The Care-Full Closures Fund
The Care-full Closures Fund offers ground-breaking financial and advisory support to 4 organisations to support them to consider and design an organisational closure or merger.
Who is this fund for?
This fund is open to nonprofit organisations of any size who are considering closure and are wanting to explore their options carefully, intentionally and with a design-led approach.
What do we mean by the ending or closure of an organisation? We mean simply that an organisation in its current form is considering coming to an end. This means it might merge with another or it might close while handing over certain programmes or services to another. (This fund is therefore not for those looking to design the ending of individual projects or programmes).
How do you know if your organisation could be considering closure or merger?
We are open to organisations from across the various stages anticipating an organisational ending.
As outlined in our Sensing an Ending Toolkit, if you are anticipating an organisational ending perhaps all you have at the moment is a shared sense that your work might need to stop or change. Or this might be something you and your colleagues or trustees might have had at the back of your minds for many years but recent events have hastened the idea.
If you’ve only just begun thinking about how to take those next steps and aren’t sure what they might look like, that’s a good starting point. As an organisation you might have:
Achieved your original purpose or feel that the need for it has reduced;
Lost the funding and resources you need to carry on but would like to keep that purpose alive in some capacity;
Be considering a merger with an adjacent organisation and want to help design a bespoke strategy to deliver it well for all parties involved.
Whatever it might be, we want to help you start a conversation with your stakeholders, both externally and at all levels internally, to navigate that process well.
In particular, we’d love to hear from you if you’re a civil society organisation that:
Is interested in collaborating on a considered and reflective process of ending or evolving
Would like that process to be inclusive of all stakeholders, especially across hierarchies
Can identify a core internal group to work with Deeds and Words on a strategy around that change or closure.
Is interested in working with a range of external partners and practitioners
Would benefit from a library of resources and shared learning on designing and delivering ‘good endings’
Could be ready to start this work in the next 4–5 months (in the autumn / winter of 2021)
What support will you get?
We are in a position to offer up to 4 organisations paid for time with experienced consultants. Alongside them Iona Lawrence, co-lead of Stewarding Loss, will also support. Organisations will also be given a grant of up to £4,000 to fund staff time and associated costs for this work. Due to the bespoke nature of this work, each of the grantees will work with Deeds And Words to develop an agreement of how they want to work together.
In time the knowledge and learning from these grants will be shared in our Care-Full Closures community of practice to inform wider practice in the field of organisational endings and closures.
Why have we created this fund?
Over the course of hundreds of conversations in 2020 and 2021, Stewarding Loss learned that a range of things that stand in the way of better organisational endings. These include:
A lack of open conversation about endings in the sector means that endings are often a ‘taboo subject’.
A ‘survival at all costs’ mentality can set in amongst some trustees and staff which prevents decisions around endings being taken early enough for closures or mergers to be designed and planned carefully and intentionally.
There are lots of coaches, facilitators, advisers and organisations who can support organisations to consider and design better endings but these people can be hard to identify as there isn’t a public community of these people.
Nonprofits need time and money in order to benefit from the skill and expertise that is available.
Interested? Here’s how to register your interest
We know every organisation who is or could be considering a closure or merger is in a unique position so our offer of support is necessarily bespoke and considered on a case-by-case basis.
If you think that this fund might be able to support or help you, please email Iona (iona@ionaconsultancy.com) for a confidential conversation about you and your organisation and we’ll go from there.