Stewarding loss in civil society: Finding our bearings
The Stewarding Loss project is exploring how can we do organisational endings well - responsibly, intelligently and with compassion. Here are a few of the ideas and people that Cassie Robinson and I are drawing on as this work develops. We’d love to hear what else you think we should be reading / listening to.
To recap
When first conceived, the Farewell Fund was rooted in there being so little conversation, let alone action, when it comes to the idea of renewal in civil society. By renewal we mean the natural cycle of life and death — things fade in their relevance. What was once seen as vital can lose its place. The purpose or reason for something existing can shift as the wider context shifts too.
Cassie wrote a couple of things in the early stages of this project. In one piece she explored the question of How We Help Organisations To Die rooted in her reflections on the Berkana Insitute’s Two Loop model born out of her work in the digital arena and having witnessed the impacts of technology on society. Through this she came to think about ways to ‘hospice the old’ — to help things ‘die well’ in order to pave the way for the transition to a new system.
On top of my own experiences of the birth, growth, renewal and decline of organisations I’ve worked in throughout my career in civil society, another lens I bring to this project is (as is often the way with grief work) my personal journey through loss and renewal when I established the foundation in memory of murdered MP Jo Cox in 2016.
As Covid-19 devastates lives and communities across the UK, it is also devastating civil society. We know that some organisations won’t survive. The Farewell Fund framing for this work is no longer appropriate. Our focus now is to identify ways to cope with this loss to support the sector to have honest conversation about what needs preserving and what doesn’t, and to ensure that loss is stewarded with intent — that it is designed.
Casting our net wide
Perceptions and understanding about endings and death reflect the social climate in which they take place so we are drawing on other perspectives and influences from across the social sciences and culture. What are the analogies and practices we can draw on from end of life care, grief therapy, our relationship to endings more widely, our cultural relationships to old and new, the care (or lack of) that surrounds people and things that are dying in comparison to the emphasis and attention we place on the new (babies and start-ups).
Building on what’s come before — loss and civil society
Charlie Leadbetter and Laura Bunt wrote a report in 2012 called the Art of Exit. It’s one of the only pieces of work we know that directly deals with how to decommission things that are no longer working. Their work was focussed entirely on the public sector. We’re interested in what this looks like for the social sector and civil society.
The Sustainable Funding Project was an initiative of NCVO back in 2011 which emerged from NCVO’s assessment that there was too little support available to organisations considering their future. It drew on examples of organisations that had closed including Merseyside River Trust whose founder set up the mission accomplished website to share her experience of winding up the Anglo-German Foundation after 36 years.
Both these projects looked at ways to approach endings creatively and pragmatically. We’re interested in building on this and particularly by asking how you can do it ethically and intelligently — with compassion.
Wider context
The International Futures Forum presents a cyclical view of time which helps to shift the sense of an ending — which is always an echo of our fear of death. We need to complete, to close well — understanding that this is what makes space for the next cycle. A second Enlightenment perspective pays attention to endings as much as beginnings (‘start-ups’), hospice work for the dying culture as much as midwifery for the new. Other seminal writing in this arena includes Ernest Becker’s ‘Denial of Death’ in which Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie: man’s refusal to acknowledge his own mortality and Stanley Keleman’s ‘Living Your Dying’.
End of life
“If we are to provide genuinely holistic care for people, we need to actively acknowledge these wider systems and design within them” Ivor Williams
The work of Ivor Williams designing end of life care with the Helix Centre is illuminating and contains myriad lessons when considering loss. In this blog here he shares his thoughts after 4 years of designing end of life care. Amongst his reflections is that he sees the dying process as a holistic one: a uniquely emotional, psychological and often spiritual period of life — something also seen in the work of Professor Scott Murray at the University of Edinburgh. Beyond the medication regimes, form-filling, consultation conversations and visits, there is everyday life. Ivor also presses that death should be a predominantly social, rather than clinical, experience. All people surrounding a dying person — be it friends, family or wider community — can deliver incredible care if supported in the right way, because good end-of-life care is everyone’s business. Initiatives such as Compassionate Neighbours and Coach4Care reflect this approach.
Ivor’s third reflection is that if we are to provide genuinely holistic care for people, we need to actively acknowledge these wider systems and design within them. Cassie wrote about the Shine Project in Fife in this piece here which presented a comprehensive ‘systems change’ approach to change the culture of care, which started with a shift to ‘grown up conversations about living and dying.’ Meanwhile the ReSPECT process creates personalised recommendations for a person’s clinical care in a future emergency in which they are unable to make or express choices.
Grieving and loss — what can we learn from psychotherapy
“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,” Joan Didion
In Kubler Ross and Kessler’s seminal On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss (2014) they present their 5 stages of grieving. Kubler Ross describes how grief has taught her that she can survive. ‘I used to be afraid that if I experienced grief it would overcome me and I wouldn’t be able to survive the flood of it, that if I actually felt it I wouldn’t be able to get back up. It’s taught me that I can feel it and it won’t swallow me whole. But we come from a culture where we think people have to be strong. I’m a big believer in being vulnerable, open to grief. That is strength. You can’t know joy unless you know profound sadness. They don’t exist without each other.’ Kessler’s 2019 book adds another stage to the process, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Kessler is the founder of www.grief.com, which has over 5 million visits yearly from 167 countries.
In Julia Samuel’s Grief Works (2017) the renowned psychotherapist and founder of Child Bereavement UK shares stories from those who have experienced great love and great loss — and survived. Stories that explain how grief unmasks our greatest fears, strips away our layers of protection and reveals our innermost selves. Samuel says: ‘Grief doesn’t hit us in tidy phases and stages, nor is it something that we forget and move on from; it is an individual process that has a momentum of its own, and the work involves finding ways of coping with our fear and pain, and also adjusting to this new version of ourselves, our “new normal”.
There are many theories and frameworks for grief which form an extensive knowledge base for loss practitioners more broadly. The Mapping Grief tool from Keele University is a good place to start getting your head around them. A theoretical framework which has been developed by Linda Machin, the Range of Response to Loss model, uses the language of grieving people heard in her practice and research, which also echoes the concepts of other theoretical perspectives.
Surfacing authentic language and rituals
We’re interested in the contemporary and ancient language and rituals around loss that create meaning. Just a few things that have caught our eye: Maleena Pone and Saima Thompson’s Fresh to Death podcast on the BBC in which they explore British Asian experiences of death and dying. In this podcast on Canadian National Broadcast radio, indigenous approaches to loss and grief in Canada are explored through multiple interviews. London based Funeral Director Poppy Mardall shares her and the Poppy’s Funerals’ team’s reflections on mourning, rituals and remembering in the Talking Death blog here. And this article here shares reflections on death in First Nation people. Whilst deep and rich in their own way — what these have in common are the claiming of language and ritual around loss in context specific, creative ways.
Understanding the power of narrative and stories
Building on the idea of authentic language, in the Art of Exit Charlie and Laura explore how “decommissioning could be understood as a process of service improvement, driven by a search for better outcomes for the public. It should be as strategic and integrated a process as commissioning, and absolutely linked to it.” Cassie noted in an earlier blog that if you change the words “service improvement” to “systemic health” or “systems change” and it highlights how a process of renewal is healthy and necessary. It is clear that the language we use and the stories that emerge are key to the processing of loss. In this recent New Yorker piece here Kim Stanley Robinson explores how The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations.
Covid-19 and loss
Our work is being undertaken in the shadows of a far greater loss — that of human life during the Covid-19 crisis, which is disproportionately affecting People of Colour across the UK. Covid-19 is seeing an emergent commentary, analysis and imagining on loss during Covid 19. The twitter account Death in the age of Covid is a useful contemporary archive of articles, comment and resources on all sorts of loss emerging through the Covid-19 crisis.
Other articles that have caught our eye include this interview with David Kessler for Harvard Business Review. In this piece for the Guardian, Yuban Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, explores whether coronavirus will return us to more traditional and accepting, attitudes towards dying — or reinforce our attempts to prolong life? This New Yorker diary of 24 hours in the crisis. These reflections from a bereavement nurse in the New Statesman on the ways grief is being shaped by Covid-19. And this New Yorker piece by Lauren Collins on her experience of losing her father during (but not due to) Covid: ‘We are left to face this with what we have: our hearts, beating sadness and love, and our imaginations, this underused magical power.’
This Human Moment from a collective including On Being has hosted a series of weekly online gatherings to help organisations and their teams regain access to their highest capabilities as human beings, and discover the resilience, calm and creativity we’ll need to move through the COVID-19 crisis — and walk together to make the future. Sessions have fused the powerful storytelling from beloved media brands with proven human change practices — interspersed with moments of artistic performance and inspiration. Their tools here are a valuable tool for all those looking not just to navigate this time but to find and create flourishing on the other side. Each session tracks to the stages of collective trauma, grief, and ultimately renewal — ‘reckoning with darkness’ is of particular value for those considering loss at this time.
Alex Evans, Casper Ter Kuile and Ivor Williams’ This Too Shall Pass is a powerful call to step towards loss. ‘Although grief is painful, we must recognise the importance of honouring it, both individually and collectively, and of allowing it to unfold in its own time rather than holding it to a timetable. Seeking to avoid it only makes things worse… Our ability to grieve well and discern these gifts is helped enormously when we are able to draw on shared myths, rituals and practices that assist us in making sense of life even as we grapple with loss and despair.’
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If you have thoughts on what we should be reading / listening to / understanding as we seek to understand how to steward loss in civil society, we’d love to hear from you. Join a loss circle for civil society practitioners and leaders here; complete our survey here; or contact me if you’d be up for being interviewed on this topic.
