Endings

I spent several hours in the mountains today (it was lovely thanks!) and the space and the air gives me lots of time to think. And after seeing this on one of the tops, I thought a lot about endings and how they can be a chance for a beginning.

I thought about how often, endings are just the start of something. The end of winter becomes the start of spring, the end of the night becomes the day, the end of my run becomes a time for rest (and stuffing my face). In organisations, endings happen, and unfortunately at the moment, it seems like it's happening a lot.

There are some great things out there that are helping organisations to think about ending better. The Decelerator say "endings are inevitable, bad endings don't have to be". The Wind Down "designs, builds, and delivers more conscious and caring nonprofit closures." I especially like their digital archive support.

One of the terms I especially like when it comes to ending is 'composting' - and no it's not just because I've built a compost bin this week. I think the idea of every ending helping to create conditions for something else to grow.

I thought about the social enterprise I had with my dad. I've got lots of things wrong in life, but doing that definitely wasn't one of them. I learned a lot, about caring, kindness, not following the bullshit, and community. It ended, like all organisations do. But I was proud that we were able to financially support a group to continue meeting and chatting, and supporting each other. It wasn't much, but it was something. And just last year we donated the last of our funds, around £6k, to a charity rewilding in Scotland, where the C for Campbell in my name comes from via my dad.

This felt like a good ending. A bit of composting. But not every organisation can pass on finances at the end, in fact it's pretty rare, because often the root cause of the ending is money. But that doesn't mean they don't have things of value to pass on. They have resources, knowledge and wisdom. And I couldn't help thinking about all that is lost, again and again when things end.

That's why I'm pleased Power To Change spent time on putting together all the things from the Powering Up programme. Not just a report, but the tools, processes, experiments, knowledge from a multi year programme that ended. It's why I glad we are helping YMCA George Williams to think about how one of their products for the Youth Sector could live on.

But I also think we need to think broader about endings and composting. Not just when an organisation ends, but when programmes and projects end. What about all the research reports, the data from projects, the experiments that worked and those that didn't. What about all that knowledge, what about all that potential wisdom. It's why we spend time up front cataloguing all the things we do in a project along the way. It's not perfect, but it's something.

And so I'm curious about what else people do, or would like to do, to make every ending, no matter how small, be a beginning?