Finding Steadiness in a Time of Endings

An interview with Iona Lawrence of The Decelerator

Iona Lawrence from The Decelerator

I’m starting an occasional series of interviews here on More Fully Alive with people whose work I resonate with. This first one is a conversation with a friend called Iona Lawrence. She has quietly been a leading light in the UK’s third sector, especially around loneliness and social cohesion, but her latest project is unusual. She and her cofounders noticed that the social sector (and, I would argue, society as a whole) is not good at endings. When projects or organisations come to an end they often do so chaotically, with no eye to legacy, leaving everyone involved hurt and exhausted. (You could, of course, say the same of businesses, romances, dreams….). They founded The Decelerator to help change that. Whether you are involved in the voluntary, NGO or charity sector or just interested in how we grieve loss and navigate instability healthily, I think you will find much wisdom from Iona here.

Elizabeth Oldfield: Could you start by telling me what led you to this work?

Iona Lawrence: I’ve worked in the charity sector since 2009, and I had the privilege and the honour of setting up the foundation for my friend Jo Cox, the MP who was killed in 2016. In setting up her foundation, her family asked that it be a time-limited foundation, one with a defined lifetime. So it was originally going to wind up sometime in the 2020s.

Elizabeth Oldfield: Do you remember why that was important to them?

Iona Lawrence: As I remember it, it was partly that they were aware of the age of their children in particular, Jo’s children were 2 and 4 at the time and therefore not in a position to say whether a Foundation was something they’d want to live with in the long term. But also for the grown ups too. This awful thing had happened that they felt the need to do something about and make meaning from. They believed they could do something major with her legacy, and with her example. But for all these reasons they were wary of creating a foundation that might need to exist forever to make us feel like we are doing Jo justice.

And with that… I think they were thinking: if our grief is to evolve, might we evolve out of or away from needing a foundation as the holder of her legacy? We know this is what we want now, but we don’t know if it’s what we want or need in the future, and we can’t know whether it is what our children will want or need in the future. Let’s set something up, and let it be big, and bold, and feisty and angry and hopeful in the way that Jo would have been. But also, let’s not be afraid that this thing might have a lifespan. And that wouldn’t mean if we closed it, that her role had come to an end, or her legacy had come to an end, but that just this part of it might have served its purpose.

I was too young and too inexperienced, both in grief and in organisational leadership, to know what leadership that was. But it’s only in hindsight I’ve come to feel really quite humbled by it.

The Foundation is still around now because my successors believe it remains a precious piece of infrastructure of immense value in this time, but when I ran it, in that context we were very much focused on a short, focused lifespan.

Elizabeth Oldfield: Do you remember noticing that at the time? Is it no surprise to you that you’ve ended up here?

Iona Lawrence: It is a total surprise to me. I was very motivated by the work we’d done for Jo on loneliness and I set my sights on running a loneliness charity. But at the same time, I found myself noticing what was happening in the midst of COVID and the explosion around the awareness of loneliness and social isolation. At the same time, the sector that worked and dedicated its time to loneliness and social isolation couldn’t itself seem to survive COVID. We lost some really important and treasured organisations: the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, the Cares Family, the Campaign to End Loneliness, untold numbers of befriending networks in local communities. All these and more came to the decision, or reached a point where they felt they had no option to close their doors just as society had been delivered this universal lesson in why loneliness matters, why our relationships matter.

Something deep in me was like: I’ve been brought up to believe that if there’s a need, and the public and politicians understand that need, then we build the infrastructure, the policies, the funding and the charities that are needed to meet that need. In a few short years, lots of the organisations I imagined playing a part in no longer existed in the same way. And through this I began to understand more deeply how vulnerable civil society as we know it is to a changing context.

Take a look at the state of communities. I live in Exeter, where we have a social infrastructure challenge. Community centres, churches, halls, spaces where you can gather without needing to spend money are in short supply. And I don’t think anyone sat here and was like “yeah, we don’t need spaces together anymore.” Over the last couple of decades, a set of factors conspired to make it inevitable that we would lose these precious things.

This is a very long way of saying I am now preoccupied by how we can be as intentional and deliberate as possible about what we take forward and what we leave behind in these very turbulent times. If, for example, economic growth and increased government spending is not going to be possible, and charities will pay the price in terms of their income for this, what then is the best way forward? How do we let things go well, acknowledging what is being lost, taking care of people as best as we can, and trying to build out of these endings, the foundations for what might come next?

Elizabeth Oldfield: What would you say are some of the unhealthy stories about endings that you see in the air?

Iona Lawrence: We run a hotline for anyone in a charity or a non-profit who might be anticipating, or planning, or even delivering an ending of any kind. A lot of people call us and say: “I have not said this to anyone yet, but I think time is up for this project or organisation”. That’s because these things are the things that charity leaders often fear the most.

We’ve got very used to believing that charities only step towards people. We have got very good at fighting tooth and nail to keep the lights on, for example through austerity. And so, to step away or wind up speaks to this sense that we have that we’ve failed, or given up. We see a lot of lonely, isolated leaders staring at spreadsheets, scared of the deep rifts and conflicts in their organisation, consumed by fear of failure. We often hear “I never had the training for this” which also speaks to the fact that these are not parts of leadership that anyone feels are particularly acceptable in our culture.

Elizabeth Oldfield: It feels to me like it connects into wider stories about limits and failure and death, actually. This shift from fundamentally biological sources of meaning-making—fundamentally agricultural understanding of humans and the Earth as being cyclical. Things grow, and they bear fruit, and then they die. And then something else grows, right, and bears fruit and dies.

Post-industrialisation, there’s been an increasing creep of machine metaphors. The economy should always grow, and we should always be moving up and to the right. The idea that death and loss and endings are entirely normal and to be expected feels like a thread that we’ve dropped somewhere along the way.

I want to read you a poem. This is “Failing and Flying” by Jack Gilbert:

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It’s the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails, and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly... How can they say the marriage failed? I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

We say that to each other a lot in our community house: at some point, we are gonna come to the end of our triumph. And that will be part of the story. If you have the story that it’s a failure, or it’s someone’s fault, then you tense up, and the ability to be soft and creative about a change in the seasons completely goes. It’s endemic in our leadership models—that it will look bad on our CV if we close a thing.

Iona Lawrence: I love that poem.

There are a bunch of different stories going on in the charity sector that are also going on in wider society. One thing I think I can see is lots of very brilliant, well-intentioned people running around like Chicken Licken saying “the sky’s falling in”. This is a very grave and serious context, but does that really prepare us for the leadership that is needed now? Or does it instead get everyone locked into a drama triangle where they end up disempowered and unable to see that they might have a set of choices and options ahead of them, even if they aren’t what success might once have felt like?

Then there are other people who are like, “guys, it’s always been hard around here. Just buckle up, don’t surrender.” Which I also think lacks something, where I think there are some really difficult decisions to be taken, and we are presiding over losses in society and community that feel quite monumental.

The Decelerator tries to meet people and listen to their stories and play them back in a way that resources people with an understanding of the situation they find themselves in and the choices they have ahead of them. We get chief execs calling us, and they’re like, “this terrible thing is unfolding, and I feel so responsible. If I’d have known now this was gonna end up, I’d have done something differently 10 years ago.”

In those moments, we narrate back what we’ve heard, but we also help them lift their heads up and look at the stories coming up around them in the wider sector. The classic conversation often goes like: “I don’t say this to underplay the intensity of your experience, but you are the 5th organisation from your sector or place I’ve spoken to in the last year. It seems that we might be dealing with a system failure, or even collapse, here. Would you like to explore that story together?” If leaders root themselves in an awareness of and understanding of what might be going on right now, what might it shift for you in terms of their feeling of responsibility for this?

People tell us through these sorts of conversations they initially come to feel relief. Helping leaders explore the story of what really is going on right now within and beyond the four walls of their organisation can really help them steady themselves, and ask: okay, so if I recognise that we are part of a pattern, what is mine to do here?

Elizabeth Oldfield: So what are the ingredients for a good ending?

Iona Lawrence: There is something about agency. Many people can come onto a 50-minute conversation with me or one of my team, feeling like they’re at a loss, they’ve reached an impasse, there is no good or plausible option for them going forwards. And they can finish it saying “these are none of the options that I ever dreamt of, but I do have options, and I have a sense of what better and worse might be.” In those moments someone is stepping towards their own power and agency in a time where they feel quite stripped of that.

Another factor in an ending and its impact is how you take care of people. A closure or a contraction of an organisation might be a catastrophic loss for many people involved, but there are better and worse ways of supporting people to come to their own experience of that loss. Whether it’s your beneficiaries, your staff, your trustees—there are better and worse ways of supporting people to encounter, experience and process loss and move through it.

We also spend a lot of time on legacy. When we as humans in this culture of ours imagine something coming to an end, we often can’t often see beyond that end. You ask people, well, what are you thinking about in terms of the legacy? And they’re like, I haven’t even thought about that yet. We get so fixated on what this ending is, because it might be something that we have fought off with all of our will for such a long time. And so we find it is easy for people to forget a simple truth: even if we do nothing at all, there’ll be a legacy to this ending.

So one of the hallmarks of an impactful organisational ending, and maybe an ending of any kind, is to try and articulate, as early as possible, what legacy might look like. Sometimes we’ll support people who’ve kept an organisation going for decades, and they might be reaching a moment now where, for all sorts of reasons, it’s no longer possible to keep it going. It really does feel like defeat.

So helping them articulate, well, what would it look like if you look back on this with pride? Not because it’s the outcome you wanted, but because you coped the best you could with the situation in front of you. Then, all of a sudden, people are like, “yes! Let’s do this! Let’s go loud, let’s go proud, let’s celebrate, let’s champion the people that made amazing things happen over the lifetime of this organisation or project.”

And then let’s get really angry and articulate about the injustices we’ve learnt about during the lifetime and ending of this thing. There’s often a powerful moment at the end of an organisation where a leader or a team is stepping away from long-held relationships with funders, commissioners or policy makers for the first time in years or decades. For 20 or 30 years, people might have been playing a game of managing relationships and keeping funders and commissioners on side, because you don’t bite the hand that feeds you. And then you’re closing something, and there’s this light bulb moment when you realise you can say the things you’ve not been able to say before! You realise you can name the injustices and inequities in this system, the things that haven’t worked. So whilst celebrating all that’s been achieved, you also get to turn around to people who might have had power over you and be like: here’s my two cents on what was broken or not working all along.

I’ve seen people do a complete U-turn in a single conversation, by the end they’re like, if I just get through the next three months to the end, I can write a fiery, honest email, or press release. Beyond this too, there is so much that can be fought for in an ending. One of the pleasures and privileges I find in this work is helping people find their way through something, not just because they have to, but because they realise that there’s good work that can be done here. To quote

Dougald Hine ‘s work, there are good ruins to be made. And in the right way, get a whole bunch of people who felt fired up at the beginning of an organisation, feel really fired up at the end of it as they set the scene for what might come next.

Elizabeth Oldfield: I can really hear this—you’re giving people tools in their moral or even spiritual distress to find their sense of agency, and to move out of that kind of overwhelm and exhaustion to okay. It’s so often what we need to hear: take off the burdens that are not ours to carry and know what is ours to carry. The distinguishing between those two things feels like the heart of so much staying sane in the world.

Iona Lawrence: The thing that you just described is the medicine I need in my life too. The pull to overwhelm and extreme moral distress is totally legitimate, and also, at a system level, not equipping us with what we need to lead in this time. I have the privilege of standing alongside and trying to be supportive of people who are doing the same thing that I’m trying to do, which is muddle our way through this extraordinary context. That makes the work an honour, really.

Elizabeth Oldfield: The metaphor that I come back to so much is: the problems so often come from when we’re clenched against reality. They’re resisting reality. Often for some good reasons, but it’s not a posture from which much creative newness can come. Walter Brueggemann talks about the structure of the Psalms—we have to look reality in the face, grieve where it is not what we hoped it would be, and then you can move through to what’s possible now.

People are probably coming to you having spent so long trying to stop something happening that it’s quite hard to go down and up again. There’s something in the changemaker makeup where giving permission to accept rather than fight is almost taboo.

Iona Lawrence: Yes, absolutely. We have these archetypes that we work with. There’s the rescuer—someone who’s battle-weary and hardened, has a strong sense of duty and service mindset, and wants to put other people’s gas masks on before their own. There’s the relentless innovator, who sees a crisis and has five new ideas about how to hack their way through. There’s the doomsayer who keeps lobbing incendiary bombs into board meetings.

It’s so interesting laying out these archetypes and creating the right context for people to feel kindness and compassion towards themselves and the fact that all of us have many of these archetypes within us. And this particular session often turns into “Rescuers Anonymous”, where everyone’s like, “oh, I definitely just want to rescue things.” At a grant-making level, 90% of a room of grantmakers will say their instinctive reaction to a possible ending is to leap into rescuer mode and say, “oh, let me see if I can find you some money to make the problem go away and save you”. We hear often that when an organisation announces publicly they’re going to close, they get 10 emails back from well-intentioned people saying “I know a millionaire who might be able to help”.

I think it’s a human thing, and a cultural thing. We want to rescue things, we want to save things, we want to preserve things. That is a profoundly important instinct, but when we’re all working on rescue mode at scale it can lead to survival at all costs. For example when COVID arrived everyone talked about charities falling off a cliff, so everything went into save and rescue mode. Trusts and foundations put huge amounts of money in to keep charities’ lights on alongside government support and furlough. The result? Fewer charities closed during COVID than have closed in the years before and after.

And so what we’re now dealing with now is a system that has depleted resources because we stretched ourselves during that period. We lived beyond our means, and now there is arguably a different or new or evolved crisis going on around charity financing because of reduced government spending and public giving, which we do not have the resources to deploy in the way that we did during COVID.

Elizabeth Oldfield: One of the key drivers of endings is funding crises, but you have also spoken about how a major factor in possible closures is conflict. How much of a problem is this?

Iona Lawrence: The vast majority of people get in touch with us and say, we need a conversation because we’re running out of money. Then, anecdotally, between 60% and 70% of those conversations will quite quickly move beyond that financial crisis into a conversation around conflict.

At worst, it’s like: My colleagues, staff or trustees have never really trusted each other. Some of the state of the relationships in organisations is devastating to witness. People who don’t have relationships strong and close enough to move beyond stereotypes about each other. The classic archetype is an older generation board and a younger generation staff who perceive one another through stereotypes.

This is partly because of the financial environment. We are in a scarce context, and therefore, as mission-driven organisations with people who have principles and their own activism at play, they aren’t gonna just be like, “oh yeah, let’s agree to disagree.” It’s like, no, this is not just about making money, this is a passion, a calling.

It’s also about how we’re holding space for difficult conversations and decisions. Often people describe that they’re trying to make these very difficult decisions with no easy answers on Zoom with a group of people who no longer meet in person, or if they do, it’s only very rarely. Beneath the surface what I think I hear from people is: I don’t know these people well enough to make a decision with them that feels like there’s no obvious right or good answer.

And that’s before you even get into considering how wider societal fractures are showing up in organisations. There seems to be a very strong and recurring pattern of conflict where oftentimes there is financial insecurity and relational fragmenting, but once you then throw in these wider societal conflicts—perhaps about what the right response is to genocides and conflicts around the world, or to gender and sexuality rights—you often find that an organisation becomes even more calloused, hardened and conflicted.

We work with brilliant people also doing this sort of work supporting charities across the country, and there’s this one woman in Scotland who said on a call the other day: When I first started working alongside The Decelerator, I thought, well, what we need to do is just make the fundraising and the financing problem go away. She said two years on: if a magic money tree came along tomorrow, we still wouldn’t be okay. We wouldn’t be able to just get back to a semblance of stability. There are these other things—conflict and social relationships in the sector and more broadly—that are as significant as the funding crisis.

Don’t get me wrong, if I were an economist, I would be preoccupying myself with how we might create some form of sustainability and regeneration to our economy. That is not my job. I can’t do that. So, I preoccupy myself with this corner of the civil society, the charity sector, and how we respond to this strange, turbulent era we are living through.

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