Over the past two decades, I’ve been a part of many companies, campaigns, and organizations that eventually came to an end either due to inertia, attrition, acquisition, or conscious decision. No matter how or why it comes apart, the process of ending a formation that you have given your time and energy to is difficult and emotional, and there is almost never any formal space to collectively share and process the feelings of guilt, grief, fear, and sometimes even relief that come up.

Recognizing that gap, I am now in the early stages of developing practices for how we might better facilitate the end of organizations.

Here are some resources I’ve come across along the way. I’ll continue to update this page as I learn more and I am doing very messy note blogging here.

Groups Designing Ends

• Stewarding Loss is an organization focused on supporting and influencing “civil society at all levels to dedicate the time, energy, care and resource to endings that it does to beginnings, uninhibited by fear, stigma or prejudice and rooted in best practice.”
• The Care-Full Closures Fund – a fund coordinated by Stewarding Loss to support 4 organizations in either closing or merging
• The Farewell Fund – the predecessor to Stewarding Loss
• AndEnd.co – Joe MacLeod’s studio for designing ends to products and services
• The Endings Project – University of Victoria backed project
• The Graceful Degradation survey

Groups Focused on Grief and Death

• Philly Death Doula Collective
• Radical Death Studies
• Collective for Radical Death Studies
• National End of life Doula Association
• International End of Life Doula Association
• Morbid Anatomy
• Grief Tending – UK-based group holding space and providing trainings for grief of many kinds

Readings

• Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief by Cindy Milstein
• Ends by Joe MacLeod
• Endineering by Joe MacLeod
• Social Movement Stages: Emergence, Coalescence, Bureaucratization & Decline
• “Sufficient Death Preparedness Correlates to Better Mental Health, Quality of Life, and EOL Care” (Journal of Pain and Symptom Management

Podcasts & Sounds

• Ask a Death Doula
• I Will Grieve You With This (comedians talking about death)
• Anarchist activist Cindy Milstein on grief, mourning, and building institutions for care in anarchist movements (The Final Straw Podcast episode)
• Death doula and lawyer Alua Arthur – How Do I Live Presently and Die Gracefully? (New Day Podcast episode)
• Alua Arthur’s origin story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2VhPGmQ35g
• Sounds of Mourning – Algorythms show on NTS.Live

This is just a list of groups I work (or have worked) with:

• The Maintainers
• Whose Knowledge?
• Collective for Liberation, Ecology, and Technology
• Lefferts Community Food Cooperative (R.I.P.)
• Brooklyn Community Bail Fund
• The Campaign for New York Health
• Greenpoint Reformed Church
• The Open Source Geospatial Foundation
• The Managers’ Association of Slovenia
• Question Copyright
• The Open Planning Project (R.I.P.)
• The Ada Initiative (R.I.P.)
• North American Students of Cooperation
• Public Lab
• Prime Produce Apprenticeship Cooperative

If you think I could be of assistance to you and/or your team, or if you wanna chat about organizational death, drop me a line!