Over the next few years, we will almost certainly see a significant increase in nonprofit closures, and many government-funded programs will end or be cut dramatically. We don’t have the power to continue everything that needs to continue, nor to ensure funding for effective work that challenges the status quo deeply in a time of broad retreat from social progress. But we do have the power to reckon with endings and to end well.
Nonprofit closures are usually sudden and traumatic for communities and staff. Instead of a legacy of progress towards audacious social change, there’s a trail of broken promises, shame and blame, birthing a whole new set of harms separate from the hole that’s also created. Why? Because when nonprofits close, too often leadership and philanthropy revert to the very patterns we are working hard to break: hoarding power and devaluing process. And there’s no accountability.
In October 2024, the Full Frame Initiative (FFI) — a national social change organization focused on system change to give everyone a fair shot at wellbeing– voted to close via a multi-month process that reflected the values that have guided it for over 15 years. In sharing this story and lessons learned so far, FFI’s CEO will name some of the third rails of the community-nonprofit-funder relationship that undermine past success, amplify grief, and concentrate power; she will also lift up alternatives and possibilities.
Participants will leave this interactive session with lessons about normalizing scary discussions about nonprofit endings, the need for funders to invest as boldly in good endings as they do in starting things up, and equipping ourselves — with time, money, space and skills — to end well; and actions that will make a difference and that don’t all require board buy-in or approval.
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