vital, but as needs change, or as other organizations overtake them in effectiveness, , they find themselves in denial..They become ‘zombie missions’. This usually leads to a lack of direction and purpose, perpetual morale issues, and constant staff turnover.“

    – Vu Le, “Zombie Missions:Organizations that should close but won’t”

    While these zombies are undoubtedly a problem, what I am lamenting here is less the orgs that stumble along half-dead than the orgs that know they are dead and never bother to let anyone else know in a clear way. What to call those that go off quietly into the night never to be heard of or from again? For now, all I can see in my mind is that persistent image of the house —likely still full of useful things — that slowly and mysteriously becomes a needlessly rundown mess.

    Here are this week’s links:

    1) New Jersey hospital flatlines
    After a failed emergency appeal to the state for funding, Jersey City’s Heights University Hospital was shuttered by its parent organization, Hudson Regional Hospital. According to the local union, the abrupt closing was in violation of local regulations and left around 120 medical employees scrambling to find roles in other hospitals in the parent system or seek employment elsewhere. Meanwhile, HRH is exploring alternative uses for the 150 year-old facility.

    2) LGBTQ center closes, dodgeball season in jeopardy
    The Fieldhouse at Studio West 117 was a pricey and ambitious effort to build an LGBTQ+ hub in Cleveland, Ohio. While no explanation was given for its shuttering after only three years, reports indicate conflict between the board and staff. Stonewall Sports Cleveland, a local LGBTQ+ nonprofit sports organization, which was one of many housed in the facility, is now frantically searching for a new space for the January 18th opening game of the gay dodgeball league.

    3) Pro-Israel LGBTQ group blows up

    For 15 years, A Wider Bridge attempted to fight antisemitism and connect queer Jews in the US with their peers in Israel, helping to promote a narrative of Israeli’s respect for human rights by way of a tolerance for its LGBTQ community. However, growing accusations of pinkwashing coupled with sexual misconduct charges against the group’s executive director, lead to increasing exclusion from US LGBTQIA+ coalitions and gatherings.

    Decreased funding was the main reason cited for the wind down. Their last day of operations will be December 31, 2025.

    4) Social isolation charity waves goodbye

    Vermont’s Social Tinkering was established in 2021 in the midst of the pandemic, in response to a growing epidemic of social isolation. While it has now marked its last gathering, it is celebrated for the number of initiatives it was able to launch in just a few short years. Their projects include many in-person meetups, an LGBTQ+ welcome campaign, nearly $200,000 in health equity grants awarded, and extensive public community programming.

    5) After 150 Years, California’s Sugar Beet Industry Comes to an End

    Policy wasn’t the only reason for the closing plants. In California, higher-value crops also displaced beets. For many years, while federal policy kept sugar at a relatively fixed price, the price for other crops kept rising—especially nuts.

    “That was a big surprise to a lot of people, how quickly almonds and pistachios expanded,” said Kaffka. “It was like printing money.”

    A great, longish read in Civil Eats explaining the how and why of the decimation of the Imperial Valley’s sugar beet industry. The loss of this critical contributor to California’s agricultural sector has had wide reaching implications for the surrounding communities, such that politicians and activists are still exploring how to fill the gap.

    6) The Colleges That Couldn’t Survive 2025

    At least 15 nonprofit institutions announced closures amid a difficult year for higher education as the sector navigated rising operating costs and political minefields amid a presidential transition.

    That number is down from last year when Inside Higher Ed tracked 16 closure announcements but up from 2023…

    Anyone who’s been hanging around these parts for a while won’t be too surprised to see this headline or this list from the journal Inside Higher Ed. 2025 was another rough year for institutions of higher learning, and this doesn’t even include the individual programs and centers that sadly came on the chopping block. Sadly 2026 is already shaping up to be another hot mess.

    UPCOMING EVENTS 

    Jan 26, 2026,  12-2pm EST
    Loss of Primary Source of Funding: A 4 Session Workshop Series by Educopia (register)
    Facing major funding loss? Get tools, frameworks, exercises, and peer learning to make strategic, thoughtful decisions for your organization

    Yours in the end,

    Camille