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!
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
