Funders and nonprofits, no hiding our heads in the sand. Here are insights + guidance so we can do better.
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What I learned about endings, leaving, and death dates from my mother dying and a nonprofit closing.
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.
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.
Taking on nine of the big red herrings, oversimplifications, and obstinacy that just don’t belong in the closure conversation.
What can the UK learn from how US nonprofits prepared (or didn’t) for the political meltdown we’re facing?
An easy one-pager guide for funders getting “closure-comfortable.”
What assumptions would undergird a sector with a healthy relationship to endings? A one-pager guide.
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.
Katya is a guest on Naomi Hattaway’s Leaving Well podcast, discussing normalizing endings and leaving as an expression of power.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.