Guest Blog for Social Founders, by

Noel Mathias, Founder & CEO, of WEvolution, 'Small, Powerful Groups', and now 'Novel Solutions to Wicked Problems'

Noel Mathias, based in Glasgow, Scotland, founded the WEvolution charity in 2011, with the innovative concept of 'Small, Powerful Groups' - meaningful, resourceful and accountable communities where everyone can be a change-maker and an entrepreneur. Below he details his year of planning to leave and close WEvolution, how he enabled the Small, Powerful Groups to continue independently, and while launching a new social impact organisation.

Noel has written this guest blog for Social Founders ahead of our Social Founders Forum on 24th September, where we will be discussing 'Founder Transition and Succession'.

Noel Mathias' guest blog for Social Founders

For My Eyes Have Seen the Glory - when letting go becomes the greatest act of love.
Isn't the promise of glory alluring? We want all that we create to be permanent, to last forever. But as the good Bible reminds us, "There is a time for everything…a time to plant and a time to uproot…a time to tear down and a time to build" – and sometimes, the ultimate sacrifice of leadership is knowing when it's time to step back…or end what you've started.

I'm writing this from the middle of my own transition, halfway through what feels like both an ending and a beginning. Fifteen years ago, I founded WEvolution – what became an incubator that helped build social infrastructure called Small, Powerful Groups (SPGs) absolutely essential for unexpected entrepreneurs to come from underserved areas, particularly underserved women. The impact has touched lives not just in Scotland, but through organisations we've helped across England, Wales, and as
far as the Netherlands.

When people ask me how I'm feeling about it all, my answer is the same each time: "Relieved. Liberated."

The Journey to Letting Go

The author Greg Sattell speaks of making change feel safe, so that people feel good about it and don't feel disrupted and scared.

That's exactly how we approached our own transition at WEvolution. The process hasn't been rushed – we made sure of that.

Change doesn't have to be urgent to be safe, and we've been fortunate to have a Board of Trustees that truly acts as partners rather than just overseers. When push comes to shove, like it did for me, I had a great Board who knew exactly what they were there for.

In April 2025, this year, we announced the closure of WEvolution. We put enormous thought into that announcement, going back and forth between the staff team, the board and a few of the women in our Small Powerful Groups community. The board was particularly clear about how we wanted to communicate our closure: communicate with transparency, radical honesty and pride – record achievements, emphasise successes, be defiant and go out fighting.

Over the years, we'd learned something crucial about the separation of our work from ourselves. The end of the organisation isn't the end of the movement we had built. This insight helped us think more clearly about our legacy and what would continue beyond our institutional existence.

But what I'm most proud of was that we had begun planning our exit in great detail. The biggest part of our transition wasn't just about our knowledge, intellectual property and resources but how to take care of the human and social capital we'd built up all these
years.

As soon as we made the closure announcement, we nominated eight women from the SPG ranks into a Leadership Collective (LC). Each month, they've been facilitated and trained, following a roadmap we prepared together for this transition. The themes were fed in by the women in the Collective, the Board, everyone involved. From this month in September, the LC has begun to self-facilitate themselves.

Want to know some of the role names they've come up with?

- Dance Leader (lead facilitator);

- Storyteller (Secretary);

- Community Hugger.

It shows the level of creativity that gets unleashed when letting go becomes a planned process.

None of this would have been possible without the brilliant staff team I've had the privilege to work with. Together, we made the difficult decision to cut our hours by 50% starting from June 2025. The entire staff team essentially put their personal careers on hold to help transition the leadership and community into the hands of the Collective before we wind down the charity on January 31st 2026.

Very few places will see people actually staying on, knowing the exact date they'll become jobless. But that's the calibre of people we've built this with – it's humbling, and it's made all the difference to making change safe and stable. Of course, we didn't ask this of them without providing additional support and budget to help cushion this transition. Taking care of the staff in the midst of organisational change is crucial – you cannot expect such dedication without ensuring their wellbeing is protected.

I want to be honest about something else that often gets overlooked in these conversations – the emotional and practical toll on your family at home. When you're planning a transition like this, you can't discount what it means for those closest to you. Your income is halved, then gone entirely. In my case, I have three little kids, with the youngest just one year old. My partner works at WEvolution too – so that's two of us facing unemployment.

The planning process had to extend beyond the organisation into our home life too. When you think about impact, it's never just about you – it's about your family, your dependents, everyone whose stability is tied to what you've built. That's a weight that sits alongside all the other decisions, and it's essential to plan for that process as thoughtfully as everything else.

Breaking Down Our Process

For other social founders contemplating this journey, let me break down what our process actually looked like:

Knowing it's the End: The most crucial step for any founder is getting out of "life support mode" and making the decision. This keeps you in control of your own creation rather
than letting circumstances decide for you. My own decision, after months of
discernment and efforts, was made in December 2024.

The Announcement (April): Months of back-and-forth between staff and board, guided by principles of honesty without blame, radical honesty, and optimism about legacy.

Leadership Collective Formation: Eight leaders immediately stepped forward from our ranks to form a leadership collective – this helped build confidence in the wider community that the ship wasn't sinking.

Capacity Adjustment (June): All staff reduced hours by 50%, with additional support and budget to cushion this transition.

Community Communication: Open, transparent, inclusive dialogue through regular interactions and feedback sessions, acknowledging the inevitable grief, disappointment, and even anger that transition creates among people you've walked alongside for years.

Leadership Development Period: Four months (May-August) of behind-the-scenes preparation before the collective stepped forward publicly, giving them time to become confident and truly understand what they were taking ownership of.

Public Introduction: The Leadership Collective's formal debut at our annual gathering of Small Powerful Groups women, where they facilitated an amazing Q&A session that gave them credibility in front of the entire movement.

Ending Party: Planned for 15th January 2026 – all part of us going out in style!

Wind-Down Date: Clear timeline toward January 31st closure.

I must say that while this looks very straightforward and linear, real life doesn't always cooperate. We started with eight women in the new Leadership Collective, and within three months, three of them had to step out because of life circumstances. Suddenly we were down to five members.

That's when we came to a crucial realisation: we needed to offer people space to step out rather than step down – removing the stigma and guilt around changing circumstances. Once we shifted to that mindset, one of the three women was able to step back into the Collective.

We're navigating questions that every founder faces eventually

• What's the legacy we want to leave?
• Who should carry this forward – through merger, through community ownership, through new leadership?
• What roadmap do we create?
• What resources do we need to bring in to ensure continuity?
  

The Hardest Lesson: My Innovation Was Never Complete

Perhaps the most humbling realization in this process has been accepting a couple of important truths: I'm not the one with all the answers, and my innovation was never a complete innovation.

There's something immensely freeing in placing faith in humanity's ability to come up with better solutions than what I could conceive alone, and in understanding that I'm contributing to a bigger picture.

David Bodanis writes beautifully about this in his book "E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation," showing how Einstein's breakthrough didn't emerge fully formed in 1905. Instead, it was built upon centuries of smaller discoveries by scientists like Michael Faraday, Emilie du Châtelet, and Antoine Lavoisier – each contributing pieces that made Einstein's profound insight possible.

A prayer often attributed to Archbishop Romero captures this essence:

"We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development... We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders."

This understanding doesn't require any less determination – if anything, it liberates you to pour everything into your contribution knowing it's part of something far greater than what you could build alone.

But there's another dimension to this journey that I learned about recently during one of the recent Social Founders Talk online events.

I had the opportunity to interview Sadaffe Abid who spoke about something she called "spiritual reinvention" – the constant need for a founder to step back, step out, and ask themselves the hard questions that need to be asked because as she so well put it: "We can get lost in our own purpose." It's a spiritual examination that recognises we cannot give to the world what we do not have.

Transition is also about the founder's own spiritual reinvention. What am I carrying that no longer serves? What have I learned about myself that needs to change? What wisdom have I gained that I'm now ready to share differently? The work of letting go externally requires an equally profound letting go internally.

What's Next? Once a Founder, Always a Founder

So what comes next for me? Well, I haven't been sitting idle. I'm a founder – it's not just what I do, it's who I am. I've already begun creating a new venture, Novel Solutions to Wicked Problems – a Global South reverse learning approach to Leadership Development.

For me, the transition isn't going to be about stopping; it's about beginning again, armed with everything I've learned, everyone I've met, and all the wisdom that comes from having built something meaningful.

If you're reading this and recognising yourself in these words – if you're in your own transition or contemplating one – be proud of what you've built while being curious about what comes next.

The glory we've seen isn't in permanent ownership. It's in the courage to build, the wisdom to know when to step back, and the faith to trust that what we've created will continue to grow in ways we can't imagine.

Your sweat, your sleepless nights, your relentless dedication – none of it disappears when you transition - it becomes the foundation upon which others build something even greater.

And that, my friends…that's a glory worth seeing.

Connect with Noel Mathias on LinkedIn.

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