Hold The Line: The Decelerator Hotline Is Taking A Pause Until December 2024
With a 300% surge in calls, our hotline has quickly exceeded capacity. We’re taking a brief pause to catch our breath and secure additional funding.
The Decelerator Hotline is currently closed for new calls until at least December 2024.
Unprecedented demand has quickly exhausted our limited pilot resources, leaving us unable to take additional direct requests at this time. However, we will still handle a small number of referrals from our funding partners.
If you need support now, here are a few options:
Explore our tools and resources for self-reflective practice or as conversation aids within your organisation.
Consider reaching out to infrastructure organisations, funding partners, or trusted peers who may be able to offer guidance and support.
Our Plans Going Forward:
In the coming weeks, our team will be focused on two key priorities: securing additional funding and updating our hotline process to manage the increased demand that we anticipate is here to stay. We will provide an update on our next steps on 25th November 2024, and should funding arrive earlier, we will explore ways to reignite hotline capacity sooner.
Over recent months, The Decelerator has experienced a remarkable surge in demand for our hotline services—a 300% increase that has far exceeded our original pilot capacity for Decelerator Hotline calls. In July 2024 we received 9 requests for Decelerator Hotline calls. In October we received at least 9 requests a week. This heightened demand has quickly exhausted our limited pilot resources.
It is too soon to draw immediate or strong conclusions from this increase. We feel sure that this uptick likely reflects a broader need for the kind of support The Decelerator offers. The uptick might also be a reflection of the distinctiveness of our services, the effectiveness of our approach, or simply our expanding reach as a relatively new organisation. We also think it might be to do with the time of the year, the aftermath and impacts of the general election and the long-tail of Covid and other shocks to the sector.
Like many nonprofits, we work within limited funding cycles and are currently awaiting further financial support, anticipated in December 2024. Until then, we regret that we can only accept calls referred through our funded partners (currently: Esmee Fairbairn, Paul Hamlyn, Unbound Philanthropy, and Pears Foundation), and we won’t be able to accommodate new requests until December 2024 at the earliest.
In the weeks ahead, we’re focusing our efforts on two key goals: securing additional funding to reopen the hotline and refining our hotline process to increase efficiency and better meet the high demand.
For those seeking support in the meantime, we encourage you to explore the written resources and tools we’ve developed, available on our website. These guides offer insights and approaches to some of the questions we’re frequently contacted about. In particular it might be useful to draw on:
Considering Closure workbook designed to help individuals and teams anticipate a closure
Guidance on how to talk to, and work with, your funders through an ending
A guide for considering a legal structure or governance change in your organisation
We also recommend connecting with an infrastructure organisation, an existing funder, or even a wise peer for support, as they may be able to provide timely assistance or alternative resources.
Those familiar with The Decelerator know our mission isn’t to create a single hotline to serve all of civil society. Instead, our aim is to catalyse “deceleration” capacity across the systems we all operate within—whether in infrastructure organisations, funding bodies, or the daily practices of the organisations we love and serve. If you find yourself frustrated or concerned by our temporary closure, and your organisation could address this need for deceleration through its own helpdesk, hotline, or guidance services, we would be keen to hear from you. We offer training, communities of practice and other kinds of knowledge sharing so that our work and learnings can inspire and inform the work of others. We’ve prepared a short conversation guide that might help or inspire you in the first instance.
By the end of this year, The Decelerator will release a comprehensive (and digestible!) report on our pilot work, featuring updated tools and resources informed by our learnings since launching in September 2023, along with our plans for the coming 1-5 years. This report will serve as an accountability measure to our community and provide practical assistance for the growing number of organisations asking critical questions about endings. We look forward to sharing this with you and seeing where it takes our contribution and impact in the months and years ahead.
Most of all, thank you for being on this deceleration journey with us - as a friend, colleague or comrade. We will provide an update on the hotline service by 25th November 2025.