The transition pathway announcement in 2023 committed to a five-year time frame for dismantling the institution of Lankelly Chase.

Lankelly tried to approach this with care, as ‘hospicing’, in the strong belief that “endings are not failures; they are part of a cycle that requires presence, reverence, and humility”.

In an article in 2025, Vanessa Andreotti, the author of Hospicing Modernity, and Lankelly’s Habiba Nabatu asked:

“How might we allow the crumbling of outdated structures without rushing to rebuild too quickly? How might we hold space for what is irreversibly changing, without rushing to save or fix it? To envision a good death in this context is to reimagine how we relate to endings, not as catastrophic failures or moments to be avoided, but as natural processes that hold within them the seeds of renewal. A good death invites us to let go of the compulsion to control or extend the life of things that have outlived their purpose—be they industries, systems, or ways of being. Instead, we are asked to companion these endings with the same reverence and care that we might offer to a loved one in their final moments, knowing that the end of one cycle is the beginning of another”.

We’re finishing this site in the summer of 2025, almost exactly half way through the five years to closure in 2028. The team who delivered the old strategy have left or are leaving, we have stepped out of the work we were so closely involved in, and the organisation’s energy is shifting to focus entirely on the transition pathway work. Relationships with grantee organisations have ended and we have made our final financial commitments to them. (After we announced our intention to redistribute our assets, we continued to make grants to many organisations who had come to rely on us, as well as to the place-based initiatives that we have supported).  We are still in the midst of the process of dismantling and as Habiba says in the same article; “it’s not finished nor is it linear, and there are different views within the organization of how we do this and should we even do it. It’s messy”. 

This phase has probably been the hardest and most contested of the organisation’s life. Different perspectives and reflections will undoubtedly become clear as time moves on and we can view events from more of a distance. However, we think there are things we can share in this moment for anyone contemplating a similar shift, for which there was no road map.