Dear funders, learn from the legacy of Lankelly Chase
Five key learnings from a generative storytelling inquiry into the history of the Lankelly Chase Foundation and the future of philanthropy
By the Generative Journalism Alliance
In the summer of 2024, a small group of journalists at the Generative Journalism Alliance was commissioned to interview people who had been in relationship with the Lankelly Chase Foundation.
Since then, we have spoken with over 50 individuals involved since 2010, including grantees, advisors, ex-staff and trustees, asking the question:
What can we learn from the Lankelly Chase experience?
The stories we have published convey many generative visions of the future, as well as accounts of serious harm experienced by those entangled in the system we call philanthropy.
The purpose of this article is to share the most relevant learning for people who are on the funding side of the philanthropic world that exists today. We present these here in five short sections, with links to stories that offer further exploration.
We encourage you to read and listen carefully to the stories from the range of Lankelly Chase partners that inform this article. Contained within those stories are deeply personal, systemically-informed insights based on years of experience attempting to push the boundaries of philanthropy in pursuit of collective liberation.
We are grateful to everyone who shared their stories, which we seek to honour and harvest learning from through our publications.
1. Be audacious in this period of deep transition
Foundations and trusts are in a unique position at a pivotal point in history. Beholden neither to the need to trade in the marketplace, nor to the role of government, you are free agents. With millions of pounds in reserve, there seems to be plenty of time to take a wider view, to discern and do the right thing. And yet, the right to hesitate is nowhere in sight. The constellation of problems and possibilities are pressing.
Lankelly Chase has been audacious to the highest degree.
By steps and stages, they’ve demonstrated that core, long-term and relational funding, loosed of archaic outcome measures and paternalistic traps, which embraces learning, ‘coming alongside’, and devolved decision making – more evolved and effective ways to transmute stored wealth into social good.
They’ve even opened up the possibility of ceasing to exist, if this would serve a higher end. The path has, at times, been bumpy, as the legacy stories attest to.
Yet, in doing so, Lankelly has broken new ground into which any genus of the philanthropic species can now move. They have shed light on all the usual, safe hiding places. And they’ve cut new pathways to our preferred futures, so the rest might go even further.
What was once audacious, could now be the norm.
2. Work care-fully with the unequal power dynamics in which you’re entangled
In a time that calls for deep systemic transitions, philanthropic organisations are increasingly compelled to reckon with their own power and positionality. And while the asymmetry of the funder-grantee relationship may not be as inevitable in the long term as it appears to us today, in present-day philanthropy it calls for constant reflection.
Whether they like it or not, funders have power and they need to face up to it. Language and theories of change are important, but if funders aren’t paying close attention to what their practices uphold and what they challenge, they risk denying, misusing or abusing that power. The everyday work of this is both fine-detail and messy, context-dependent and highly relational, and it must be done care-fully – with great care and respect.
Our story sources told us that accountability was often a key piece of the puzzle that was missing in philanthropy. In answering ultimately to their trustees rather than the people they serve in their work, big or quick changes in strategic direction could leave funders’ partners feeling alienated, or desperately struggling to keep pace for fear of losing funding.
We heard a great deal about how Lankelly Chase were willing to talk about power, particularly in places and spaces where those conversations weren’t necessarily welcomed, or where the topic was tending to be invisiblised. This honest reflection – when supported by codified practice which aligns with language and intentions, and held in care-ful balance with stepping into power and using it for good when the situation requires it – could prove to be a critical capacity for the philanthropy of the future.
3. Adopt a relational approach to systems change
When we see the world as made up not of individual actors but a web of interconnected relationships, we see profound implications for how grant-giving gets done.
Rather than funding many separate projects, what we found in Lankelly Chase’s approach is a more expansive, even if at times chaotic, ecosystem approach being undertaken. Questions such as, ‘how do we connect organisations for greater impact?’ What do people need besides money? And how can we, as a funding organisation, play a role in weaving people and ideas across often nascent and siloed fields of work?’ invite a very different kind of relationship.
Underpinning this relational way of seeing is high levels of trust, which we found Lankelly Chase placed in its partners, stakeholders and grantees. This took the form of both believing and believing in – trusting that a grantee was being honest about their work, and their values and their motivations in it, but also buying into its potential impact and being a proactive, supportive partner in the work itself.
Navigating this level of complexity is not easy and it may not be possible to ‘get it right’. There is a huge amount of learning contained in that journey, but it involves sitting with the discomfort, tensions and contradictions that sit at the heart of the current philanthropic model.
4. Centre your work around inquiries
What if we posed questions rather than answers?
Our conversations with partners of Lankelly Chase reveal the potential for creating new relational patterns and practices within philanthropy when a funder begins from a place of deep questioning.
To fund with an understanding of complex systems requires a radically different orientation. If we don’t (read: can’t) know what set of actions lead to what set of outcomes, because the landscape is complex with multiple interacting nodes affecting the whole, then what does that tell us about the approach needed?
Initiating inquiries necessitates the asking of deeper questions, as well as letting go of some degree of certainty, predictability and control which characterise traditional philanthropic relations.
For an inquiry-led approach to reach its full potential, it must be accompanied by robust learning-based structures.
We’ve observed in the stories that our sources shared what can happen when structures are merely an afterthought to the curiosity-driven inquiries. Yet we’ve also seen glimpses of what happens when structures to support learning are woven into the fabric of a funding organisation: knowledge is generated by the people closest to the issues, the distance between the board and field reduces and well-informed strategic pivoting can happen.
When this flourished, it was because learning was seen not just as something that happens ‘out there’ for people ‘somewhere else’, but as demanding a radical transformation in the ways an organisation structures itself.
5. Practice what you preach
Funders must align their own behaviours, processes and institutional cultures with the transformative agendas they support externally. This means interrogating how decision-making, pacing and power operate at every level, from individual staff mindsets to board governance to sector-wide norms and redesigning them in service of shared liberation.
By committing to multi-year core funding, adaptive budgeting and co-designed accountability mechanisms, practice-led philanthropy embeds reflexivity into its very DNA. It requires the courage to fund the unfashionable, to be genuinely changed by grantee feedback, and to resist shortcuts for superficial metrics.
In doing so, funders leave behind more than reports or one-off pilots; they leave relational infrastructure and muscle memory that continue to animate collective power long after formal grants end.
Now what?
For people and organisations operating on the funding side of philanthropy, the learning shared here is an invitation to reflect on your own practices and what this means for the future of your work and the field.
As we have explored, moving from theory to practice may be the ultimate challenge. While some of the language is now available and conversations are shifting, the actions and systemic changes are often one or more steps behind.
Our hope is that this high-level summary, in addition to the depth found in the 50+ stories that inform this, offer ways forward for those who seek to align words with actions, and push the boundaries of philanthropy in pursuit of collective liberation.
This period of deep transition calls on all of us to transcend the logics and relations of degenerative systems. While philanthropy is itself a byproduct of colonial capitalism, and thus entangled in such systems, it also has the potential to catalyse transitions to regenerative, life-affirming systems.
Whether what we are left with is still philanthropy, or something else entirely, we don’t know. Only by ‘living the questions’ in our bodies, organisations and ecosystems can such answers reveal themselves.
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