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
