Since April 2025, The Decelerator has received 44 calls to our Hotline from organisations anticipating or planning some form of ending. These have included closures, mergers, programme reductions, restructures, succession planning and much more. This blog is an overview of the persistent patterns we have observed over time through the Hotline and our broader work, along with emerging themes that are beginning to surface.
Short on time? Check out these two lists first. Or scroll down for some longer-form analysis…
Persistent Patterns
Endings remain counter-cultural: Conversations about closure still feel taboo. The Decelerator Hotline continues to be the first place many callers feel comfortable voicing the anticipation of a possible ending, or exploring an ending in a way that isn’t loaded with connotations of failure or defeat.
Survival at all costs: Although a growing number of organisations are reaching out to us, and sometimes earlier than they said they might have previously, there remain many who delay and hold off. The rationale is often “we have not failed yet, there may still be time to save this organisation, it is not time to call The Decelerator. We’ll call them when we have no other options left.”
Governance fragility: Boards and leadership teams often tell us they are ill-equipped to handle endings. In turn this means that reactions to changing circumstances can be delayed, defensive, or avoided. The responsibility frequently falls on a single individual on a board or a team who is working on their own to achieve better or good outcomes, even in the face of great adversity.
Under-resourced leadership: Those leading closures or contractions are rarely given additional support, leaving them to shoulder the pressure on top of already demanding workloads.
Fatigue from the slog: Many working in civil society experience their efforts as unrelenting, with few visible victories and increasingly entrenched challenges. Some of this fatigue stems from the political and social landscape. During hotline calls 2 years ago, many expressed hope that a Labour government might bring stability, along with a more favourable narrative and policy environment for parts of civil society. Those hopes have since dissipated, leaving a lingering sense of despair.
Prioritisation and understanding: Staff and trustees can find themselves consumed by the day-to-day weight of their roles, managing crises, or by the burnout and distress of what is happening in their organisation. We hear people saying they find it hard to distinguish between what is within their control and what is not, delaying essential decisions or execution of essential next steps.
Latent conflict becoming active: Long-standing tensions within organisations tend to resurface when financial or operational strain intensifies.
Conflicts colliding across scales: Political disputes and wider societal tensions are increasingly intersecting with internal debates about governance, ethics and identity.
Conflict reflecting wider societal divisions: Organisations, and sometimes entire sectors, are increasingly caught up in conflicts that echo broader divisions in society. These often centre on gender, race, ethnicity, class and age, and can become particularly acute when combined with financial or operational pressures.
Financial insecurity intertwined with conflict: Scarcity and disagreement feed each other, corroding trust both internally and with external partners.
Endings can be inequitable: Inequitable both because of where they happen, who does ‘the work’ of delivering the ending and carrying the burden, and in terms of their lasting impacts and which communities are most affected (you can read more about what we have learnt so far about endings and equity here).
Simple stories in complex times: Coverage in the media and on social platforms often reduces the present moment to unhelpful extremes: “everything will be fine if you hold tight” on one hand, or “collapse is inevitable and blame lies elsewhere” on the other. The reality is more complicated than either of these narratives suggest, and both tend to feed into the survival-at-all-costs approach to leading in a time of profound uncertainty and change.
Funders and grant-receiving organisations aren’t having the necessary honest conversations at right moments for better outcomes: Funders and grantees are often locked in a cycle of mistrust. Grantees worry that disclosing difficulties will result in withdrawing funding, while funders express frustration that they are not informed early enough. And many people in the middle who are simply unsure whom to approach and when.
Civil society support often focuses on ‘crisis services’ and diagnostic tools: These are designed to determine what an organisation should do next in order to avoid an ending at all costs. While they play an important role in addressing urgent needs, we regularly hear from both providers and users that these approaches, though valuable, are not sufficient on their own. Too often, organisations return repeatedly for emergency support without ever addressing the underlying causes of instability.
Calling The Decelerator doesn’t signal the end for you or your organisation — it’s often the start of seeing new possibilities: When people come to us needing a conversation about closure for example, some do close within a year and others find a way forward. What everyone tells us, though, is that the support gave them clarity, confidence, and a stronger footing for the future.
Earlier engagement: We are hearing from more organisations earlier in their journey. A handful in the last 3 months called at the beginning of a three-year funding cycle which they already have doubts about being able to replace. They called to discuss what questions to put on the table and how to prepare for the possibility of an ending with as much foresight and legacy as possible.
Emerging Patterns
Mounting moral injury and extreme distress: Increasingly, leaders are naming the profound emotional toll of decisions about survival or closure. They are carrying the heavy, often intolerable weight of a civil society that, in some places, is being forced to step back from the very people and communities who depend on its support, services, and even its existence. We are meeting leaders who blame themselves, experiencing overwhelming moral injury and acute distress as they shoulder this responsibility.
Changing personal thresholds: More leaders talk to us about having reached the point of being able to recognise the impact of the work on their health and choosing not to carry that cost by stepping down or leaving the sector. For some, rest is resistance. Particularly in minority-led organisations, stepping back is framed not as weakness but as a deliberate, sometimes political, act.
Bigger life questions: Many people are starting to ask themselves difficult questions about their future. They wonder whether they can find meaning, purpose, or a fresh start beyond the role or organisation they’re in now. Alongside this, there are very real fears about how they will make a living if they move on, or if their organisation doesn’t survive. People tell us they feel torn: on the one hand, they worry about their own security and the jobs of those around them; on the other, they know that the heart of working in a charity or nonprofit is not job protection but staying true to the mission and the communities they serve.
A belief in the importance of legacy: More leaders are recognising the value of planning intentionally for legacy, whether that’s the legacy of a project, an organisation, or a period of leadership. Even with limited time and resources, they are choosing to prioritise activities that celebrate achievements, honour the contributions of teams over time, and mark endings with pride. This might take the form of a closing event, a carefully worded press release that acknowledges the wider systemic factors behind the ending, or carefully finding new homes for key assets, projects services so they can endure.
Hidden costs of community asset ownership: Ownership of community assets can create significant burdens, particularly for organisations already under financial or operational strain.
The accelerating and intensifying pace of change: Rapid developments in AI and other technologies are reshaping the sector. Leaders describe feeling torn between the pressure to keep up and the need to question the costs. Many funders talk of the impact of AI on increased application numbers. Meanwhile The Charity Commission recently reported a sharp rise in applications and said they were considering using AI to ‘get ahead of the deluge’.
So what?
If you take away just one thing from this blog, let it be this: raise questions about endings early, and make it a regular part of your routine. For many of us, The Decelerator’s team included, doing so is likely to feel unnatural or uncomfortable to start with at least. For the best outcomes and greatest impact, conversations about endings should begin at the very start of a project, leadership period, or organisation, and return at regular intervals.
In reality this means boards and teams asking not only how things can grow, but also what may need to end. It means questioning the usual logic of growth at all costs, and weighing it against the realities of contraction in programmes, organisations, and partnerships. It means sketching out possible endings long before you reach the point where no other choices remain.
We’re encouraged to see more people coming to us earlier, starting these conversations while there is still room to make decisions and shape legacy should an ending come to pass. Yet too often, we also see endings delayed until it’s too late, when questions of impact and legacy can no longer be addressed in any meaningful way.
Taking Stock In Deceleration Month
In August, The Decelerator team stepped back for Deceleration Month, our regular and essential pause to catch breath and take stock. After three months of taking calls via the Hotline, running workshops with funders and infrastructure bodies, and developing initiatives such as the Empowering Endings community in Scotland and the upcoming Deceleration Assembly, we created space to ask ourselves some important questions. What are we noticing in civil society? What are we learning about how to respond? And what can we do or say that might better support those working in it?
We explored these questions in zoom rooms, in person, and through a shared team journal. By the end of the month, some themes were clear to us, and we believe they are worth sharing more widely.
We offer our reflections regularly in the hope that they help you chart your own course through the shifts and changes affecting civil society, and perhaps encourage action towards a sector that is more confident, better equipped, and more ready to face endings, transformations, losses and opportunities.
Spotlight on a Persistent Pattern: Funding in Unstable Times
Since we began this work in 2019, one constant has been clear: when people think about charity endings, they think about funding crises. And they are not wrong.
Patrick Butler in The Guardian recently highlighted some of the structural and systemic pressures that have disrupted how the sector has operated for decades. Public funding, already eroded by austerity, continues to be shaped by economic uncertainty and political volatility. Commissioners, often motivated by duty, are reducing contracts while still seeking to maintain the ambitions tied to them. However well intentioned, the effect on delivery is stark. Organisations of many shapes and sizes are struggling to sustain themselves and the work they believe is essential.
Large national organisations, comparatively well resourced and efficient, often secure contracts that once supported smaller local groups. While this may bring cost savings, it often comes at the expense of local knowledge and trusted relationships. Delays in commissioning and contracting decisions deepen the pressure, leaving leaders without the clarity they need to plan. For example, The Decelerator received calls from Healthwatch delivery partners across the country discussing these dynamics well before the government’s decision this summer to scrap the programme entirely. The latest decision saw a spike in Hotline enquiries as organisations struggled to work out their next best steps whilst the necessary legislative change is sought in the coming months and years.
Philanthropy is also in flux. Some funders are pausing to rethink strategies, leaving organisations without continuity they've become accustomed to, or hoped for. Hotline callers often ask: “Why can’t they just bridge the gap?” We hear from others that they know philanthropy cannot replace the scale of shortfalls caused by government cuts, rising costs and declining public giving. Even when foundations seek to respond with bold new strategies, the immediate impact is disruption, as long-standing work is set aside in favour of new priorities. Communities bear the sharpest consequences as vital services disappear, often with little prospect of replacement or legacy.
All of this is taking place even as data from 360 Giving shows that the overall volume of philanthropic funding to civil society is steadily increasing both in real terms and in comparison to public giving or government funding. Data aside, Hotline conversations at alive with stories of how funding shifts and reorientations are part of the turbulence and contributing to an often unpredictable landscape for organisations that depend on, rely on or simply hope for maintaining or growing their resources.
Emerging Pattern: Moral Distress, Burnout and Conflict
Alongside financial pressures, we continue to hear about human and organisational strains including burnout, conflict and governance fragility. These themes now arise in the majority of Hotline conversations. It has become impossible to ignore the widespread accounts of stress and exhaustion across the sector (as Fair Collective’s recent work on mental health highlights). Reports of governance crises, such as Prince Harry’s Sentebale controversy, are echoed in the kinds of situations we hear about every week.
What is striking now, however, is not only isolated breakdowns or individual exhaustion that might be relieved by rest or workload adjustments, but a deeper form of moral and even spiritual distress. This is akin to what is often called “moral injury” in the NHS and other public sector roles.
We hear from leaders every week describing how their civil society organisation is being asked to meet increasingly complex needs with shrinking resources, often within systems not designed for today’s demands. Leaders managing closures, mergers or downsizing are carrying not only heavy workloads but also the sorrow and despair of stepping back from communities they have served. This is moral distress.
In these tough, strained times, it's perhaps no surprise that significant conflicts are emerging within organisations as people disagree about the best path forward when difficult decisions with no easy answers must be made. Conflict is also intensifying around wider societal issues. We hear frequent accounts of staff teams divided over responses to international conflicts, or over organisational positions on gender and sexuality rights. Our Hotline data, whilst not a representative sample of civil society at large, nevertheless points to a pattern whereby divisions and conflict multiply and intensify when financial distress is also present.
This distress is not limited to charities and community groups. We hear of long-term sickness, stress and anxiety among staff in funding bodies, who carry the strain of saying no to effective, needed organisations simply because of limited and hotly contested funding pots.
Whether funder or recipient, many in civil society have long believed that our role is always to move towards communities, never away. Mission statements that pledge to “end poverty, inequality and climate change” foster the sense that we are part of a never-ending story, where the only end point is the vanquishing of the problem itself. To acknowledge otherwise, to witness an ending unfold in the face of rising need, and especially when there is no meaningful legacy that can be envisaged, can feel unbearable for those who find themselves in the driver's seat of a project, organisation or network.
Yet there are glimmers. Increasingly, leaders are speaking more openly about organisational and personal thresholds, about honouring endings rather than denying them, about experimenting with rest as a form of resistance, and about beginning legacy conversations earlier. These are small but significant shifts, and they may prove to be seeds of something healthier in the long run.
Comprehending the Endings We Cannot Imagine In A Never-Ending Civil Society
Change in any sphere of life often feels painful or bewildering before it stands a chance at revealing new possibilities. We see this in energy systems built on unsustainable consumption. We see it in social patterns, such as smoking, where behaviour continues despite known harm. And we see it in civil society as it exists today: under strain, and struggling to imagine itself without its current hard-won structures, funding, roles and organisations.
Many, though not all, of those who call us are from the professionalised parts of civil society: organisations with offices, paid staff, and funding relationships with government or trusts and foundations. These organisations have endured austerity and waves of financial instability, but today’s combination of insecure funding, increasing need, fragile governance and staff exhaustion is exposing deep vulnerabilities.
At the same time, we also hear from grassroots groups and social movements, often operating without salaries or offices, whose experience reminds us that the current model is not inevitable.
For The Decelerator, this moment is not about rushing to fix everything or clinging to permanence. It is about recognising the scale and complexity of the challenges before us, and asking what good leadership and service might look like in an age of profound uncertainty, likely contraction and possible transformation. This is not an admission of failure, as many of us (ourselves included) can sometimes feel. As Laurie Laybourn has written, there is no way to steer around or avoid the complexity and challenges we surrounded by. The work now is to learn how to move through them and spot the opportunities and glimmers of possibility as they appear.
The Decelerator makes the case for attention to both “big” and “small” endings within organisations, recognising that each offers a chance for reflection, change, and transition. Big endings, perhaps the closure of a programme, a major restructuring, a leadership change, a closure of an organisation or a merger with another, are often highly visible and can shape the future direction of an organisation, a place or a sector. Smaller endings, like the conclusion of a project, a team member leaving, or the winding down of a routine process, are subtler but equally valuable for learning and adaptation.
All endings have the potential to reveal what is working well and what no longer serves the organisation’s mission or is viable. By noticing, acknowledging and engaging with them, organisations can make intentional choices, preserve what matters, and create space for new opportunities to emerge.
Signs that endings are around us are everywhere. So too are the signs that civil society can adapt and renew itself by working through, rather than avoiding, the change and endings that are coming towards us.
The Decelerator has a lots planned for rest of the year, here’s some of how we’ll be focusing our time
Supporting conversations: Engaging with people through the Hotline who are anticipating, planning, or reflecting on an organisational ending. We’ll also be testing ways to help people ask questions and explore options earlier in the process.
Training and workshops: Delivering sessions for funding organisations to support them to experiment with ways to respond effectively to the evolving needs of civil society.
Collaboration with networks: Working alongside infrastructure organisations and membership networks to strengthen the support available to organisations navigating change. Including continuing the Empowering Endings work in Scotland.
Events: Hosting the Deceleration Assembly on 15th October and running our regular Deceleration Hours to nurture, champion and connect everyone working in this space.
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