Deciding what to stop is harder than deciding what to start, and most charities only do it when money forces the issue. By that point, the bank balance is making the choice and the board is signing it off. Stopping by choice, while the charity can still choose, means ending work that is often good, often valued and sometimes loved, because something else matters more.
That makes it a governance decision rather than an administrative one. And ending the work well, with the people who use it, deliver it and pay for it properly looked after, is as much the board’s job as deciding to end it.
Know something needs to stop but cannot get the board there? A clear list of what the charity will stop doing is one of the things our strategy work is built to produce. See how we work on charity strategy.
Stopping and not starting are different decisions
Turning down something new costs you an opportunity. Ending something you already run costs more, because it comes with people: those who use the service, the staff and volunteers who deliver it, the funder who paid for it, and the supporters who gave because of it. One is a boundary. Ending existing work is a change that lands on people the charity has made commitments to.
Strategy guidance tends to fold the two together under “what we will not do”, and the boundaries on a one-page strategy are mostly about the future. Declining funding that would pull you off course is a subject of its own. I am talking in this article is about the harder of the two: the work that is already running.
Why boards put off the conversation
Every programme has someone attached to it. A founder may have started it. Someone on the staff may have built their role around it. Beneficiaries rely on it, and some of them would struggle without it. Stopping feels like failure, and it can feel like abandoning people. Trustees also worry about how it will look to funders, and that a charity doing less will be seen as a charity in trouble.
So the conversation gets moved to next year’s review. Meanwhile, the work keeps drawing on staff time, management attention and fundraising effort that the strategy says are needed somewhere else.
The cost of not deciding is real but hard to see. It never appears as a loss on a budget line. What you see instead is the priority that never quite gets started, and the team that is permanently stretched. Capacity is a financial fact, and a board that has not chosen what to stop has still made a choice, just one that nobody wrote down.
Finding what to stop
Start with one question for each programme and commitment: would we start this today, knowing what we now know? A no does not mean the work ends. It means the work needs a reason to continue, and having always done it is not one.
Look at the full cost, which is rarely the figure in the programme budget. Management time, a share of premises and systems, trustee attention, and the fundraising effort needed to keep it funded all sit elsewhere in the accounts. A programme that appears to pay for itself often does so because its share of core costs is being carried by everything else.
Then look at fit. Work that sits outside the strategy’s priorities is not automatically wrong, but it has to earn the capacity it takes. If the only argument for it is that it is good work, that is true of most of what charities do, and it does not help the board choose.
Look, too, at what the work changes as well as how busy it keeps you. A service that holds a problem steady can be worth running for years. Knowing that this is what it does, and deciding to keep it on that basis, is a different decision from assuming it is reducing the problem.
The answer is not always to stop outright. Some work can be reduced to what the charity can sustain. Other work is better run by another organisation, and a planned handover protects the people using it far better than a closure. Both are forms of stopping, and both need the same care.
Want a structured way to run this across everything you do? The e-book When Your Strategy Stops Guiding Decisions includes a keep-or-let-go assessment to apply to every programme and commitment, and guidance on bringing the results to the board.
Making the decision properly
Ending a programme belongs to the board. It should not rest with the chief executive alone, and it should not happen informally by letting a grant lapse and saying nothing. The Charity Commission’s decision-making guidance for trustees (CC27) sets out seven principles that trustees must be able to show they followed, and explains them particularly for significant or strategic decisions. Ending a service people rely on is straight up one of those.
In practice, that means three things. Trustees need enough information to decide: the full cost, who uses the work, what else is available to them, and what the funding terms say. The decision is made collectively, so every trustee shares responsibility for it, including those who argued against it. And it is recorded, with the reasons, so that anyone reading the minutes later can see what was weighed. How trustees make decisions that hold up covers the principles in more depth.
Expect disagreement, and treat it as part of the process. A board that ends a programme without anyone questioning it has probably not looked closely enough. Where the board cannot reach a decision at all, there is usually a wider question underneath about what the charity is for, and it is worth naming as a governance matter in its own right.
Ending it well
How the work ends matters as much as the decision to end it. There are four groups to plan for, and the order in which they hear matters.
The people who use the service come first. They need enough notice, a clear explanation, and, wherever possible, somewhere to go next: a referral, a handover to another organisation, or a tapered ending instead of a sudden stop. For some services, an abrupt close does real harm, so the timing deserves as much thought as the decision.
Staff and volunteers come next, and before anything is announced publicly. If paid roles are affected, take employment advice first. Redundancy and consultation carry legal requirements that sit outside this article, and getting them wrong creates a second problem on top of the first. Volunteers are owed the reason, not just the end date.
Funders need a conversation before they read about it in a report. Check the grant terms first. Money given for a restricted purpose can only be spent on that purpose, so ending a funded programme early means agreeing with the funder what happens to anything unspent: using it differently with their consent, transferring the activity to another organisation, or returning it. If nobody is sure which money was restricted and to what, that needs sorting out first. NCVO’s guidance on restricted funding, written for closures, sets out the options and applies just as well to ending a single programme. A funder who hears it from you early is in a position to help. One who finds out late is not.
Supporters and the wider public come last, and deserve a plain account of what has stopped and why. Charities often fear this part most, but a charity that explains a considered choice reads as one that is making choices. Silence is what invites the worse interpretation.
Decide at the same time where the freed-up time and money will go. If that is left open, it tends to be absorbed by whatever is most urgent, and the point of stopping is lost. The next budget should show the change.
Keeping it stopped
Ended work has a habit of coming back. A funder offers money for something very like it. Someone who missed the board meeting raises it again a year later. New staff see the gap and propose filling it.
Write the decision into the strategy as a boundary, naming the condition that would normally tempt you back, such as funding becoming available or demand rising. The Charity Strategy Toolkit covers how to write that section of a one-page strategy so the boundaries hold. When the offer arrives, the answer has already been agreed, and nobody has to relitigate it from scratch.
And if you cannot see what to stop because the real problem is unclear, and it could sit in governance, income or capacity, it is worth finding that out first. The Charity Growth Diagnostic is built for that.
When the board is split on ending something, the conversation usually stalls rather than resolves. Someone outside the room can hold it steady long enough to reach a decision everyone can stand behind. Book a free 30-minute call.
