How to say goodbye

SHIFT has been part of my life for just over five years, first through my position on the Steering Committee and Fund Disbursement Hub, then for the last three and a half years as a staff member. Over that time, I’ve seen our work change, our impact increase, and our network grow exponentially. I've had the opportunity to do work that I feel passionate about, that challenges me, that sometimes is just for fun, alongside colleagues that helped me grow as a worker and as a person. I’ve been able to support some incredible Montrealers and Concordia community members who are doing beautiful work, more often than not on very few resources.  

And while of course there is a lot of sadness in my imminent departure from SHIFT, I’ve been preparing myself for this moment for a long time now. As you the reader may know, SHIFT only has secure resources for us to operate for about two more years, before we will likely have to change our structure, integrate with sister offices within Concordia, and close programs. Now, we don’t know what the future holds in terms of fundraising (if you know someone with a few million dollars to invest, email us!), but our perspective at SHIFT has always been to think long-term: to prepare for things even when they’re uncertain. To that end, I’ve spent the better part of the last year thinking several years ahead, crafting a process with our Steering Committee and other governance bodies to think about what closing could look like. This is partly because I find sunsetting to be a fascinating intellectual exercise, but also because SHIFT has people that we’re accountable to: our funded partners, our interns, our wider community. It is our responsibility to communicate early and often what might be at the end of the horizon, to start our goodbye well before it’s time. Guiding SHIFT’s “Sunsetting Process” since December 2024 has also helped it feel easier to say goodbye myself: thinking and living in the future showed me not just my individual path forward after leaving, but also what possibilities my departure opened for SHIFT and our partners.  

As my goodbye letter, then, I thought I would share some things I’ve learned in the last year and a half about saying goodbye, and doing it together.  

Now, we don’t know what the future holds (if you know someone with a few million dollars to invest, email us!), but our perspective at SHIFT has always been to think long-term

How to know it's time

At some point in 2024, SHIFT’s staff started to have a feeling. It’s hard to describe now, but we started to have conversations about how we could continue our work knowing that closure might be coming: how to prepare our partners, our governance members, and our wider community while not losing our motivation or making too many sacrifices. Once this feeling starts, it’s hard to ignore: it infects every strategic planning conversation, every existential question of how we approach our work, every budget review. Essentially, it demands attention. And once that attention is demanded, it’s time to take a step back and give it what it wants, not hope it goes away.

I've also always had a feeling that it would make sense for my position at SHIFT to end first. This is something I mentioned to my colleagues about as early as 2023: while our governance and participatory funding programs make up essential aspects of our work, they are also areas that could be run "smaller" (less investment of staff time) while continuing to serve our partners well. It feels good, therefore, to be closing my position now, and reusing those resources to keep programs running a bit longer.

How to find your approach to goodbye

Keeping our eyes to a faraway – and yet unconfirmed – future, we prioritized “contingency planning” conversations amongst the staff and with our Steering Committee. We wanted that contingency planning to feel collaborative, to acknowledge the grief in it while also thinking of it as yet another exercise in working differently. We crafted a years-long “Sunsetting” journey, one that would have our Steering Committee reexamine not just what comes next, but everything that came before.  

To me, this is the most important part of goodbye: taking as much time as you can to think across time, to remind yourself of the learnings, to be vulnerable, to give gratitude, and to drop yourself fully into the fear of the future – something I’ve been doing in my own relationship with SHIFT for the last few months (including, embarrassingly, fighting off tears at our most recent staff winter party because I realized it would be my last time playing silly games with my colleagues).  

The first step in our Sunsetting journey with the Steering Committee was to figure out how we wanted to approach our process. This goes beyond research into how similar institutions (i.e., philanthropic foundations) closed down their operations. From the start of our process, I thought of our team as kind of death doulas: as guides to help our governance members through recognizing and processing the grief that comes from thinking about SHIFT’s end. At the same time, we encouraged the Steering Committee to see themselves as stewards of the process, to reflect on SHIFT’s future while holding the potential risks and ruptures to our wider communities. 

This is the most important part of goodbye: taking as much time as you can to think across time, to remind yourself of the learnings, to be vulnerable, to give gratitude, and to drop yourself fully into the fear of the future

Using death cycles as a metaphor might seem lofty, but that anchoring helped our Steering Committee make sense of what was happening. We talked with our Steering Committee, at the start of the process, about seeing the potential of SHIFT closing not as an “end”, but as a regeneration: an opportunity to “seed” our work in other parts of the university, to share everything we’ve learned and all the connections we’ve made. We talked about composting, about new growth, about death as beginning.  

This framing was helpful in our decision-making process. Instead of just grieving, thinking about the regenerative potential of closure helped us get back to that grateful reflection as well, and access a joyfulness in telling stories – to each other and ourselves – about what we’ve loved about our work.  

How to do goodbye together

Saying goodbye as a group starts with aligning ourselves on the frameworks and values that underpin our decisions and figuring out what information everyone needs that will set them up for making the strongest decisions. At our Steering Committee, this included starting our Sunsetting Journey by revisiting SHIFT’s Theory of Change and results from our past evaluations. We pulled out lessons from research we’ve done and community consultations and asked our Steering Committee members what questions they still had about SHIFT – and Concordia as a whole – that needed answering before they could decide about how SHIFT would close. 

We also made space for levity during our Sunsetting process. We had our Steering Committee members write speculative fiction about what the end of SHIFT would look like, we created a “Survivor” themed meeting for them to narrow down the options of how SHIFT would close (including “spend it all in a big way” and “continue normally as long as we can”). Again, beyond celebration, we also wanted to make sure that our grief exercise was balanced with thinking in potentialities: when we strip back to our core community needs and our mission, what are the possibilities that exist for SHIFT and its future? What comes next, or what do we dream comes next, after death? What flourishes from our compost?

And so...goodbye

As things with Concordia and SHIFT’s budget changes, so did our Sunsetting process, and now our staff and Steering Committee are talking about what comes from closing my position. We’re digging into questions about how to (re)allocate resources, preliminary conversations about the order in which to end our programs, and more.  

As much as we try to prepare for goodbye, we can’t predict the movement of things underneath us and how that movement impacts our planning. I suppose, then, that the most important takeaway of the Sunsetting Process has been that it’s an ongoing journey: that goodbyes go on and on; new paths emerge, or sometimes old paths disappear; and we keep recalibrating. The best we can do is do it together all the way along, be transparent and honest, and keep a healthy balance of grief and gratitude.

Bye y'all!