Lankelly was unique, brave

Where will radical investment come from now?

 

A Lankelly Legacy Interview. Hosted by Generative Journalism Alliance

 

 

Helen, I would love to first hear from you about the work you do, who you are, and your relationship with Lankelly Chase. I think that will provide some context and a nice flow into where I want to take this.

 

Where did we start with them? I think it was an exploration of asset-based community development and co-production, and what relevance or value those terms had in the context of an organisation for Romani and Traveller people. We did asset mapping and had a graphic walkthrough on the wall. I’m pretty sure they’re still there, some lovely asset maps from a community point of view. 

 

 

We had begun a process to ask Lankelly for the money to buy the Leeds building, which had for the second time come up for sale. We would have lost it had we not been able to buy it, which would have been very significant. I understand that that discussion was a pretty significant discussion for Lankelly, in the context, perhaps, of also what came next. One of them said to me that that decision broke them. By which I think they meant that they’d had a fairly strong principle about not investing in capital things. And then the process of having that conversation with Leeds GATE obliged them to really challenge why that was, and what they thought the rationale about that was. I think that is part of what was obviously an ongoing and important conversation about whose money is this, and who gets to decide what happens to this money? 

 

Another thing that was really notable about working with Lankelly was that they joined in. They engaged in this intellectual exploration a lot around colonialism and force and all this sort of stuff, which is obviously completely relevant to where they’re at now. 

 

In terms of an intellectual investment, in enabling us not to have to chase project money, but to be able to go off on discussions and debates and explorations, that was the most powerful thing that Lankelly did for Leeds GATE. 

 

It is the thing that I am most concerned is going to be lost by their demise, and I’m not on my own with that concern. I know people in other organisations who really don’t get a strong sense of where else that sort of radical investment is going to come from. It’s not difficult to see that small organisations like Leeds GATE are highly vulnerable to losing out due to the power of larger, more established, more publicly acceptable approaches.

 

I want to come back to this point and pick up on other resource holders and transition. But before going there, I want to ask you: What, if anything, would you have liked to have been different in your relationship with Lankelly Chase? 

 

Nothing. It was great. There’s literally nothing. It was unique. It was brave. 

 

Leeds GATE has got a set of value statements, one of which is that it’s a brave and creative organisation and having an almost unrestricted backbone. I mean, we did what we said we were going to do, but how we spent the money was about what was going to work for us. 

 

The money enabled us to say ‘no’ to other things. It really allowed us to be brave and creative where many other mechanisms for funding don’t. 

 

I wouldn’t change anything. They engaged in relationships. They were honest with us. They expressed their limitations and boundaries. They were just great. It was a liberation that Lankelly Chase gave us. We didn’t have to blow in the wind with whatever the power words of the time were. We could do what our members were expressing was their interest and their needs. 

 

Thanks for sharing that. To go a little bit deeper: What meaning was made for you through that experience and what insights did that experience offer you?

 

I mean, just a degree of respect came from them, and that enabled you to think straight, because you weren’t busy being disrespected and having to respond to that. You were just being respected, and your head could expand.

 

Coming back to the thread we were starting before: What would you like now from other resource holders as you continue in your work?

 

Trust in you being the right people in the right place at the right time to do what you need to do, instead of trying to push you into being part of a system that they own. 

 

That’s what Lankelly did. We felt trusted. Yeah, trust. Trust in relational funding, instead of outcomes or whatever. 

 

Go to the margins first if you want to know about how to do something, if you want to act in a way that’s equitable. I think of it like a dartboard – all the power is in the middle. It only gets out to the margins if you step there, and not if you’ve already spent all your money on things that you recognise because they were a bit like you. I think you can see that the money follows familiarity. That is the thing I would like to see. 

 

Also, there is a thing which is a little bit of a challenge. What I find coming from funders through organisations onto communities is this total control of what is the right way of doing things, what you should be interested in, what you should care about, because it’s what they’re interested in, [what] they care about. 

 

The work that we did with Lankelly wasn’t massively involving community members. It was members doing asset mapping and things like that, but I wouldn’t say that we hugely bored our members with the intellectual stuff. That sounds a bit arrogant, but actually it isn’t. It’s respectful. It’s respecting where people are at and what we needed to do to make Leeds GATE be the best organisation it could possibly be, which might not be the same as what our community members needed to involve themselves in on a day-to-day basis. 

 

What are you seeing in the philanthropic sector at large that is working that you would like to see more of?

 

Well, for example, as a response to the recent far-right terrorism, a number of funds quickly stepped into supporting groups that had been affected. 

 

A good example would be Lloyd’s Bank Foundation, who very proudly – and I would support them – are focused on small and emerging groups. Once you have £500,000, you’re not eligible for their money again. It’s good to segment in that way. It makes things very clear and easy to understand. 

 

They, however, perhaps along the similar zeitgeist to Lankelly, have come up with a rule for 75% of your board being from the community that you serve. I think there is a danger of this, which is all about [how a] community organisation should be led by the people that they’re there to serve. I think it’s a lazy measure. It saves you from having to ask a load of more complicated questions and trust the people who answer those questions for you. When I said, ‘We know we’re doing right because we talk to our community members and we listen to them every day,’ Lankelly would trust me with the answer to that question, and they came and looked at what we were doing and participated in. 

 

What steps, if any, are you already taking, or are you willing to take to make that possible?

 

I inherit a mindset which was partly moulded by my relationship with Lankelly Chase. In fact, if I looked at all the funders and how much they’ve influenced my thinking, Lankelly Chase is the one that has really done that. It’s courage, which is being demonstrated by what it’s doing now – the courageous thing that they’re doing – even if it’s potentially a bit flawed. That encouraged me to be courageous. It makes me look around and think bravely about the future. 

 

I believe that five years from now, we’re going to start seeing societal breakdown, if we’re not already. But I certainly think once things pop up even more than they are now, these models of collaborating through colonially-owned structures are going to not serve our needs. So I am trying to be in a space while still earning a living, which is the tricky part.

 

What’s the best thing that could happen?

 

If you could take the attitudes and behaviours of Lankelly Chase, but put them into government departments so that funding for the community sector could come directly from the public purse without all these layers of ownership and distortion, that would be the best thing that could happen. 

 

For example, what I’m doing with this integrated care system paper is the dynamics of relationship between community sector and integrated care system professionals are skewed by who’s got the money and who can dole out the money, and how, and what’s the criteria that they can put on that money. It makes the working relationship between those two arms of health skewed, because the power dynamics of somebody’s having money and somebody not having money. My best solution that I can imagine is that you take the money for the community sector away from all of that. 

 

And I’ve had government money […] their attitudes are ‘we know best’. If you take that attitude away and build trust and relationship into funding at that level, I think that would actually be better than family foundations and charitable trusts, because they are less accountable than perhaps we might hope government departments would be. 

 

So, that’s a thing that I would like to see happen in terms of Lankelly and their money. I would like to see at least some of it buying community assets for people that don’t have them, and that does include buildings and land. I hope that they’re working on some sort of covenanting, which obliges whoever gets that money to demonstrate equitable and courageous funding practice, assuming that what they’re going to do with it is ‘fund on’ – you know, it’s an onward funding mechanism, just from a different, perhaps less colonial source. 

 

I feel a bit cross with the [Lankelly Chase] board, actually. I love the people that are there, but I feel like maybe even a bit more courage would have said, ‘No, we’re not going to give this money [away]. No, we’re brilliant, and we know we’re brilliant, and we’re going to carry on being brilliant according to these principles. And yeah, it’s a slaveholder’s money. Well, fuck you slave holder. You probably won’t like what we’re going to do with your money anyway’. 

 

I just think it is so courageous what [Lankelly Chase have] done and it’s bloody nearly killed them. I know that the personal toll that it’s had on individuals involved in it has been absolutely massive, and I think there’s a little bit of ego maybe at play in it, because those people who made that decision aren’t the people who rely on the money.

 

Thank you, Helen, for everything you’ve shared.

 

 

Hosted by Jack Becher. Edited by Sam Walby

 

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