Midwifing Ghosts: The Work a Nonprofit Only Gets to Do When It Closes
Each ending births a ghost, who descends on us unbidden when endings and leavings continue to arise in life. What script that ghost gives us is determined by our experience of the ending that birthed us. We can, and must, midwife far more ghosts of good endings and leavings.
On Chimeras and Second Bodies:
Arts organizations have always been a tenuous proposition, but right now, the survival of that corner of the nonprofit universe is mortally threatened. Their survival is essential not only because the arts are essential, but because the subsector living on helps the rest of us learn to die well.
What If Philanthropy Hoarded Uncertainty, Not Money?
Some uncertainty is normal – even helpful. It’s fuel for creativity and innovation; it pries open windows of opportunity. But too much uncertainty can have the opposite effect. And right now, nonprofits are awash in uncertainty. The importance of foundations not hoarding financial capital is well covered by others. The importance of funders hoarding uncertainty, however, needs an advocate. So here I am.
The End: A Meditation on Dates, Death Certificates, and the Visceral Events We Call Leaving
What I learned about endings, leaving, and death dates from my mother dying and a nonprofit closing.
A Nonprofit Closure Cheat Sheet for Boards + Staff
There’s no one-size-fits-all recipe for closing well. But there are absolutely things to do and things to avoid, and we need to start being clearer about what those are.
The Calculus of Leaving: How Late Grant Decisions Create Impact Debts in Community
What if funders notifying nonprofits about grant renewal just before a grant runs out isn’t just a pain in the neck? What if it has real implications for impact? What if it creates a debt in community that accrues interest — and no one who created that debt takes responsibility for paying it?
Leaving badly is costly, but will be the norm until we start to think differently about impact and responsibility.
Closure + Hot Takes = Trouble
Taking on nine of the big red herrings, oversimplifications, and obstinacy that just don’t belong in the closure conversation.
Civil Society Under Pressure: A Transatlantic Conversation
What can the UK learn from how US nonprofits prepared (or didn’t) for the political meltdown we’re facing?
De-boogeying the Monster
What assumptions would undergird a sector with a healthy relationship to endings? A one-pager guide.
Tails from Philanthropy
Investing in tails is a philanthropic obligation born of funders’ power to leave.
Learn what a grant tail is, why they’re essential to good endings, and ten things funders can do to support tails.
Normalizing Endings: A Conversation with Naomi Hattaway
Katya is a guest on Naomi Hattaway’s Leaving Well podcast, discussing normalizing endings and leaving as an expression of power.
The Inferno Coming for Nonprofits: A Call to Steward the Forest, Not Save Every Tree
What if nonprofits' impact is held hostage by the belief that closure is failure? Are we thundering towards a moment when, like an unthinned forest, the whole sector will face a conflagration?
Buying Time
Our collective failure to reckon with the difference between the damage left by the suddenness of a shutdown and the difficulty, but lesser damage, of a winddown is borne most by the communities that have the least say in any of this. Learn about the harms of how, and why funders need to buy time— not take it.
The Measure Podcast
My first time talking publicly about the Full Frame Initiative’s closure (recorded in November 2024), this interview is a little bit raw and a whole lot real.
If We Care About Justice, We Have to Care About Endings
The title is clear. Learn why it matters.
How We Leave Matters: Navigating Endings with Intention
A view from the middle of an ending: endings as an expression of power, an opportunity for growth, and a container for loss and joy.
Funders, I Want to Tell You About My Donkeys
Come for the donkeys. Stay for the donkeys and the insights about why when a stoic animal or organization says they’re hurting, the time to act is now.