Is your organization facing the difficult reality that you may need to shut down? Are you exploring how to stop your work while honoring your mission and safeguarding your people, resources, and impact?
The global development and humanitarian sector, facing close to $80 billion in cuts over multiple years, needs to embrace the mindset of for-profit startups. Through that lens, “graceful exits” and strategic pivots are signs of smart leadership, not failure. The decision many nonprofit and NGO leaders are facing isn’t whether to give up — it’s about recognizing that sometimes the most courageous leadership decision is knowing when and how to end well.
To explore this topic and learn from leaders who have closed down a nonprofit, Humentum hosted a panel discussion on how organizational sunsetting, when done thoughtfully, can be an act of leadership and legacy.
The panel event, “Sunsetting Your NGO Responsibly: Preserving Legacy While Gracefully Exiting” held July 23, was moderated by co-CEO Chris Proulx, featuring Emily Bove, Founder and Principal, Boèm Impact; Amy Miller-Taylor, Senior Advisor, Giving Tuesday; and Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken, Principal Consultant, Five Oaks Consulting, Inc.
Divide to do more: Role clarity and accountability
One of the barriers to closure can be the weight of the decision itself. If you’re the leader, you feel like it’s all up to you. How can one person be responsible for a choice that will have such a ripple effect for so many others?
That’s the situation Emily Bove found herself in as executive director of the Botanga Foundation, whose mission was to equip the hardest-to-reach girls and women with knowledge and skills to be agents of change in their own lives and communities. In their case, they had funding for the work, but not for their full operating costs. The biggest expense was also immovable — the lease for their office (signed before she came into her role). Unfortunately, the only option to get out of it was to declare bankruptcy.
As executive director, she felt the weight of the decision was all on her. That weight was so heavy it was also holding her back from looking at all the options and sharing the responsibilities. What broke down those barriers was reaching out to a friend and mentor to share her decision. His response: this is the board’s decision, not yours. It’s up to you to lay out the options.
“That perspective enabled me to reset and anchor myself in what was my role,” said Bove. “The board did eventually vote on shutting the organization down. But it enabled us to put accountability where it was supposed to be, and then I was able to have space to be accountable to my team and to our partners and to the people that were part of our network.”
Amy Miller Taylor echoed the value of role clarity. In the case of Global Integrity, they had done the analysis and prepared various scenarios for shutting down and transferring some of the key work to partners.
“Our board did a fantastic job of understanding their role and their legal and fiduciary responsibilities,” said Miller Taylor. “They had their own work plan that had nothing to do with the team. They distributed leadership among them for the closure. And they finalized the administrative closure of the organization in record time. I think that really speaks to understanding roles and responsibilities and embracing those, so your team can get on with the programmatic work and ceding mission sustainability to the board.”
Take time for the transition: Allow space for grief and celebration
If you’re in a situation where the choice to shut down is clear — all the options have been examined and all the scenarios played out — how do you maintain trust among employees, donors, the board, and other key stakeholders?
“We created what we called a ‘hospice’ plan for the shut down,” said Bove. “The first pillar was transition and safety; the second was accountability and governance; the third was celebration and healing.”
The transition pillar included both the people — finding them new roles for staff with partner organizations — and the assets. Safety was emotional and mental health, which involved bringing back the founder, as well as allowing plenty of time for the team to work through their grief and loss.
Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken, who has worked with many organizations through changes, emphasized the importance of this step in the process. “People in our sector tie our identity so closely with the work we do. When we are asked to let go, people need to go through the emotions of sadness, anger, uncertainty, frustration, anxiety. They need time to go through that, in addition to all the practical and tactical steps they need to take.”
The third pillar of celebration for Botanga included formal recognitions of the contribution in writing, online, through social media, and even rituals and ceremonies.
“We called it a release ceremony,” said Bove, “where we each had two envelopes. One of things we wanted to keep, and one of things we needed to let go of regarding an organization we had all loved and worked hard to sustain. We threw that envelope into the fire pit, each one of us. You want to think about how to curate that emotional process for your team, your board members, and your partners.”
Tosca echoed that.
“Storytelling and symbols are so important. And that’s part of a lens on leadership that is incredibly important in this phase, what some people call symbolic leadership, meaning that the role for leadership needs to be about meaning-making. How do we make meaning out of what is happening, whether planned or unplanned.”
Focus on the future: Share your assets
What makes closure easier for stakeholders is to know that the work itself will be carried on, even without that specific nonprofit.
The mindset shift is to see yourselves not as a lone actor with a unique mission that only your organization can do. “Each of you saw your organization as part of a much larger movement,” said Chris Proulx. “That’s challenging for the sector, because often we’re competing with our collaborators when we’re seeking funding. When it comes to closure, we need to shift that orientation to say, no, others can carry on the work in a way that we’re not able to right now, and that’s okay, because the work is going to continue.”
Another factor — not often considered — is having enough funding to close down with intention, and with the ability to transfer the work and the legacy.
“In addition to communicating with transparency, you also need financial transparency,” said Proulx. “You need to know, not just how much cash you have in the bank, but what would it cost to do the kind of responsible transition we should do to carry on the work.”
Global Integrity was able to do just that.
“We were able to pursue some funding from a collaboration grant to facilitate the transfer of the OpenGov Hub, our main asset. That was a crucial source of support,” said Miller Taylor. (OpenGov Hub is a dedicated co-working and event space, providing resources for organizations doing work in the open governance and transparency sector.)
As Proulx shared in wrapping up the panel, “Organizational perpetuity should not be the aim. We should all feel comfortable to kind of say we had our moment; we delivered on our mission. And now, we can, with enough foresight and planning, transition this work responsibly and carefully.”
Change is hard. Let us help.
This isn’t just a conversation about closure. It’s about leadership, legacy, and making the most strategic decision for your mission.
Before making the difficult decision to shut down, take a moment to step back and explore all your options.
Download our free Organizational Transformation Guide – A practical roadmap to assess where you are and where you could go. Explore alternatives like restructuring, merging, strategic partnerships, or consolidating programs. Our consultants can also guide you through strategy and structure changes with their 25+ years of experience supporting nonprofit leaders through high-stakes decisions. We’ll help you evaluate your structure, think through complex scenarios, and develop a clear, mission-aligned path forward.