Learning through practice in systemic funding
From intent to infrastructure for grassroots power
By the Generative Journalism Alliance
Informed by conversations with Lankelly Chase stakeholders ranging from grassroots organisers to former trustees, this commentary explores how funders can move beyond rhetoric to construct models tailored to real-world practice. We surface the core tensions between aspiration and application, and illustrate how reflexive frameworks, adaptive pacing, and structured relational mechanics can turn ‘live learning’ into sustained shifts in power and practice.
Philanthropy often celebrates aspirations for transformation, yet too frequently trips over its own timelines and structures. As Yasmeen Akhtar observes:
“While it’s a wonderful fantasy to be a transformative funder, I think we are not there, so we are confusing ourselves and the wider communities by not getting the pacing right in terms of, what have I actually learned and what have I actually done with that learning?”
Yasmeen’s reflection cuts to the heart of a persistent challenge in philanthropic practice: the gap between aspiration and action.
There is an enduring tension between the desire to catalyse systemic transformation and the practical paces required to embed learning, adjust structures, and shift organisational behaviours. An inquiry-led approach offers the promise of ‘live learning,’ surfacing insights as they emerge, but without clear frameworks to translate learning into action, even the most well-intentioned funders risk perpetuating the very power imbalances they seek to dismantle.
This tension is not only about external strategies or field-level interventions; it also lives within the internal dynamics of philanthropic organisations themselves. Yasmeen’s critique underscores the necessity for funders to reflect on their own practices, questioning how internal behaviours and organisational cultures align or misalign with their transformative aspirations. Meaningful shifts in philanthropic practice require reimagining internal structures and processes to support multi-year general operating support, thereby fostering trust-based relationships with grantees.
Embedding reflexive frameworks
At its best, a practice-oriented funder moves beyond the cyclical grant-and-forget model to develop reflexive structures that hold space for emerging insights, critique, and course correction. This demands a hybrid posture: combining the open-ended curiosity of inquiry-led work with the intentional relational commitments that define a trust-based approach. It requires pacing that honours both the complexity of systemic change and the lived realities of partners on the ground – recognising that learning without application can become abstract, and that relationships without structures can lapse into informality and bias.
A reflexive framework turns each grant into a learning cycle, not an endpoint. In Gateshead, Community Bridge Builders began with the simple premise that local people know best, but it only thrived because Lankelly Chase supported them for three years to learn what that meant in practice. As Andy Crosbie describes, the first two years saw more criticism than green shoots. Only in year three did tangible impact emerge, from a Deaf Arts Festival to oversubscribed sports projects, and it was only possible because reflection, critique, and adaptation were built into the budget and support model.
Balancing emergence
We learned too that waiting for ‘results’ can kill promising work; rushing to outcomes can prevent real shifts. The Gateshead example surfaced over three years: initial setbacks, followed by breakthrough events that drew regional media coverage. Emergence must be counterbalanced with structure. Waiting for ‘results’ can inadvertently snuff out nascent innovation; rushing to outcomes can lock funders into superficial wins.
Yet the annual budgeting cycle repeatedly threatened these emergent gains. As Crosbie notes, “if this work had been funded in the usual way…the money would have been cut off” long before any impact appeared. Embedding multi‑year adaptive budgets, or at least built‑in ‘pause and learn’ phases, aligns funder timelines with community tempos, an approach to foster ongoing adaptation rather than annual cliff-edge decisions.
Real trust is both a disposition and an infrastructure. Jane Millar recalls a trustee board committed to debating tough questions, like ethical investment and diversity of lived experience, without policing grantees. This open respect enabled both rigorous inquiry and genuine partnership across hierarchy lines.
Core funding as backbone practice
Yvonne Field of the Ubele Initiative reminds us how core funding and trust catalyse sustained practice, and how opaqueness can undermine it. They received emergency funds and then three years of core costs from Lankelly Chase. This backbone support allowed Ubele to staff up, build infrastructure, and free up senior leaders for frontline systems-change work.
“[Lankelly] were very flexible with that, we could use it exactly as we needed it, which is what we needed from a funder – a very supportive and flexible funder.”
Unlike project-tied grants, core funding woven into a reflexive framework becomes living practice, enabling organisations to respond in real time to emerging community needs.
“Emergency grants during COVID weren’t an exception – they seeded long-term systems work. That emergency support helped us build some infrastructure and support systems so that we could do the work with the communities that were under real threat.”
This illustrates how practice rhythms can adapt funding to crises and then transition seamlessly into systemic interventions, honouring both urgency and long-view learning.
Practice as provocation
Gill Wright’s work with Greater Manchester System Changers reveals that practice can also serve as a form of political provocation, especially when underpinned by autonomy and relational trust. She says:
“We haven’t had to conform and play political games with the local council. It’s meant that we’ve been able to be truly autonomous to what we believe in.”
This was not a product of compliance or institutional appeasement, but of a sustained, trust-based funding relationship that resisted extractive accountability models. Gill’s reflections illustrate how practice becomes powerful not when it is performative, but when it disrupts systems by embodying alternative ways of being bold, place-rooted, and unapologetically community-led.
Here, practice becomes a site of resistance: not just to broken systems, but to the subtle coercions that often accompany philanthropic support – those unspoken pressures to shape-shift, to dilute language, or to align with dominant norms in order to receive funding. Instead, Gill and her peers used their funding not to report up, but to organise outwards, building solidarity across Greater Manchester, navigating political and institutional structures, and holding their ground without fear of financial consequence. This is practice as stewardship and strategy, sustained not by performance metrics but by values and connection.
A shift in stance, not just strategy
Across these stories, what emerges is not a toolkit of best practices but a different stance entirely – one where funders take responsibility not just for how money is spent, but for how their own behaviours, assumptions and timelines shape the possibilities for change. This means practice isn’t a neutral zone of delivery, but a political space where power must be negotiated and where funders must examine their reflexes as actively as grantees examine theirs.
As Yasmeen Akhtar reminds us, being a “transformative funder” isn’t something you declare; it’s something you earn through iterative shifts in structure and self-awareness. The slow work of reshaping internal behaviours, how decisions are made, who gets to ask questions and what happens when someone challenges authority is just as critical as what gets funded externally. Otherwise, even the most radical rhetoric risks becoming a smokescreen for the same old dynamics.
Practice as legacy
If the story of inquiry taught us that ‘live learning’ demands structure, then the story of practice teaches us that structure demands courage. Courage to trust beyond metrics. Courage to fund the unfashionable. Courage to be changed by the work, not just to fund it. The stories show us what happens when that courage is real: when practice is allowed to take root not as pilot projects or time-limited experiments, but as long-term infrastructure for community power.
Practice, in this framing, is not the opposite of theory – it is the embodied theory of how systems might be made differently. And just as importantly, it is legacy work: what remains when the funding ends, when the language has shifted again, when the strategies have moved on. It is the relational residue, the bold muscle memory, and the networks of trust that continue shaping the world long after formal programmes end.
To be a practice-led funder, then, is to leave something behind that isn’t just reports or outcomes, but conditions – conditions in which people don’t just survive within broken systems, but build better ones from the ground up.