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How We Leave Matters: Navigating Endings with Intention

Hosted February 2025

Health and philanthropy funders must recognize their role in shaping sustainable systems that not only support organizations in their prime but also provide pathways for responsible transitions and closures. This webinar featured Katya Fels Smyth, Founder and CEO of the Full Frame Initiative (FFI), who shared insights from FFI’s intentional ending.

How We Leave Matters: Nonprofit Endings as Process and Power

from Rx Foundation’s Power is a Social Determinant of Health series

Session description: In this session of the Power is a Social Determinant of Health series, colleagues explored the complexities of endings within the nonprofit sector—how organizations, funders, and communities experience and navigate closure. Katya Fels Smyth, Founder and CEO of the Full Frame Initiative (FFI), shared insights from FFI’s intentional wind-down process, highlighting key lessons on power, responsibility, and sustainability.

This session explored:

  • Why responsible endings matter in the nonprofit sector and how they affect organizations, funders, and communities.
  • Why funders should engage with grantees to ensure sustainability beyond the life of a single organization.
  • Why funders must shift funding models to support entire ecosystems rather than individual projects to mitigate harm from unexpected closures.

Watch the Recording

Session Highlights

Endings Carry Power – How an organization departs from its work and relationships has lasting effects. Thoughtful endings can preserve trust, while abrupt exits can cause harm.
The Funding Dilemma – Many nonprofits fear vulnerability, avoiding discussions about financial struggles due to valid concerns that funders will reduce support rather than help to stabilize them. Funders must invest in the sustainability of missions, which may mean stabilizing an organization or funding endings with integrity.
Reframing Closure – Ending an organization is often perceived as a failure, but it can reflect a commitment to the mission by ensuring work continues through other means.
Headshot of Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick with a quote from the RX Foundation power session, "We must be willing to embrace solutions that respond directly to community feedback even if it sounds foreign, risky and non-academic. People want relatable messaging. This builds trusts which can increase engagement and close care gaps.
The Role of Funders – Philanthropy must recognize its responsibility in supporting organizations through the full lifecycle—including closure—to mitigate unintended harm to communities and partners.
Transparency in Transitions – Open and honest communication about potential closures helps maintain trust with staff, funders, and the communities served.
Planning for Endings Early – Funders and organizations need to be accountable for the preventable harms of bad endings, and contingency planning should include clarity around what it would take to end well.
Headshot of Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick with a quote from the RX Foundation power session, "We must be willing to embrace solutions that respond directly to community feedback even if it sounds foreign, risky and non-academic. People want relatable messaging. This builds trusts which can increase engagement and close care gaps.

Speakers

Erica Andrade, President/CEO of El Centro

Katya Fels Smyth

Katya Fels Smyth has dedicated her career to transforming systems that perpetuate inequity and harm. In 1995, she partnered with women who were unhoused in Cambridge and Boston to found On The Rise, a community for women pushed to the margins. Recognizing that righting inequities requires structural change, not services, in 2009, she founded the Full Frame Initiative (FFI), a social change organization moving the U.S. to be a country where everyone has a fair shot at wellbeing – the needs and experiences essential to weather challenges and have health and hope. Through FFI’s partnerships with communities, government and organizations, Katya led transformative work as CEO that shifted narratives, surfaced new solutions and created durable change. Examples include changing how pandemic recovery dollars flow into communities, transforming public perception and funding for domestic violence nationwide, and launching the Wellbeing Blueprint, an agenda for structural change in the wake of COVID and this country’s racial reckoning. She led FFI’s expansion into urban planning and climate, including the creation of WIATT, a tool for guiding infrastructure investments to increase wellbeing equity. A former Affiliate with MIT’s CoLab, Research Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Echoing Green Fellow, Katya lives in western Massachusetts with her spouse, teenagers, and an unwieldy menagerie of pets and rescued farm animals.

Green Arrows

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