Leading at the End: Supporting Your Team in an Organizational Wind Down

When Courtney Harge, former CEO of cultural arts organization OF/BY/FOR ALL first approached her board to let them know that she was concerned they may need to close, the response she received seemed to convey that it simply wasn’t a possibility.

When mission-driven organizations end with care, it can help ensure the wellbeing of their outgoing staff, their communities, and future work.

“I realized there was no real space to talk about ending. There is this shame around it, and so there’s no conversation. It really just felt like, ‘Well, we can’t really talk about that. You just have to keep going.’”

Harge is not alone in feeling this way. Every day, nonprofit leaders are facing down the question of whether it might be time to shut down—and struggling to find support in exploring a possible sunset.

Whether it is due to lack of funding, a shift in political landscape, or because the mission has been accomplished, the idea of shuttering a nonprofit can be fraught with fear, anxiety, and a lack of clarity about how to approach the discussion and how to order operations toward a dignified end.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. When mission-driven organizations end with care, it can help ensure the wellbeing of their outgoing staff, their communities, and future work. Thoughtful, caring, and even joyous closures are possible given time, focus, and a little guidance.

Meet the Moment

“Our organization always struggled with fundraising, I’d have to say, from the get-go,” Aaron Zimmerman, founder and executive director of the now sunsetted New York Writers Coalition (NYWC), tells NPQ.

In 2024, Zimmerman made the difficult decision to shutter the 22-year-old New York nonprofit that had provided free and low-cost writing workshops to people across the city and state, most notably people with disabilities, people who were incarcerated, and others from traditionally marginalized groups. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, NYWC soon found itself unable to go into the institutions that they’d traditionally serviced.

While they quickly shifted to free online offerings, with attendance often far outstripping what they’d experienced in person, the services they provided did not have a commensurate revenue model. The grants that supported workshops in schools and prisons were no longer there in the way they had been before.

The decision to shutter the nonprofit came only after an extended and tortuous period of trying to salvage the organization’s operations at all costs.

As the world emerged from lockdown, Zimmerman quickly realized that NYWC just wasn’t going to be able to go “back to normal.” This sparked a frantic period of emergency fundraising, followed by a period of discernment, during which the organization reached out for help to explore their strategic options.

It was at this time that they were presented with the idea of shuttering the group. While they did get fairly close to their fundraising goal, Zimmerman says, “We decided rather than just trying to go as we’d been going, like month to month with a lot of uncertainty, it just made more sense to wind down gracefully, be able to give staff some severance, be able to have a party to celebrate our 22 years of work, be able to give some last programs.”

Timing a Shutdown

I recently spoke to John MacIntosh, veteran nonprofit consultant and principal at SeaChange Capital. The organization frequently deals with organizations at the crossroads, and he advises them to have three to six months of operational funds to execute a really good closure.

This makes sense. However, with the scarcity inherent in so much movement and mission-driven work, in my own consulting practice I have found that it can be hard for an organization to differentiate between a rough patch and the proverbial “writing on the wall” that the time to shut down has come.

Nonetheless, it is common to hear many who have led a group through a wind down lament that they wish they’d embarked on the path sooner. In fact, when asked what advice she would give to someone who was in her former position, Harge immediately advised to “communicate the possible closure earlier.” She says that once she was able to speak openly about it, she was able to tap into a previously unrealized well of community support.

Support Your People

In its 2020 report, the British collective Stewarding Loss stated, “An ability and capacity to be in an ongoing relationship with loss—to continually anticipate it—know how to respond to it, and have distinct roles for it, feels important to familiarise ourselves with in the next couple of years before crises happen on a wider and more regular scale.”

In the case of successful nonprofit wind downs, I find that transparency in the day-to-day culture often helps to soften the blow of a closure. Both Harge and Zimmerman emphasized the open communication they had with their staff. When teams are familiar with their finances and operations, it can sometimes make for a more grounded, if not easier, conversation about an impending end.

That said, the anxiety around losing employment, benefits, and a sense of belonging and purpose, can still be palpable. Harge shared how she tried to facilitate a mental shift in her organization by sharing with her team how revenue and engagement was trending down over time. She admits that despite all the information she shared, and the fact that the team consciously comprehended the rationale of the decision, they still struggled to integrate that understanding into how they worked.

“It was really hard for them to stop,” she says. “Or for me to say, ‘Hey, we aren’t actually making things anymore.’”

Seeing that there was still such a mix of creative and anxious energy in the group, Harge decided to work with the remaining team to channel their efforts into designing a dignified ending and ensuring they all had what they needed to pursue the next steps in their individual career paths.

One meaningful way to counteract this tendency to conflate closure with failure is…to highlight all that you have achieved.

Zimmerman spoke about how NYWC held open community “town hall” listening sessions to understand how they could craft a closure that reflected the needs of all their stakeholders. They also did some targeted outreach and set up pages on their website to point people toward other like-minded groups and resources. Several of their workshop facilitators were empowered to launch their own platforms for the workshops they had delivered through NYWC.

“I think we did it the best we could; we gave people time to process it, figure out what’s next for them, and also what our community needed,” noted Zimmerman. “I still get emails on the regular expressing sadness and appreciation of our work.”

Celebrate Your Wins

In a recent conversation I had with an executive director on the precipice of an ending, she shared that she was worried that everyone would look back on the organization’s efforts as a “waste of time.”

No matter whether an organization lasted five years or 50 years, this sentiment echoed time and again. There seems to be a stubborn mental bond between longevity and value, or impact that permeates through our organizational cultures, especially when it comes to social change work. One meaningful way to counteract this tendency to conflate closure with failure is to use the considered time of your conscious and deliberate wind down to highlight all that you have achieved.

One organization that has done a particularly beautiful job of showcasing and memorializing their past work is the Kendeda Fund, which ceased operations after 30 years of funding progressive causes. With a beautiful website that features an interactive “virtual garden,” it tells the story of the foundation’s various investments and the legacy it left behind.

Similarly, the Whitman Institute used their sunset as an opportunity not only to highlight their good deeds but also to tell the story of their spend down in order to seed more such efforts throughout the field.

However, you do not need to be a large philanthropic operation to shine a spotlight on your work and pat yourself on the back. For example, the New York Writers Coalition used its wind-down budget to celebrate their end in true NYWC style—with a community celebration and one final writing workshop.

Know That Good Endings Are Possible

Whether your organization is at the beginning, the end, or beautifully flourishing in the middle of its lifespan, there’s never a bad time to think about what good ends can and do look like.

Endings aren’t always the complete shuttering of a company. Sometimes they are program closures, exits from particular communities, employee departures, or leadership transitions. While it often feels like these things are catching us off guard and by surprise, it is likely only because we have avoided thinking about and planning for them.

As a person with a commitment to social justice and transformation, you have already embraced a life that requires courage and fortitude to face down the status quo. When you can bring that same energy to thinking about the life cycle of your organization, you may find that there are many ways to face, prepare for, and even enjoy (!) the end.