Foundation
This site
This is an archive website detailing the work of the Lankelly Chase Foundation between 2010 and 2025.
In it we share the joys, breakthroughs, mistakes and heartaches of our systems change work.
You will find critique and differences of opinion in these pages – our intention is to present our learning with openness and vulnerability in the belief that things won’t change while institutions focus on guarding their own image.
We hope the material is useful and we encourage other funders to go further and to be bolder.
Dismantling Lankelly Chase
In June 2022, as the culmination of the foundation’s action inquiry approach, the trustees decided that the continuation of Lankelly Chase as a philanthropic institution was no longer a model that supported our mission.
The intention was to use Lankelly’s power and resources differently to create a space to reimagine the relationship between wealth and social justice.
This decision became known as the ‘Transition Pathway’. It will lead to Lankelly’s closure as an organisation and the redistribution of all its assets by 2028.
Our work 2010-2025
Between 2010 and 2025, Lankelly Chase operated as a charitable funder with a mission to collaborate with partners to change systems of injustice and oppression that result in the mental distress, violence and destitution of people subject to marginalisation in the UK.
We resourced charitable activity across the UK and occasionally overseas, spending more than £87m supporting innovators and changemakers from different fields.
This is an archive site and is not updated. Please visit Lankelly’s main site for current information.
FAQs
- Lankelly Chase will continue until 2028, albeit with a smaller staff team. Its work as a conventional grant-making foundation largely ceased in 2025.This website aims to share learning from Lankelly’s efforts to support systemic change over the fifteen years from 2010. (There is a history of the foundation up to 2010 called ‘A Matter of Trust‘ so we’ve started from that point).
2025 was a key transition moment in Lankelly’s journey towards redistribution and closure. The foundation ceased most of its grant-giving operations and the staff team started to disband. It made sense to choose 2025 as the close of this chapter of Lankelly’s life.
The site was written by members of the outgoing Lankelly team, principally Cathy Stancer and Renee Davis, mainly based on interviews with colleagues, and team workshops and discussions over 2024-5. As such it includes differences of opinions and perspectives. There is more than one story here and some things are contested.
There is also a bank of stories from grantees and other collaborators, collected for us by the Generative Journalism Alliance. These are unmediated and contain critical reflections on our work (some of it quite sharp) as well as appreciation of what we’ve tried to do.
We haven’t included everything from the last fifteen years of activity – that would have been overwhelming. We have made choices about what to focus on. We have included narrative about and outputs from signature workstreams, important and influential reports and announcements, and meaningful internal documents. As a whole, it’s intended to give a sense of the kinds of work we were involved in and supported, and to illustrate how our thinking and priorities developed over time.
We acknowledge our privilege in having the resources to create this archive, which inevitably centres our voice and experience. We know many other stories are not presented here. Many people have generously shared their wisdom and insights with us over the years. Very little of the learning here is ours alone.
As we’ve said, this site has been put together by members of the outgoing Lankelly team and as such, our perspective is limited by the position we have held in the system.
Nevertheless, we hope this material is useful to those who come after us – including those staying in institutional philanthropy and those interested in breaking out.
Lankelly has now made its final grants under our previous strategy and is focusing all of its resourcing on the transition pathway. There is no grants budget or grants programme and we are not accepting any applications for funding.At the time of writing in the summer of 2025, Lankelly’s board are putting in place a structure to hold a research and development phase.This is bringing together a number of people (and the organisations they are part of) around an inquiry to understand how to create a new healthy resourcing system for social justice work. These people and organisations were approached after being nominated by their peers through a consultation process.
This isn’t yet the start of the redistribution itself.
You can visit the main site here, where updates will be posted, view our linkedin page or email enquiries@lankellychase.org.uk.