Simultaneously the best and worst funder
Funder involvement in projects needs to be clear cut
By Jan Garrill
I’m now retired from the organisation that originally got involved with Lankelly Chase. I used to run a community foundation in York, Two Ridings Community Foundation.
Following some involvement in a homelessness network in York, but unprompted, we got approached by Lankelly Chase Foundation by Habiba Nabatu, to say they wanted to support some work they were doing in York through developing participatory grantmaking. Would Two Ridings like to lead on it from a local perspective? I said, “absolutely” as it aligned with our community centred approach to involving local people in grant making decisions.
We ended up doing two things with Lankelly Chase. We would do participatory grantmaking as part of the work they were doing around homelessness with the York Multiple Complex Needs Network (MCN). In addition, they had identified a gap in the work around working with children and young people’s organisations, so they asked us to help develop that network.
Changing goal posts and challenging power dynamics
One of the things I’ve always said about Lankelly is that they’re the worst funder I’ve ever worked with, but they’re also the best funder I’ve ever worked with. They are incredibly generous and exposed us to some incredible processes and people but they were at times very distant from the work and yet also quite controlling.
At one point I considered whether to walk away from the work but in the end, to get resources and support into people and groups in York meant we decided to make it work. I say this about being the worst funder because at times it felt ungrounded and conflicting in all sorts of different ways for myself, members of the team at Two Ridings who were doing the work and ultimately the people involved in the participatory grant making. Part of it was – and I think this is the tension that Lankelly Chase have – they want to be involved but they don’t want to be involved. They didn’t own or feel involved in the work we were doing and we felt excluded from the work they were doing.
York was one of what Lankelly would call their ‘experiment areas’, which I found disrespectful. The language of experiment comes from the systems change world and it felt like Lankelly Chase were these gods on Mount Olympus looking down at us poor humans in York and going, “how should we change the dynamic? Let’s do some participatory grantmaking. Let’s do this. Let’s do that. Let’s observe what happens. We’ll step back and we’ll step in and we’ll decide when we’re doing it.”
As the mortals in York trying our best, dealing with the day to day at the same time as, trying to make systems change many of us struggled with this approach.
Immediate needs versus system change
Another way in which they were challenging was that the Lankelly Chase funding for the participatory grant making had certain parameters around bringing in people with lived experience and the funding could only be used for systems change activity, not resourcing ongoing project or organisational activity. Both of which were positive but it did cause tensions, especially when there was an expectation that the people involved in the participatory grantmaking had to give a lot of their time to work through all the governance and creation of funding criteria. The community of people involved gave a lot of their time for a process that many of us felt could have been done quicker and more iteratively rather than not knowing if there was a chance to repeat the process with more learning.
Having said that, we should have been more assertive in pushing back against their parameters, but there never seemed to be a clear process to do that.
In the meantime, we were in the middle of a pandemic and a cost of living crisis and it was hard to say this funding couldn’t be used for some service support at the same time as addressing the systemic challenges. If you’re a welfare rights charity supporting people giving advice on benefits, if your primary need is another welfare rights worker so I can deal with a deluge of people coming to my service, that’s not what Lankelly Chase will fund. And they say, well, others will fund that, which is probably true. But what they asked us to do, was to create the environment so that these organisations and people could go, “this is to fund work to support systemic change in York for multiple complex needs.”
But then there was no capacity or mechanism to do any of that change.
So I think people felt a little bit frustrated.
In some ways Lankelly was one of the best funders
Lankelly Chase were a great funder too . . . they recognised the full cost of doing such complex work and resourced the participants and Two Ridings accordingly.
But, we were always very aware of the power dynamic of them as a major funder and even us as funders ourselves did not feel we could be as honest and as open about the frustrations without fearing it might jeopardise the funding. Which is ironic as I am sure Lankelly Chase would not wish to be seen as so powerful.
But we did raise our concerns and it was the best thing we could have done as Lankelly Chase were open to the challenge and we did have some open and honest conversations about what wasn’t working.
Lankelly also allowed us to work with some really impressive individuals and organisations to share and help us learn. That was the best thing about Lankelly.
End points and exit strategy needs to be clear
Systemic change is what we’re all after, but some people, particularly frontline charities, don’t have the luxury of funders with ongoing and secure funding streams , ‘Hmm, let’s ponder this for 18 months and think about what we’re going to do’. They’ve got to deal with the here and now, of paying their staff, and facing increased demand.
Lankelly did fund a bit of that time through that PGM process, but I on reflection, a more blended approach where some of the funds could have been used to support the day to day, to “keep the lights on” alongside funds to help them think about how keeping the lights on isn’t a long-term solution.”
I also think that if we knew what their exit strategy was we could have achieved more. For example, I’ve worked with Rank Foundation, a very different funder, but they do place-based work, and they say, “We’re going to work here probably five years and we’ll do small grants and we’ll fund you to come together and do all sorts of fantastic things. And in five years time, we’re leaving.”
And we just never knew with Lankelly. Where was the end point?
Our organisation got stronger
Working with Lankelly tested my depth of feeling about what I do and how I do it. On a personal level it challenged my thinking about ways to do things. It made me stronger and it made our organisation stronger, but there was a bit in the middle where it felt really precarious for the organisation and for some people in the network.
As an example, much of what Lankelly did was couched in the language of systems change. Whilst some of it was clear, there was a lot that felt very alien and made me and others feel disenfranchised, stupid and excluded.
I came out of the other side thinking that if I felt like that and ultimately unsafe with a funder in the future, I’d be stronger in challenging them and walking away from the relationship.
I also feel quite strongly that if you were going to invest in a place, as Lankelly did, you either do it freely, and give, and let it happen. Or, you say, ‘I want to be involved and I’m going to be involved and this is how I do it.’ At one point they were involved and then they weren’t involved. Maybe we were unfortunate as we were involved at the tail end of their multiple complex needs work and as they shifted their focus and got into the whole process of Lankelly disposing of their endowment, their priorities changed.
Endowed funders are very privileged, but with that privilege comes responsibility – to help organisations and help people and get our processes as straightforward and as simple as possible, and to do no harm.
Learn more about Generative Journalism Alliance