Walk towards the sound of gunfire

Philanthropy has inherited a ghastly duty

 

By Peter Latchford

 

 

I’d not come across Lankelly Chase before I joined the board in 2009, which I was on for eight years, and I’d not been involved with endowed organisations before. I’d worked in a non-exec capacity in a number of charities in public service, so I knew the general deal, but not the extra layer that comes with having your own resources to disperse as you see fit. I was just really curious about what it was like to have the freedom to intervene without the constraints that always come with government money.

 

The £100 million or so that was in the bank was a lot of money in one way, but obviously not very much at all when you look at the scale of our socio-economic challenges. I think I was hoping that £100 million could be a catalyst, or a positive disruptor, or would allow systemic change. When a system is gridlocked it’s important to work out where the leverage points are and apply pressure.

 

When I joined in 2009 it felt like a group of people  who managed the money well, and who distributed it in a conscientious way, but with limited ‘theory of change’. For me, at least, there was no agreed construct which said ‘this is why we think this is more important than that’. There was no rationale for where the leverage points might be. At the time I felt that the absence of a rationale or a theory of change was a constraint, was a problem. Now I would be more forgiving of that – I’m now more sceptical about plans and frameworks.

 

Walking towards the sound of gunfire

 

When we began to focus the organisation around this notion of severe and multiple disadvantage, after a while we realised we needed to get a better understanding of who that population was. We discovered that the primary candidate to be in that category was working class, northern, male, white. It felt like an inconvenient truth. The business of getting to a theory of change was itself a radical change in the organisation, and problematic. I don’t think it was ever really settled.

 

One way of looking at Lankelly’s self-dissolution is that it’s lost faith in its own ability to maintain a robust liberality or to pursue that. It says other people should decide. I’m not convinced those other people will be as liberal, and I think that’s problematic. That change – from perhaps a superior benevolence, to a kind of troubled intellectual humility – feels like one of the biggest things I saw over my time in the organisation. 

 

I should say, I don’t think I played my role as a board member well – I probably didn’t come across as supportive enough to the grant officers. I found all this quite difficult and challenging, and felt the need to air the things that I’m airing. I am not sure that doing so was helpful.

 

I became aware towards the end of my time at Lankelly that they were very caught up with the wider issues in philanthropic organisations, and with this issue of: What right have we to intervene? Which is a characteristic of the liberal dilemma. What right have we to change the way other people live their lives? What right have we to require that our middle class liberal values are forced upon others who may not share those values? 

 

That’s a big external theme, and I think it’s a theme for philanthropic organisations more generally. If it’s not, it should be. I’m just not convinced the answer to that is that we have no right. 

 

I think it’s equally as valid to say we want to be muscular in our defense of liberalism, in the face of absolutism. I think liberals might need to be walking towards the sound of gunfire on that one.

 

Systemically desirable, culturally feasible

 

For a while I chaired a very troubled NHS Trust, and became very flattened by the fact that this organisation, which had some very talented people in it, had been troubled for 30 years, and seemed unable to get out of that state. I couldn’t work out why, even though I’d spent four or more years there. So I put myself on a systems thinking Masters, trying to get my head around alternative ways of framing this thing, and found it very useful.

 

There’s a great phrase I keep coming back to in the systems thinking literature which is, ‘systemically desirable, culturally feasible’. A lot of people in the systems thinking world became extremely frustrated, because essentially they’ve got ‘the answer’ to why our systems are failing us, but nobody would bloody listen. What they realised was that you can describe a desirable state, but it’s getting there that’s the challenge. 

 

‘Systemically desirable, culturally feasible’ says you’ve got to get there in steps. What happens is you move in one step, which gets you to a slightly better position, and it will change the culture such that you can then take the next step to a slightly better position. Actually you never reach an answer – you’re just all the time moving forward progressively.

 

There’s another great phrase which I came across at the Tavistock Institute, talking about effective boards: ‘The board’s job is to own the anxieties of the organisation.’ When I first read this I thought it was more of that leadership bashing thing. But actually if you look under the surface, say it’s the private sector, there’s a tension between the needs of the shareholders and the needs of the customers – and it’s an essentially irresolvable tension. So your job as the board is to own that anxiety and to continually balance that tension. Every organisation has a different set of tensions that characterise it, and the board’s job is to continually, like being on a bicycle, rebalance to find the optimum balance, but usually not to resolve them. 

 

I think there’s something to be said for the existing philanthropic organisations owning the anxiety, and owning the discomfort of the fact that they have been put by history in this appalling position of bestowing gifts upon the poor. Your ancestors have given you this ghastly duty, and if you drop it, it’s worse than if you don’t see it through in a systemically desirable, culturally feasible direction.

 

Desire for relationships

 

When Lankelly was characterising its job as helping people suffering from severe and multiple disadvantage, and found out that their archetypal person was a white northern male and then started speaking to those people, its findings were about people’s desire for relationships. Not for a roof over their heads or for a detox or whatever else, but wanting to feel a human connection. If you’ve got a background in community development that really will be no surprise – but it was good to see that coming out.

 

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.

 

 

Story Weaving by Jack Becher and Sam Gregory 

 

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