Seed funding for early work uncommon

Lankelly shouldn’t be exceptional, but it is: Mandy Van Deven

 

A Lankelly Chase Legacy Interview. Hosted by Peter Pula

 

 

Mandy, can you share the story of how you came into a relationship with Lankelly Chase?

 

In the summer of 2022, I was at a conference, having a chat with Anasuya Sengupta, and Carrina came over to say hello to her. Anasuya introduced us and asked Carrina if she’d like to join us, which she did. We were talking about the various, common threads in the work we each do, and there were ways that Lankelly had been trying to support transformational narrative work, recognising that this is an under-resourced area. I had some idea of who the foundation was before, but I just didn’t have a depth of knowledge.

 

There came a point where Carrina invited me to apply for funding. Maybe it was six months or a year later. It coincided with one of the last rounds of grantmaking where new grantees could be brought in. It was kind of interesting to be brought in at a time that was post-announcement, after they said they were going to redistribute all of the foundation’s assets.

 

I was stepping into the family, as it were, when the foundation was in transition, and in a time when the work I was doing through Elemental was just starting to take shape. That meant there was a lot of uncertainty but also a lot of possibility for where we could take things, and Lankelly provided us with sizeable seed funding that allowed us to build in a way that didn’t compromise our ambitious vision. This perspective shouldn’t be exceptional, but it is.

 

One of the ways that it’s exceptional is that it is extraordinarily uncommon in philanthropy to give seed funding at an early stage of work. Furthermore, the barrier to entry was very low in terms of the proposal and application process. With other foundations, the barrier to entry is exponentially higher.

 

But they saw and backed the vision. They recognized that I had the skills, knowledge, and the networks to pull it off. But still, to be given £100,000 at the start of making the vision into a reality is unheard of in the philanthropic sector. And it’s just the truth that Elemental would not exist right now if it were not for the fact that Lankelly is designed in such a way as to allow for the emergence of things and to trust people enough to give them a shot to move it forward.

 

That is a practice that’s critical for funders to adopt in this moment of polycrises. The way we are going to get to a just and joyful world is by resourcing experimentation by people who have some semblance of how we could be operating differently and a solid hunch on how we could get there that’s rooted in lived experience with navigating through uncertainty and overcoming challenges. The complexity of the solutions we need are going to mirror the complexity of the issues, and that means a logframe isn’t going to cut it. People are going to have to be trusted in the way I have been trusted through this relationship with Julian, Carrina, and Jenny at Lankelly.

 

A lot of foundations do not practice what they preach. They will say we have trust-based practices. They will say, we want to seed innovation. They will say, we want to have a process that is not cumbersome and distracting from the vital work that people are doing to practice the future we long for today. But their actions betray something else.

 

In the case of my Lankelly experience, their actions are actually speaking louder than what it is that they’re saying. In the time period that I have had this more meaningful relationship with them, they haven’t really been saying anything publicly. And there’s a double-edged piece to that. On some level, it’s really lovely. You trust me, you’ve given me all of this runway to go and do the thing that you are resourcing me to do. 

 

But, it’s always nice to be in relationship with the people who are doing the resourcing, and also have access to other people at other foundations who are doing resourcing.

 

And if folks in a foundation that funds me don’t know the details of what my work is, then they can’t talk to their funder peers and tell them the details of what I’m doing and why they should be funding it too.

 

There are many ways that the practices Lankelly Chase has been operating through, at least in the time I have known them, have really made a clear statement about the value that they see in particular types of work, particular people who are doing the work, and particular types of ways of doing philanthropy that I think are quite necessary in the context of a sector that can be pretty harmful.

 

What was made possible through your relationship with Lankelly that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise?

When the funding relationship started, I had just come out of a two-year participatory research and design process to answer the questions: What are the principles and practices that funders will need to adopt if they intend to be adequate partners for building narrative infrastructure and power among social justice movements? And what should an initiative look like for doing the work to cultivate the conditions for that type of resourcing within the philanthropic sector?

 

Just following that process is the point that I met Carrina, and started telling her about the imagined design for this initiative. At that point, I think I had a £10,000 grant, which was fine, but that’s like a month’s worth of my time, right? That’s not going to allow me to fundraise. That’s not going to allow me to start to put those design elements into practice. None of that is going to happen with such a small amount of money.

 

So to have £100,000 to put into building this initiative, well, all of a sudden I can work part-time just on this. That means I was able to properly engage in fundraising, begin putting the analysis out there from the research process, and build the partnerships that this work needs.

 

Over the 18 months or so, we’ve been fully operating, and other funders have come on board. We’re still in the startup phase of the journey, but like I said before, there’s zero chance that we would be as developed as we are now if we did not have the resourcing to put behind it from the beginning.

 

Philanthropy likes numbers, so to give you a sense of what this funding has meant numerically. In 2024, we worked with staff, trustees and board members at more than 70 foundations to share insights from the research and analysis we did and support some of them to refine their approaches to narrative funding. We reached more than 35,000 people in the philanthropic sector and narrative-related spaces like social justice movements, think tanks, and advocacy organizations. Multiple foundations cited us in their reports, and philanthropy networks cited us in the various channels where they distribute information to members. We engaged in learning exchanges with more than 60 organisations that are working on narrative work. And we held our first convening of narrative funders based and working in Southeast Asia. There’s more, but this is a glimpse of what has been made possible because this money came in the door when it did and in the way that it did, which is to say, no strings attached. ‘We trust your vision to do what you think is best.’

 

What would you like to see happen next?

 

To my thinking, it’s not just a role but a responsibility for people who have positional power in philanthropy to leverage it in ways that repair the harm that allowed these funding institutions to exist in the first place. And let me tell you, I know from experience that it’s not easy to take on that responsibility from inside a foundation, and it shouldn’t be done without a solid system of accountability and authentic relationships with folks who have born the burdens of that harm — which is my understanding of what Lankelly is trying to do in its future iteration.

 

In this moment, though, there’s need to think through how they can partner with folks to leverage the many stories like mine that can encourage others in the sector to take up some of these good practices that are too few and far between, not from a place of self-congratulation or pompousness, but from a place of, ‘Here are some things we have learned together with our partners. Here are some things that it took us time to get to. And here is information about how we got there.’ Folks need inspiration and they need guidance on how to do things differently, with a contemporary interpretation of these inherited but deeply outdated standards.

 

We wouldn’t expect that just by riding a bike around that others are going to learn how to do it through osmosis. No, we’d show them our bike. We’d explain how it works. We’d help them build their own bike. And we’d be a caring guide as they test it out, get their bearings, and figure out how to do it on their own. So, the question isn’t simply: how can we do our work in a more just and joyful way. It’s also: how can we help others to get there too?

 

 

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