Tools for Endings
The Decelerator’s library of Endings Tools is available free to you and your organisation.
The tools are compiled from the insights and learnings gained through hundreds of hours of support to organisations who were anticipating, designing or delivering endings. Scroll down to find:
Seven principles for a better endings
Tools for organisational closure and merger
Tools for leadership transition
Tools to support you to wind down a project or programme
We hope they will help you design, deliver and advocate for funding for better endings in your organisation.
These tools will be updated and added to regularly. So if you have a story, resource or experience of an ending that you think could be transformed into a learning tool for others considering a similar ending, we’d love to hear from you.
Seven Principles For Better Endings
No two organisations are the same, so no two endings will be the same. Some organisations will have time and resources on their side whilst others will have little. Yet we believe whatever the constraints of the time and resources you have available, there are some principles that can guide the anticipation, design and delivery of better organisational endings. You can read more about them in our Sensing an Ending Toolkit.
1.
Root your organisation and its culture in its mission and purpose, not the organisation’s ongoing existence.
2.
Acknowledge that endings, as with beginnings, are part of the inevitable cycles of change and renewal for people and organisations.
3.
Find agency and determine your pace by bringing design and intent to the ending.
4.
Harness the power language, metaphor and narrative.
5.
Understand the technical, practical and legal steps needed and your accountabilities.
6.
Give space to emotions and the emotional journey.
7.
Assign people roles which share the responsibilities needed to deliver the ending.
Tools for organisational closure or merger
Sensing An Ending is a step by step guide to anticipating, designing and undertaking a nonprofit organisational closure or merger. When we published it via Stewarding Loss in 2021, we believe it was the first resource of its kind to weave together both the practical and the emotional considerations of a closure or merger. This was a particularly crucial resource to compile in 2020 as it responded to the belief across civil society that countless organisations were facing hardship and possible closure as a result of the impacts of Covid-19.
This worksheet is designed to support staff, trustees, teams or communities to explore the idea of an ending - specifically in this instance, a possible organisational closure. However the prompts in here could easily be used to aid the consideration of other endings in organisations - eg. a transition of leadership, the end of a programme or project cycle, or the end of a partnership.
This worksheet is a bitesize introductory worksheet that sets the scene for the Sensing An Ending Toolkit: A toolkit for nonprofit leaders to help decide, design and deliver better organisational endings which Stewarding Loss published in 2021.
In November 2022, after 10 years, Year Here stopped delivering social innovation Fellowships and all operations ceased.
The case study. is designed to share the ‘how’ of ending Year Here’s Fellowship and operations. Why? Because leading the ending of something is one of the most mysterious undertakings everyone involved had ever embarked on. They want to shed light on their experience so that if you find yourself considering closure, you can gain a sense of what it will involve, how it might feel and how you can do it as well as possible.
‘Legacy work’ can be broadly defined as the communications and programming activities delivered by a closing organisation seeking to ensure their learnings and impact have an enduring effect on the sectors, communities and beneficiaries they served. This document contains a few examples from legacy work The Decelerator has supported.
Tools for leadership succession
A guide to support Chairs, Trustees and Senior Teams lead the design and delivery of great leadership succession and transition