How to know when to stop a project you built
Does this project still serve everyone involved in a way that improves the whole ecosystem, and if not, can I set it aside?
Question 7 of the Index
Starting is not the rare skill. Anyone with enough conviction can start something, and conviction is renewable. The rare skill is looking at a thing you built, that people know you for, that is not failing, and asking whether it still earns the room it takes up.
This question is hard for a reason that has nothing to do with the project. By the time you can ask it seriously you are inside it: your name is on it, people depend on it, and stopping would be read by others as a verdict on you rather than on the work. So the honest assessment arrives pre-loaded with a cost you personally pay, and that is not a condition under which anyone reasons well.
The people who are good at this tend to separate two things the rest of us fuse. Whether the work is still needed, and whether they are still the right ones to do it. Those come apart more often than they come together, and most of what looks like commitment is the second question never being asked.
The other half is the ecosystem, which is the part that turns a personal decision into a public one. Something that serves you and your funder while quietly leaving the people it names dependent is not doing what it says. Setting it aside is sometimes the most useful thing left to do with it.
Ending a program that still works
The usual signals for when to shut down a nonprofit are financial: reserves run low, or a major funder leaves. By then the decision has largely been made for you. The harder case is deciding when to end a program that is still funded and still working, because nothing outside you will force it.
Mission drift is the slow version of the same question. The program keeps running and the reports keep going out, while what it does moves a little further each year from what it was for. A nonprofit exit strategy written at the start, naming what would have to be true for the work to be finished, is the most reliable defence, and few organizations have one. If yours does not, the question above is a place to begin writing it.
Bring the project. Not the pitch for it, the thing itself, and what you would have to admit for the answer to be no.
No account, no card, one exchange. Yours to keep.