Empowering Endings in Scotland

Empowering Endings is a project dedicated to building the capacity and confidence of Scottish civil society to navigate organisational endings well, a first for the sector. We're doing it through the people leaders already turn to: infrastructure workers, helpdesk advisors in membership organisations, and consultants and freelancers.

This work started in 2024, when we were invited by SCVO and Community Enterprise to listen to what support professionals across Scotland were seeing in the charities and voluntary organisations they work with. What we heard was that organisational endings were coming up more often than the sector, its leaders and its funders tend to acknowledge, and taking more forms than the word "ending" usually suggests: closures, mergers, insolvencies, leadership succession, restructures, organisational refocusing and more besides. In response to what we heard and learnt together, we co-produced the first version of a dedicated toolkit for organisational endings in Scotland. You can download the toolkit here.

In the words of one member of the Empowering Endings network: The civil society we get on the other side of all this change is going to look and feel very different to the civil society I build my career in. It’s now my job to support and work with that change, not resist it.

Since 2025 we have been working with over 50 of those support professionals to build the tools, peer support and expertise needed to respond well when a call for help with an ending comes in. What runs through all of it is a shared belief: supporting voluntary sector leaders through endings takes skill, tools, confidence and networks, not one person figuring it out alone.

From mid-2026 to mid-2028, Empowering Endings is funded by the William Grant Foundation and Robertson Trust to deepen that work further, in partnership with SCVO. We will be sharing the insights and learnings from this work across the UK to inspire and catalyse other place-based initiatives to better support organisational endings.

Do you work for an infrastructure or membership organisation? Or are you a freelancer encountering the need for endings? Empowering Endings is for you!

  • We host quarterly community calls, bringing practitioners together to share what's coming up and learn from each other. We hear from expert speakers who share their skills and stories with us. `

  • We host annual in-person events, built for the specific demands of this work.

  • More work is in the pipeline, shaped by the network as we go.

To find out more or get involved contact Zoe Greenfield, who's project managing this work: zoe@decelerator.org.uk

Are you a funder, policymaker, or regulator keen to support a stronger voluntary sector by enabling better organisational endings? We’d love to hear from you. Email us.‍ ‍

"The voluntary sector we come out the other side of this with is going to look and feel very different from the one I built my career in. I reckon the rest of my career is now about working with that change, to support it and work with the best of it, not to resist it."

— Member of the Empowering Endings network

If you're here because your own organisation is considering or facing an ending, welcome! But this page isn't likely to be the most useful place to start.

We'd recommend checking out The Decelerator Hotline which is a free and confidential service for civil society organisations and groups across the UK. Alternatively you can contact a relevant infrastructure group or membership body for your place, subsector or issue area.