Learning to end

What happens when a project or partnership ends? We’ve all known the moment a programme concludes not with a celebration or a sense of completion, but with a sudden silence — the rug pulled from under our feet as funding runs out, meetings stop, and people move on. The work that felt alive just weeks earlier risks being frozen in time or quietly lost.

Once we realised HCT Gloucestershire wouldn’t work as a traditional programme, there was no place for a fixed delivery plan or a tidy package of outputs. Instead, we tried to build a practice – one rooted in our shared spaces and day-to-day work. Something that could be lived, not just reported on. We hoped this would avoid the usual ending pitfalls by embedding new ways of working into our own systems, and by seeding connections and collectives – like the HCT co-lab – that could carry the work forward in new forms.

At the time of writing, the HCT Stewardship group has not yet had the chance to create a formal ending. But as it draws close we are recognising the different journeys each person in the group has been on. Individual learning will diverge, and we will not all end in the same place.

In HCT co-Lab, the ending was deliberately designed. The final celebration for the first cohort was not about closing something down, but about naming what had grown — in individuals, in relationships, in practice. That experience made something clear: whatever our hopes for sustaining this work into the future, we need to tend to endings.

We didn’t set out to do relational work, or start with a contract and structure for how this would work. The HCT Stewardship Group became a kind of ‘first pancake’ - our best attempt with the ingredients we had at the time that we could learn from and improve on. We’ve learned that if we take that work seriously, we also need to learn how to end well. That doesn’t mean drawing a line or tying everything up neatly. It might simply mean making space – to harvest learning, to honour our individual experiences, to work out what we each want to carry forward, and what we leave behind. Not closure, but compost.

Because endings, done with care, don’t stop the work. They feed what comes next.