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Background

I’ve been an activist for more than 20 years. Over this time, I’ve worked at different levels of social intervention, including education, community organizing, direct action, and policy advocacy. I’ve worked in cooperatives, libraries, schools, nonprofits, and as an independent consultant. Specific fields include rights and justice for LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV, labor organizing, and early childhood education, among others. These experiences have given me a rich and nuanced perspective on the health and functioning of organizations of different shapes and sizes. 

The Problem

My experiences have led me to these conclusions:

1. there are more nonprofits than the funding economy can adequately support;
2. organizational development work almost always assumes that the organization will be around in perpetuity;
3. when an organization needs to shut down, leaders and front-line staff are often unprepared. 

These three factors create conditions in which:

• individuals feel a sense of personal failure and shame, 
• communication lags within an organization, communication to external shareholders is rushed or hush-hush, 
• relationship ruptures emerge without adequate opportunity for repair
• operations staff bear a double-load of managing the ongoing administration as well as closure tasks simultaneously
• leadership staff and board members feel overwhelmed and are unable to provide emotional support to themselves and other team members 

Taken together, the outcomes of closure may result in:

• Attitudes: bitterness, contempt, and despair govern the ending days
• Behavior: back-channel conversations, spreading rumors, hiding-the-ball, putting leadership on blast, trauma patterns dominate
• Knowledge: institutional knowledge and lessons learned are lost, or live in perpetuity in a siloed, half-finished google doc
• Basically, everybody feels bad and doesn’t have the energy to make things right internally or externally

Approaches to Solutions

Luckily, I’m not the first person to make these observations and want to do something about it. I’m very grateful to learn from the work of:

• Camille Acey, founder of The Wind Down
• Iona Lawrence, founder of The Decelerator
• Alison Lucas & Lizzie Bentley, authors of Good Bye: Leading Change Better by Attending to Endings
• Cassie Robinson, co-founder of Stewarding Loss

What I provide

My approach considers the organization and its people as whole, living organisms whose activity occurs at multiple levels.



I made the above diagram to summarize the domains of work I can support and am repeating the text here so that people using screen readers can access the information.

1. The Body (physiological level)
   • offerings: somatic stress management practices, education about the stress cycle and its impacts at the biological level
2. Mind & Heart (psychological level)
   • offerings: listen to leadership & stakeholders’ thoughts and feelings, tease out personal and organizational needs, translate this information into concrete plan of action
3. Relationships (social level)
   • offerings: hands-on training sessions on trauma, interpersonal conflict, and cultivating peace; conflict mediation / restorative justice sessions
4. Administrative (institutional level)
   • project management for closing process; checklists for finance, operations, and legal steps; legacy planning
5. Transcendent (spiritual level)
   • holding space and designing ending rituals tailored to your organizational culture

Fees

I’m available for smaller engagements on an hourly basis and longer ones either hourly or on a fixed-fee structure. It’s important that we get to know each other before committing to intense work, so I provide a 1-hour consultation at no charge. I offer a sliding scale hourly rate from $175 – $350 based on organization size. We can also negotiate a fixed-fee contract based on deliverables and estimated hours needed to complete them.

How to get in touch

You can fill in the brief form on the contact page of this website, email me at change@thresholdsupport.org, or call or text me at (815) 270-5972. I look forward to hearing from you.