The Team
We are a small, primarily part-time core team with a steadfast commitment to remain small in size, but with vast ambitions for transformative impact.
Surrounding our core team is a broad network of partners, allies, and collaborators each playing a crucial role in our collective mission. Together, we are dedicated to enhancing the capacity of civil society to navigate endings and transitions.
Iona Lawrence, Co-Founder
Iona spends most of her working week overseeing The Decelerator’s day-to-day operations and works with the team and our wider networks to steward our vision and strategy. Her passion for bringing endings out of the shadows and putting them on the table emerged gradually over a decade working in civil society organisations. Over this time Iona was part of some suboptimal endings, some better ones, and even some pretty good ones. Iona brings with her experience across civil society, from being founding Director of the Jo Cox Foundation, to being a community organiser in the refugee camps in Northern France, to being a trustee of the Rural Coffee Caravan, and many other things in between.
Louise Armstrong, Co-Founder
Louise plays a strategic role in The Decelerator, bringing her expertise from across civil society and philanthropy to our work. She dedicates approximately one day a month to our work. In her current 10 year cycle she’s wanting to make a contribution to reframing the culture and practices around how we view and value loss, grief, death and closures as part of the natural cycles of life and the overlooked part of transformation. Louise plays multiple roles in different parts of the change ecosystem - including Thirty Percy Foundation and School For Systems Change - and sees herself as a change maker, facilitator, systems change designer, coach and process doula.
Linda Craig, Hotline Deceleration Navigator
Linda is part of The Decelerator Hotline team fielding and providing calls to members of civil society considering organisational endings. Linda works for The Decelerator on an ad hoc, flexible basis and this enables The Decelerator to best meet the needs and requests of hotline callers. She is an experienced long-term and interim manager in the voluntary sector, having covered senior positions in a variety of organisations such as Vauxhall City Farm, Suzy Lamplugh Trust, Doteveryone, the International Longevity Centre and Switchback. Her permanent roles have included Co-Director at Drugscope, General Secretary of Quaker Peace and Social Witness and Director of Pesticide Action Network.
Josephine Knowles, Hotline Deceleration Navigator
Josephine is part of The Decelerator Hotline team fielding and providing calls to members of civil society considering and planning organisational endings. Josephine works for The Decelerator on an ad hoc, flexible basis and this enables The Decelerator to best meet the needs and requests of hotline callers. She has previously been involved in setting up a phone support service for women in the sex industry. Josephine is an accredited coach (ACC) and has her own experience of transitioning out of an organisation she co-founded and led for 26 years, and feels a call to support others through their 'endings'.
Lily Piachaud, Creative Operations Lead
Lily leads on developing organisational systems and processes for The Decelerator and running day-to-day finance and operations. Lily works for The Decelerator on a flexible basis enabling us to draw on her skills and expertise as needed. She has been working for the past decade in a range of roles in the social change space. Her particular expertise and passion lies in helping people to birth things - ideas, organisations, processes, projects and systems - that have a goal to change our world for the better. Her most recent job was at New Constellations where she ran day-to-day operations and explored new forms of organisation and governance.
Max St John, Supervisor
Max provides the team with professional supervision both individually and as a unit. This gives everyone space to reflect on their practice (given the often challenging nature of the work) and to surface collective learning for constant improvement and course correction. Max works for The Decelerator for 1-2 days, flexibly over the month. While running - and closing - his own businesses and creative projects, over the past 20 years he has been working in organisational development, specialising in interpersonal communication and conflict, providing training and support for leaders and teams that are trying to turn the tide on some of society's trickiest issues.
Sieske Valk, Operations and Project Manager
Sieske will be joining us in October 2024 as Operations and Project Manager. Working 4 days a week, she will be one of the organised, efficient, creative beating-hearts of our small, largely part-time team. Sieske brings extensive experience to The Decelerator, including her work supporting people through endings and transitions which led her to establish (and later close) a social business focused on end-of-life care for animals.
Thanks and Acknowledgements
The Decelerator has received funding for a pilot phase from Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Esmee Fairbairn and Pears Foundation. We are immensely grateful to them for their support.
We are grateful to the following organisations who went above and beyond to support The Decelerator its pilot phase:
New Constellations who acted as our fiscal and legal hosts for The Decelerator in our pilot phase.
The agency Ave who gave us some pro-bono studio time to create The Decelerator’s brand.
NCVO for providing us with desk space.
The Decelerator is an initiative that emerged from research and endings support tested through Stewarding Loss. We are grateful to the catalytic energy and foresight of Cassie Robinson and the Stewarding Loss initiative without whom this project might never have existed. The broader work of Stewarding Loss around conscious closures, hospice work, and transitions will continue both in the UK and internationally - initially with a focus on funder and wealth holder communities, and broader cultural practices and narratives in relation to loss. The Decelerator has a complimentary focus which is to meet the urgent and growing need for practical support for endings in UK civil society.