Category: the rest

“We discovered that exits can also be creative moments, and can generate new opportunities in terms of staff development. They can also catalyse critical thinking about development, and help people to focus on which activities will be most sustainable in the long-run rather than continuing with the status quo.”

– Lucy Morris, EveryChild’s Responsible Exit Principles (Praxis Note 70) © INTRAC 2015

It All Started With Death

One of the things that was a stumbling block for me in launching The Wind Down was what language to use to describe what I was doing. For the first few years when I was just talking to my friends about the idea, I used the language of “organizational death doula”.

In the circles I am in, people have a pretty good sense of what a birth doula is, and the idea of a death doula is also coming into greater awareness. So I figured that adding the word “organizational” would not be such a far leap. However, I soon found that people thought I was planning to offer death doula services that an organization could make available to their staff, almost, say, as an employee benefit. Things were definitely getting lost in translation!

Furthermore, I think the language and idea of death more and more began to invoke something too sad, dark, and negative. The more time that I spent learning about not only death but endings and closure, the more I realized that there was an opportunity here to lift the “heavy cloak” surrounding the winding down of projects and organizations and destigmatize the reality that most things do come to a close.

So I decided to move away from death.

At A Loss For Words

Many of my friends in closure in the UK have been using the language of loss and grief to speak to these ends. From Stewarding Loss to Grief Tending, there has been a bit of a focus on sorrow and the idea that something is being taken away. While loss — loss of job, loss of purpose, loss of attachments to community and coworkers — is undoubtedly likely to be a part of the experience of closure, I didn’t want to put too much focus on negative emotion.

If I want people to want to come to me (and eventually, hopefully pay me!), I want to provide a sense that it isn’t all just tears and gloom. So, despite my deepest appreciation for the work that those other groups are doing, I decided to steer away from that language in talking and thinking about the practice I am trying to build here.

Tending To What Is

Love is a willingness to attend to what is already occurring with a newfound attentiveness.”

– Nicolette Polek (from Heavy Traffic magazine III)

The loose group that my above-mentioned British friends have pulled together is meeting regularly under the moniker of Practice of Composting and Hospicing, and a lot of our discussions — such as the one by the folks working on peat lands! — circle around cycles in nature. We talk about planting seeds, nurturing, growth, recession, death, repurposing, and rebirth as possible parts of a healthy natural or organizational cycle. Additionally, I felt the idea of hospicing evoked a sense of care and a succumbing to the natural end of something.

So in thinking about more appropriate language for this project, I gravitated towards the ideas of intentionality, care, focus, attention, and an overall willingness surrender to what is happening, while also thinking about what you and your participants might leave behind. I like the idea of shifting from death, doom and gloom, and sadness to the possibilities that emerge when we bring in care, creativity, consciousness, and maybe even celebration to these ends.

This remains a work-in-progress, but I feel really good about where I have landed in terms of the overall “elevator pitch” for The Wind Down. It aligns very much with where my friends from Stewarding Loss have now landed with their Decelerator project — we are all focused on slowing down unto a stop with intention rather than a jarring slam of the brakes. It is an exciting time to be working in closure…. and, with that, I draw this post to a close.

In October 2022, I traveled to the UK to visit family and see some sites. During that time I also had the great opportunity to meet Louise, Cassie, and Iona of Stewarding Loss, an organization focused on supporting civil society organizations through mergers and closures. At that time we talked briefly about bringing together more people who have been thinking about and working on how to structure more graceful exits.

In January of this year, Cassie published a lengthy Medium post in which she shared (among many things!) the intention to create this community of practice, and in April 2023, the Practices of Composting & Hospicing group had its first official meeting. We meet once a month with a different, fantastic facilitator. Topics have included:

• death and the collective imagination;
• lessons learned from the closure of charity organization EveryChild (great report on that here); and
• peatlands and death (by the team at RE-PEAT)

In October, I had the great pleasure to present the what and why of my own developing project. The full slide deck is here, but the TL;DR is below.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been through a lot of bad, sloppy organizational endings and the more I went through them the more I began to feel like there must be a better and more caring way to end. I have been craving tools and language to help people inside and outside of the group, project, or organization understand:

1. what was going on and why
2. what was going to happen next
3. where everyone was in the process

In addition to the practical aspects of a shutdown, there are all the messy emotions — confusion, anger, fear, grief — that often accompany and ending. I am thinking of this as the linear/structured stuff on one side and then the amorphous/”squishy” stuff on the other. These two sides, of course, can and do often bleed together — and that isn’t a bad thing! At the center of this work is a desire to destigmatize, normalize and maybe even celebrate ends as part of a healthy organizational lifecycle. Stop being embarrassed; show us your ends!

In the presentation I shared about two ends that probably had the biggest impact on my thinking in this area. The first was the end of The Ada Initiative (TAI). TAI was an advocacy and education organization for women in open source, open culture, open knowledge, and sci-fi/slash spaces. It was in operation from 2011 until its shocking closure in 2015.

I served as an advisor to the organization from May 2014 until June 2015, when I stepped down to concerns about transparency. In August 2015, a surprise, clandestine board meeting was convened after which it was announced to the world that TAI would be closing down. Many people in the space were devastated to hear this decision has been taken despite the ongoing need for the group’s work and more than ample funds in the bank.

In the haste to close, a lot of voices were silenced and many relationships were irreparably broken. There was no discussion (to my knowledge) of seeking someone else to run the organization or transferring the funds to another group that could carry forward the mission. The group did, however, leave a respectable archive of resources up on their webpage underneath the announcement of their closure (more on closure announcements in a future post!).

The second closure that really impacted me was that of the Lefferts Community Food Cooperative, a small community food shop that I helped to open in my community of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn here in New York City. The shop was volunteer-run and, as such, could only be opened a few days a week. From the outset, we struggled to keep it sufficiently staffed with volunteers and stocked with enough different food items to keep people interested in patronizing the store. We juggled the challenges of staying in compliance with city health and safety requirements alongside concerns of making our (meager) rent and controlling pests.

After 3 years of service to the community, the store could no longer last and the board made the tough decision to close down. However, while keeping volunteers around enough to keep the store open was a challenge, ensuring there were enough volunteers to close the store down proved even tougher. The closure and loading out of foodstuffs and fixtures dragged on for months, during which the community was uncertain whether the store was open or closed. The metal rollgate outside the store that had been painted with the vibrant store logo remained on the outer rollgate for years after the store finally, completely shuttered — a reminder of the promise of fresh, healthy food in a community starved for good options.

Bad endings have so many things in common. They often feature:

• feelings of confusion, misdirection, upset
• untied/loose ends
• knowledge loss
• broken friendships and bad feelings

So when I think about good endings, I expect that they will hopefully deliver the opposite, if not something even better. I don’t think a good ending will nullify “negative” emotions but I do think they can drive up alongside with happier emotions such as pride in the work that was accomplished, gratitude for the relationships that were fostered, and hope for the future of the overall mission.

A strong ending should have structure and transparency around that structure. An organization that wants to end its work well needs to have an understanding of who all the stakeholders are in the organization’s work (Joe MacLeod of AndEnd talks about “personas“) and an open line of communication to them all. An ending is not usually going to be a democratic process, but keeping people in the loop goes a long way towards fortifying relationships.

Finally, organizations that are dying/have died have a lot to share with others not only about how to keep an organization alive and healthy, but also (in the spirit of composting!) nutrients that will seed new efforts. When an organization can take the time to close down with intention and shared knowledge, they leave behind breadcrumbs that will lead the next generation in carrying forward critical mission-driven work.

In order to move my work forward, my asks at the moment are for:

• More stories about all sorts of organizational endings
• Opportunities to work with (or even just observe!) groups that are going through endings
• Connections to people who can help me think through options for digital knowledge sharing/ long-term data stewardship

Over the past two decades, I’ve been a part of many companies, campaigns, and organizations that eventually came to an end either due to inertia, attrition, acquisition, or conscious decision. No matter how or why it comes apart, the process of ending a formation that you have given your time and energy to is difficult and emotional, and there is almost never any formal space to collectively share and process the feelings of guilt, grief, fear, and sometimes even relief that come up.

Recognizing that gap, I am now in the early stages of developing practices for how we might better facilitate the end of organizations.