Trust and shared purpose: Following the energy into relationship

Lankelly Chase’s philanthropy has been rooted in relationships. What promise might the trials and tribulations of this approach hold for the future of philanthropy?

 

By the Generative Journalism Alliance

 

 

An important part of Lankelly Chase’s approach has been the concept and practice of relationality: seeing the world as made up not of individual actors but a web of interconnected relationships. The implications of this thinking for the foundation’s grant giving and the way it operated, particularly in recent years, were wide-reaching and often took them far outside what might traditionally be expected of a grant funder.

 

Most of the partners and stakeholders we spoke to had a lot to say about the positive impact of Lankelly’s relational approach. They were also at pains to emphasise that there were negatives, complexities and uncertainties that came with it.

 

‘Belief, faith, trust – don’t underestimate that’

 

A common theme across many of the generative conversations we hosted was the high level of trust Lankelly 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:

 

“Belief, faith, trust – don’t underestimate that. People talk about the money from funders, but someone going, ‘God, I think you could do this.’ […] You can’t do anything without confidence and you get confidence by having encouragement. Lankelly encouraged, and that was a big deal.” – Maff Potts, Grantee

 

Several sources described this as feeling like they were ‘on a journey’ with Lankelly Chase, travelling in a shared direction and navigating the complex realities of system change work together:

 

“I’ve always felt […] that we’ve been on a journey together. They’re with us with the grant making and they want to see us succeed. They want to find out what we’re doing. They want to get involved with it, not just because they want to make sure their money’s got impact, but because our purpose is their purpose, and their purpose is our purpose.” – Esther Foreman, Advisor and Grantee

 

These journeys were often not plain sailing. They involved continual friction with current systems while at the same time navigating the pains of new systems trying to be born. This is confronting and confrontational work:

 

“For whoever else is out there holding resources and is willing to do that, it’s going to be a deeply uncomfortable experience, but it is ultimately the ethical and right thing to do. And you know, if you ever want to change who benefits from you existing and having these resources – which is really highly questionable: why have you got these resources? – you need to go on that journey.”  – Matt Kidd, Grantee

 

This also necessarily meant that Lankelly had to have an appetite for both risk and uncertainty than many funders would simply not tolerate:

 

“They didn’t see risk as a barrier to what they wanted to do. They embraced risk and utilised it to create opportunities and create learning, knowing that lots of stuff would ‘fail’, in the sense that it’s not traditionally what success looks like, in terms of funding being used to ‘solve’ something or create a service. It’s not tangible. The learning is the purpose of the learning, and the implementing of that learning is the purpose of granting.” – Catherine Scott, Grantee & Place-Based Associate

 

Lankelly’s trusting, relational approach led to some key administrative changes, for example in not asking grantees to fill in reams of paperwork or to commit to narrow outputs or short-term outcomes when their work was emergent, experimental and for many reasons carried a real risk of failure. But for Rob McCabe, whose work on The Pathfinder project challenges social work and criminal justice orthodoxies, “that flexibility wasn’t just administrative – it was philosophical.”

 

“That willingness to invest on faith alone, without onerous terms and conditions, revealed the shortfalls of the traditional funding model: a model that too often equates complexity with risk, and human systems with mechanical outputs.” – Rob McCabe, Grantee

 

‘Who are the people who get trusted?’

 

The flip side of these broadly positive aspects of a funding relationship based around trust was that for some people and groups, it was hard to understand how to initiate a connection with Lankelly Chase.

 

While a traditional funder might be very clear about their remit and its limits – to some extent enabling potential grantees to ‘game the system’ by simply telling them what they want to hear – for those engaging with Lankelly Chase the opposite was often true; a connection (and subsequent grant) might live or die on whether one of the foundation’s staff members was personally passionate about their work.

 

This informality led to concerns about how this more trust-based way of forming partnerships could end up favouring some stakeholders and alienating others, and that this preferencing could be systemically prejudicial. One source framed this in terms of accountability:

 

“There needs to be clear accountability alongside requests for trust. If you’re saying, ‘Trust me, I’ve got your best intentions at heart,’ or, ‘Trust me, this is going to work out,’ then it’s hard to follow-up on any specifics. Also, who are the people who get trusted? And who are the people who don’t get trusted? Who are the people able to be legible as worthy of trust in the ecosystem? And who are the people you would be suspicious of?”– Rose Longhurst, Funder Peer and Grantee

 

The people at Lankelly Chase leant into personal relationship with grantees and other stakeholders, often to transformative effect. Several sources told us that a deep connection with a person who understood their work was an antidote to the institutional relationships they had with other funders. This was particularly the case for some of the grantees of colour that we spoke to:

 

“What I think Lankelly Chase did well is they did not interfere with the process [of making the film Weave]. I don’t know whether that was because they know Renee, so they completely trusted Renee, or if it really was the death of George Floyd. It might have been with Lankelly Chase that actually they meant it when they said it and they understood that a part of that process is, if we’re going to work with a Black organisation, especially one that is so small, we’re not going to try and swallow them or dictate to them how things should be done. This is going to be ‘you lead and we will follow’. I think they did that absolutely brilliantly.” – Ursula Myrie, Grantee

 

But for some this also meant not knowing what their relationship with the funder as a whole was, and sometimes this put a strain on grantee’s relationships within their own ecosystems. This is illustrated by two thoughts from Noni and Guppi of Decolonising Economics, who point out that this personal connection – and not knowing why they were offered grants rather than others in the field – made it hard to relate this back to their own partners and fellow practitioners:

 

“Habiba was really supportive of us. I think we had been really struggling with the resource to make this happen, and then not only did we get the resource we got to chat to Habiba, she would be really excited about our vision, and it felt like she really understood where we were going and what we needed.“ – Noni, Grantee

 

“We don’t know where the relationship from Habiba came from, which leaves us not knowing where we land afterwards […] The operations of the organisation are so elusive.” Guppi, Grantee

 

‘Into the trench’ 

 

Many of Lankelly’s partners and stakeholders have told us how refreshing and motivational it was for a grant funder to ‘walk alongside’ them – to act as an advocate in the systems they were operating in, as well as with other funders, public sector organisations and more. Sources used metaphors like being ‘in the trench’ with them and ‘getting their hands dirty’.

 

This posture was an extension of the foundation believing in the work of its grantees, and naturally followed the question: What else do you need from us, besides money? As well as advocating for partners and grantees with their existing stakeholders, Lankelly also got them into rooms they might not ever have gotten into otherwise.

 

“When we were negotiating with the Mental Health Trust and our local partners to deliver our projects, Julian (Lankelly Chase CEO) came to those meetings with us. That was a profound act of solidarity. They could have just said, ‘Here’s the money, go away’. But Julian got into the trench with us. That made us feel powerful, because we were now with this relatively big philanthropic organisation that was willing to stand next to us in our hour of need. That fundamentally shifted the ball game. Not only did that make us feel powerful and strong, it made our statutory partners take us seriously … and they gave us something like £400,000 to develop our Ethnicity and Mental Health Improvement Project.”

 

Devolving decisions through relationships

 

Lankelly’s later work on devolved and place-based decision making was a natural evolution of their relational approach. The foundation first moved agency for grant giving away from trustees, which is the norm in many philanthropic organisations, and towards officers and staff, who formed inquiries around topics of concern. This shift enabled more agile and relational decisions which were closer to the realities being experienced by current and potential grantees and their communities on the ground.

 

The next step offered a place-based opportunity to further devolve decisions, trialled most extensively in Greater Manchester:

 

“Around the time of the pandemic, Greater Manchester System Changers was the movement of people Lankelly gave money to […] The resulting resource redistribution has been one of the most liberating, equalising things I’ve ever been involved in. Here in Wigan, we’re at a real significant turning point with the local authority and with the local power structures that would never have happened had it not been for this no-strings investment.” – Angela Fell, Grantee 

 

Following the energy of relationship through to another conclusion, this place-based focus is likely to be a key aspect of Lankelly Chase’s legacy, and one which seems to have taken firm root in Greater Manchester.

 

Unavoidable truths

 

Former Trustee Peter Latchford told us he believes there are some unavoidable truths in philanthropy which influence relationships – one of which is that grantees ultimately need money from funders:

 

“One of the things I got wrong during my time at Lankelly was that I was thinking more about the concepts, the logic and the complexity in the system than I was about relationships when I was sitting round the board table […] The discomfort is always going to be there because the reason you’re in a relationship with the grantee is because they want your cash, and you’ve just got to live with that. That’s the deal.” – Peter Latchford, Former Trustee

 

Another analysis says that, as with many things in philanthropy which is trying to do things differently, there were times when the gravity of tradition pulled Lankelly and its partners back into relationship dynamics that were undesirable, destructive and simply more conventional than its stated aims would suggest: 

 

“Institutions are drawn to what they know in times of crisis – back to what’s familiar. I think that’s a shame, because the familiar relationships come with their own dynamics.” – Guppi Bola, Grantee

 

In committing to relational working, Lankelly stepped into the very human messiness that defines real relationships. By trying to move away from the comfort of formal or institutional interactions, which are hierarchical and boundarised by an outdated understanding of risk, they got closer to a more genuine posture as a funder who wanted to do things significantly differently. 

 

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.