Get Ready To Assemble: A Gathering On Endings and Transitions in October 2025

The Deceleration Assembly is coming to Birmingham in October 2025, and we’d love you to be part of it.

At The Decelerator we speak with handfuls of courageous, creative and ambitious practitioners every month. People doing the important work of standing alongside communities, organisations, sectors and movements navigating change, turbulence and the need for endings.

Is this you? Perhaps you’ve supported an organisation that's winding down a programme in the midst of a rapidly changing financial context. Maybe you've just helped a tired team through a merger, or you're standing beside a founder preparing to step away after decades. Maybe you're watching a project, or even a whole organisation, fade out — not because it failed, but because the world has changed and the work needs to shift. Or maybe, you're just holding a persistent feeling: Something here is ending. I don’t quite know what to do with that. Who do I need to be to be useful and impactful at this time?

You're not alone.

Across civil society, endings and transitions seem to many of us like they are becoming more frequent — and more complex. Whether planned or unexpected, they often arrive without a map, leaving staff, leaders, and communities feeling uncertain, isolated, or stuck in a mode of “survive at all costs”.

At The Decelerator, we believe that supporting civil society to respond to turbulence, look endings in the eye and evolve in these times is going to take action from all of us. So we’re organising the Deceleration Assembly. A space to pause, reflect, connect and hatch plans — with each other and with the possibility that organisational change, transition and ending can be done with impact, care, creativity, and even hope.

So whether you’re a fundraiser asking what is my role in a longer-term constrained funding environment, a facilitator asking whether it’s possible to help organisations really consider a world without their existence, or an accountant wondering how on earth you might help your clients face the reality of the context they find themselves in…whoever you are and whatever role you play, this is a space for you if you think now’s the time to step towards endings, rather than look the other way. Read all about it and book your spot here.

Deceleration Assembly: The Practical Information

• Date: Wednesday 15th October 2025

• Time: 10:00 AM – 4:30 PM

• Location: A beautiful venue in Birmingham (we’ll share the address when you register)

• Pre-gathering: Join us for pizza and an informal chat the night before (Tuesday 14th October, 6–8 pm) at Franco Manca on Bennett’s Hill. The meal is not included in the ticket price.

• Tickets and travel bursaries: We have a variety of tickets available and travel bursaries. Find more information and book tickets here.

What We Will Do Together

1. Cultivate a Shared Practice of Better Endings
   What makes an ending responsible, ethical, and generative? Connect with a group of peers all grappling with organisational endings. Through real stories, tools and open conversations we’ll deepen our collective understanding of this question.

2. Spark New Ideas & Future Collaborations
   This is a space for meeting collaborators, exchanging fresh perspectives, and experimenting with new ways of working. Hands-on activities and peer-led sessions will support connection, reflection, and action that extends beyond the day.

All of this will take place in a welcoming setting — hosted with warmth, fed with delicious food, and designed so you don’t need to perform, hustle, or have your elevator pitch ready.

This Is For You If…

• You find yourself grappling with questions about possible or planned organisational endings - closures, mergers, programme/project termination, succession planning, etc., on your own.

• You sometimes feel like you’re a bit of an oddball for thinking this is even relevant to your work or practice.

• You want to find a way to help the organisations you work with think more upstream.

• You want to test ideas, and approaches and framings on others who give a damn.

• You sometimes find yourself reacting to organisational endings or being caught off guard, and you want to find a way to help the organisations you work with.

• You struggle to find the right words to put a niggle you have about an organisational ending on the table in the first place.

• You might read any of the items on this list and think, "I know how to do this, and I want to share what I know with others!

Book Your Spot Here

If you have any questions, please drop us an email: hello@decelerator.org.uk.