Author: camilleacey

The other day I went into the city to attend a day party memorializing the life of a beloved member of NYCs house music and ballroom communities. As I entered the venue, the organizer stamped the inside of my wrist (a practice that is customary at nightclubs. The stamp allows you to exit the club and return later without having to rejoin the line). It was a hot day and the club was muggy (it has a heated pool next to the dancefloor!), so when I departed I wasn’t coming back!

It wasn’t until I was on the subway ride home that I bothered to look at the stamp on my arm: it was a setting sun with the word SUNSET beneath it. It might be the stamp they always use there, but that afternoon it was a beautiful and subtle reminder that we all go.

Where have you seen or been given subtle reminders of inevitable endings in your work and life? How can we stamp SUNSET in more places?

Here are the links!

1) San Francisco pulls the plug on criminal justice partner

In 1964, The Own Recognizance (O.R.) Project emerged as a project of the San Francisco Bar Association to support local people who were arrested and could not afford to pay bail. In the early 2000s, the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project (SF Pretrial) arose as a standalone organization to continue carrying this work forward. The group not only helped ensure that roughly 1,800 defendants on its caseload made their court dates, but also got people social services like medication and housing that helped fight recidivism.

For the past year, nonprofit SF Pretrial has been fighting for its life after the city’s Superior Court’s leadership pushed to end their contract following a financial mismanagement scandal. SF Pretrial reportedly worked hard to rectify those problems, but it was not enough to salvage the relationship and keep the group up and running. The city insists the work can be handled by its own Adult Probation department. However, SF Pretrial’s board — whose members include a former SFPD chief and a former district attorney — has warned that a law enforcement agency tasked with tracking people who have not been convicted of any crime is problematic, and that transition (which already is missing its self-imposed transition timelines!) could create chaos in criminal courts already plagued by backlogs and lawyer shortages.

2) Mother’s labor of love homeless group forced to shut down after lease loss

Named after the founder’s late son Brian, who also experienced homelessness, Connecticut group Brian’s Angels provides unhoused people with survival items such as toiletries, nonperishable foods and clothing. The organization also offers a temporary shelter, as well as employment and banking support. Since the COVID pandemic in 2020, the center has also provided daily hot meal and bagged food.

After 11 years of using Prospect United Methodist Church, the church shocked the group when they suddenly decided not to renew the lease. Despite an outcry from the volunteers and community, the city of Bristol and the church did not relent, Instead, the the mayor insisted that the city already had a robust social safety net and that she was certain the gap could be filled by other social service orgs in the area.

3) San Francisco nonprofit photo gallery out of shots

After 52 years, SF Camerawork has shuttered (no pun intended this time). The nonprofit arts space was dedicated to contemporary photography served the Bay Area’s photographic community through exhibitions, publications, critique sessions and events.

The group cited widespread causes rising operating costs, declining public funding and changes to the “philanthropic landscape” — causes that have sadly lead to the demise of many other San Francisco cultural centers in the past year.

4) Northwestern Program of African Studies to end its near eight-decade chapter in higher education

Founded in 1948 by American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, the program was the first formal academic program focused on Africa and its study in the United States. Staff were not informed as to why the program was being sunsetted, nor what will be the future of Africa scholarship at the university.

I’m feeling a bit tender about this once. Northwestern was the first (maybe only?) university to offer a full correspondence course (with a whole set of cassette tapes I came across as a kid!) of my mother’s native language.

5) Closing Federal Prisons: A Winning Hand

Closures do unsettle the small towns where prisons sit. But a shuttered prison can find a second life. New York’s Arthur Kill Correctional Facility is now a film and television studio. Virginia’s former Lorton Reformatory is a mixed-use complex with housing and retail. Utah is turning a 600-acre former prison into homes and research space. Incarceration was never sound economic development, and research confirms it never worked as one.

An interesting editorial from the director of the Council on Criminal Justice (which, **trigger warning**, does seem to be a lot of cop and cop-adjacent “centrists” — but if they are down to close down some prisons then I guess I’ll chalk it up to the strange bedfellows you get in the Time of Monsters, right?)

6) How to Exit to Community: A Cookbook for Blockchain communities

Kudos to the BlockchainGov team for the launch of this handy (and FREE!) resource, which is a value little book for people in any and all sort of project communities. Don’t get it twisted; I DO NOT care about blockchain. Nuh uh.

7) Pace of college closings picks up, with more projected

“More than 440 of the nation’s private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities are now at risk. Fewer than half of students at colleges that close continue their educations..of those who do, only half go on to earn degrees. Some 670,000 students are enrolled at those (at-risk) colleges and universities…”

A perfect storm of declining birthrates, a reduction in international students due to attacks on immigration, political pressure, and a drop in overall in-person college attendance have resulted in a preciptious drop in college enrollment and a surge in closing campuses. This article in Hechinger Report covers what is happening, the ways states are responding, and how some creative people are cashing in.

8) Is the future of philanthropy impermanence? (video)

This is a great discussion between Glenn Galaich of the (spending out) Stupski Foundation alongside Santosh Ramdoss of the (also spending out) Gary Foundation.

Yours in the end,
Camille

P.S. Rest In Power, Ren!

Whew! How is it July already?

With travel to Boston, Barcelona, Marrakesh, and Lisbon, my June was eventful to say the least. I wanna start this edition of CR by thanking everyone who transported me and/or hosted me across the three continents. It was exhausting but illuminating and fun.

Amidst all the trains, planes, and automobiles I was whizzing around (and sometimes experiencing terrifying turbulence) in, a few weeks ago, I walked over to my local library and picked up the 1954 book The Man Who Never Died: A Play about Joe Hill, with Notes on Joe Hill and His Times.*. For those who aren’t familiar, Joe Hill was a working class Swedish immigrant who came to the US to do menial day labor. He ended up quickly learning English, joining the radical union movement with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and writing such iconic protest songs that he soon became the target of union-busting bosses across the country. One such boss — the owner of a copper mine — was so frustrated that he had Hill framed for murder and sentenced to die by firing squad. While activists and statesmen from Australia to D.C. attempted to stop the execution, Hill was eventually marched out to be killed amidst fervent protest. It is rumored that his final words to his comrades were, “Don’t mourn. Organize.”

While the story of Hill was inspirational to me in many ways —- I mean who doesn’t want to write such bangers that people are moved to shut down factory floors? —I did, however, take a bit of umbrage at his words. The story of radical social change is full of many wins but far more failures. It has birth, maturation, and the sting of far too many deaths. We see hopefully beginnings but also (as we well know) many devastating ends.

So it is that I remix Hill’s words to a phrase that is more fitting for the time we are in now, where we realize the importance of holding many emotions at once in order to do the critical inner work that will benefit our movements. To all of us in this moment, I say Mourn AND Organize; we can let the grief radicalize and embolden us even as the solidarity comforts us. We can absolutely do both!

*Shouts out to rapper/director Boots Riley for mentioning this book here and reminding me to do more reading on him! Go see I Love Boosters, folks!

Here are the links:

1) Beloved Maryland Food Co-Op Shuttered

Since the halcyon mid-1970s, the Bethesda Food Co-Op has offered organic food, household goods, and a base for people who not only wanted healthy food but also a deeper connection to their community. The store also served as a first workplace for generations of local teenagers. The store’s leadership made the difficult decision to close after years of struggling with competition from larger, corporate-owned chains. These issues were compounded by the loss of many loyal customers, federal employees who were DOGE’d out of their jobs early last year.

2) Ohio Food Assistance Org Screeches to a Halt

After “exhausting every option”, food assistance group Local Matters of Columbus has ceased operations. LM was known for its “Veggie Van,” which sold affordable produce, meal kits and other pantry staples, including flour and canned beans. The mobile market traveled throughout the area selling its products and offered online ordering, accepting SNAP and WIC benefits.

They credited the sunset to “gradual impacts that put the organization in an untenable financial position,” including a “shift in philanthropic attitudes” and “the unexpected end of major ongoing funding.”

3) UK Advocate for Working Parents Goes Out of Business

Despite almost 5 decades of advocating for busy families and the care workers that support them, Working Families has succumbed to shifting political winds. The group provided legal advice to British families, guidance to employers, and pressure on policymakers to make workplaces more family-friendly. While charitable funding had not dried up for WF, they found that the national conversation around these g issues had shifted such that companies were less and less willing to work with them.

Despite the blow, Working Families highlighted a number of achievements during its history, including supporting one in 10 UK parents to access free legal advice in 2024-25 and advocating for improvements in parental leave and carers’ rights, including Neonatal Care Leave Act 2023 and the Flexible Working Act 2023.

4) Autism groups gets the job done

South Carolina’s Champion Autism Network was formed in 2016 to make their community more friendly to individuals and families dealing with autism, and according to their leadership, they have achieved just that!

According to their ED, “We have achieved our mission in wanting to create a community and an environment where people with autism can come out and play. And we’ve done exactly that.” The group’s initiatives are now being run by independent partners and former community members.

I love a “mission accomplished” ending. They are the best!

5) Crime Drops, Policy Shifts, Prisons Close, Society Wins!

Between 1980 to 2013, under decades of “toughness on crime”, the American federal prison population ballooned from around 25,000 incarcerate people to almost 220,000. However, over the last almost-15 years, policy quietly shifted (and stayed shifting!) under numerous administrations, resulting in a plummeting number of inmates as well as shrinking staff head count, decaying infrastructure, and budget shortfalls. As such, the government has announced a list of prisons that they plan to shut down in the coming years.

While the list is promising, going from a list to actually being emptied out and decommissioned is always a whole ordeal. Prisons are often large employers in the towns where they are located and the guard unions rarely give up without a fight. A lesser-regarded issue is the negative impact the move can sometimes have on inmates who often lose community support and resources when they move from one facility to another. So, y’know, we’ll see. But my fingers are crossed!

6) Why Start at the End?

Over the past six years through Solvable’s Department of Dismantling, we’ve been experimenting with the H2 horizon not only being about what an organization, community, or collective group might start doing, but also what they will no longer do. To intervene in ways that make a different future possible, “change is not just about building the new, but also actively unbuilding the current (hospicing, outgrowing, decommissioning, sunsetting, etc)”

Welcome to the Ever/Was Collective! Really cool to see comrades popping up with timely closure support for the Canadian civil sector. Check out their hotline here!

7) An Organizational Death Doula Guide: Letting Your Organization Die Gracefully

More closures are coming, probably at a faster pace than our sector has ever felt. Can we prepare ourselves to sunset organizations in a way that feels transformative?

In change management, people use the word “perturbation” when talking about a shock to the system. It’s a phrase that was carried over from harder sciences to the world of organizational psychology to help get at the idea of a disturbance that will have many intense consequences— some predictable, some not. What if we prepared for those we can predict? What if we held at the forefront of our work the larger community and mission served, above and beyond the function of our particular nonprofit or foundation?

Behold! Yet another closure consultant emerges into the world. Dorothy Lee went from tackling existential questions as the ED of a small nonprofit to realizing that the sector needed to do endings better…and furthermore that she might be able to help! Check out Dorothy’s piece on Community-Centric Fundraising and then extend her some encouragement if you can.

Yours in the end,
Camille

I love borrowing concepts from other fields to help think and/or explain challenges in closure. One I love Is the idea of scuttling, a term from the maritime domain that refers to the process of deliberately drowning a ship or running it aground in order to address a specific problem. Ships get scuttled for several reasons, sometimes it is to make a quick escape in a dangerous situation, in other times it is to create an artificial reef or clear navigation channels for other vessels.

So given my nerdy love and use of that nautical expression, I was excited to turn on the radio the other day and learn another one: fouling. Fouling occurs when a vessel sits idle for too long and begins to amass barnacles, algae,and other organisms on the ship’s body, which then causes it drag and damage. It turns out this sort of fouling is happening at this very moment to hundreds of ships that are currently just sitting and waiting in the Strait of Hormuz. Not only is there an effect to the body of the ships, there is also the psychological harm being inflicted on all the seamen sitting with uncertainty about whether and when they will get home as they wait for the resolution of a conflict they didn’t start and are powerless to influence.

All this got me thinking about the long-term effects of uncertainty in the social sector. Of course, not every minute of the day can be capital-D Doing the work but I do wonder what might be deleterious effects having to pump the brakes to deal with financial and political crises. Among the questions swimming around in my mind are: How much wear and tear does it put on the battered body of a busy org and its overworked staff? Is there any way to do some amount of preventative anti-fouling (this is a real thing!)in anticipation of these times? How do continued periods of such fouling factor in to the calculation of any individual employee’s tenure or even the anticipated lifespan of an organization?

Here are this week’s links:

1) Priced out prison guards cause clinker closure

After an initial 2019 decrease in the size of the penitentiary’s population, Asheville’s Craggy Correctional Center is now wrapping up all operations because the cost of living in this North Carolina town is pricing out current and potential prison guards. According to prison leadership, despite their best efforts they have only hired three guards in two years and most of its current staff commute to Craggy from further flung, less costly areas. As the 250 souls incarcerated at this location are transferred to other facilities throughout North Carolina, I sit here and wonder if the affordability crisis will somehow gift us a silver lining of decarceration…..

2) Name mixup muddles a foundation’s wind down

When The Dorot Foundation announced its ten-year spend down plan last month, phones began ringing off the hook…..at the anti-loneliness nonprofit also called Dorot (which means “generations” in Hebrew). Despite announcements from the foundation explicitly explaining that the two organizations had “no connection”, the confusion persisted, going so far as donors and funders of the non-foundation Dorot threatening to pull funding due to the perceived spend out!

I spend a lot of time thinking about closure communications but cases of mistaken identity wasn’t on my BINGO card before reading this one…but it is now!

3) Unfortunate faltering of AZ domestic violence hotline

Despite growing rates of domestic violence in Arizona and a persistent need for support services, Phoenix’s SafeDVS was forced to abandon this vulnerable population and close its lifesaving phone line earlier this month. For about 15 years, this 24/7/365 call center operated a centralized referral system for all domestic violence shelters in Maricopa According to another local leader in this space, victims will now have to resort to calling shelters one by one to find a safe haven.

4) Failed building bid bests Boston black business space

For over a decade, Roxbury’s Black Market incubated new projects and hosted vendors and community events to stimulate the economy and foster self-empowerment in the Nubian Square area of this vibrant urban neighborhood. Unfortunately, after a deal to buy their building fell through, organizers declined to sign a lease extension with the building owner (itself a nonprofit) choosing instead to end the effort altogether.

Organizers are now scrambling to vacate the premises, wrap up programs, and help current vendors secure new homes. Community advocates and planners say the episode highlights the broader challenge of turning cultural programming into sustained ownership in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.

5) Quaker-based education on the ropes in New England

Since 1961, Cambridge Friends School has provided elementary and middle school education rooted in the Quaker religious tradition to young people in the Cambridge area of Massachusetts. However, an email that went out earlier this month advised that the 2026/27 school year will be its last.

Though no reason was provided, records reveal that enrollment at the school, which serves a high percentage of working class and students of color, has nosedived from 145 in 2023 to just 23 in the 2025/26 school year. School trustees says they will use the time after the final school year to explore options for continuing to promote Quaker education in the region.

6) The grief of grantmaking

“…grief is an inevitable part of life and is widely present in philanthropy and wealth distribution…a healthier philanthropic ecosystem would require us to get better at recognising it, naming it, and tending to it.”

A great piece by the always-fantastic Louise Armstrong, who is the executive director at Thirty Percy Foundation and co-founder of UK closure firm The Decelerator.

7) Passing the Torch: What It Means to Transition with Care

“And while the headlines often focus on who’s leaving or what’s being lost, I’m starting to believe that change doesn’t have to feel like loss. It can also be an act of love if we approach them with care.”

Sometimes I get so annoyed with LinkedIn that I wanna just delete my account and never go on there again and then other times, I come across ideas and people so invigorating that I remember why I am there. Miriam Messinger recently crossed my path on LinkedIn and reading this article that she co-wrote when she was at Interaction Institute for Social Change last year really made my day!

THIS WEEK! THIS WEEK! THIS WEEK!

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is credited to have once said something along the lines of, ‘”There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen.”

If that doesn’t resonate with you right now, you aren’t paying attention (and I might be interested in blissfully sailing out to whatever island you are hiding out on). But if you are here and reading, your eyes are probably open and you are WIDE AWAKE and get it. Sometimes life and/or world events come at you fast. When you are lucky or prescient you are ready for it and nimble like a cat. However, other times you are comfortably working away and totally blindsided.

While none of us can be omniscient, once you’ve lived a bit, it becomes clear that the only constant is change. Why then do we so often build organizations that seem to forget or ignore that? Part of what animates me here at The Wind Down is trying to get across the message that longevity and stability does not always correlate with impact.Sometimes we do need institutions that are strong like oaks, but other times we need structures that flow like water. How can our sturdy structures sustain during those “nothing decades” even as they help us stay alive to those weeks when decades bear down on us? My inbox is open if you’ve got the answer!

In the meantime, here are the links:

1) Michigan hunting and fishing group succumbs to the forces

Just shy of its 90-year anniversary, Michigan United Conservation Clubs has announced they will be closing after failing to secure the full $100,000 it required for basic operating funds. For nearly 100 years, MUCC worked to defend hunting, fishing, trapping and conservation in the state. It consisted of individual members and affiliated clubs that paid dues to fund its work.According to its leadership, their shuttering will leave a void in the state’s conservation space.

2) Rural Catholic college gives up the ghost

Since 1946, Anna Maria College has provided a Catholic-centered education to undergrads and graduate students. While it initially opened as a women’s college, in 1973 it went co-ed. The school was best known for having the largest fire science program in the Northeastern area of the United States.

However, the school’s mounting debt forced the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education to step in and push for the wind down.

3) Canadian dairy cooperative dealt closure blow

After being told that the plant was to be expanded, the 90+ employees of New Brunswick’s Agropur dairy plant along with the wider community are reeling at the news that their plant is scheduled to be shut down by 2028. According to reports, the end of this plant will affect not only the workers but the ability of New Brunswick to maintain its food security and independence.

4) Doors (temporarily) swing shut at museum memorializing “Scotland’s Alcatraz”

From 1883 to 2013, Peterhead Prison incarcerated thousands, and was also the site of several notable prison rebellions. Once decommissioned, it re-opened as a tourist attraction. However, new owners Cove Attractions have struggled to make it a big draw, so they are hitting pause to add more to the offering. They plan to open up more areas of the facility to the viewing public and also — because I guess they think it’s not in poor taste — an escape room option. Siiiiigh.

5) Hampshire College and the Death of a Boomer Utopia

“…In this unsettled moment, it makes sense that a place like Hampshire lost its relevance. And yet we might need its kind of unruly thinking now more than ever.”

A NY Mag writer pays tribute to their alma mater and muses on what the closure of the very liberal liberal arts college (also based in Massachusetts) might portend for our society.

6) “Nobody Told Me That Leaving Would Feel Like This“

“…in this sector, organizational failure and personal failure have become the same thing. When the organization struggles, we struggle. When it stumbles, we stumble. So we do what people do when their identity is on the line? We hold on. We fight. We downsize to a point of almost comedic inefficiency, keeping the lights on with a skeleton crew and a wing and a prayer, because closing means something we cannot stomach. It means we failed. Not the model, not the funding landscape, not the political conditions. Us. Closing gets read as a character flaw, a confession, proof that we were not enough. And so we choose almost anything, almost anything at all, rather than let it end.”

Dr. Shawn Ginwright is a healing-centered leadership expert. In this piece, he shares how he is working with an ever-increasing number of impact leaders grappling with closures. If anyone needs to hear this today, let me be the first to say: you have done enough, and you are enough. Get some rest.

UPCOMING EVENTS