Lankelly Chase has been engaged in over a decade of work on systemic change.
Since we began our work on severe and multiple disadvantage in 2012, we have created a huge amount of learning about the nature of the problem that our mission has aimed to solve.
At the same time, the context in which we have worked has radically changed in ways that unavoidably reshape our understanding of our mission.
Together, the learning and the context have led us to create a new strategic direction that we believe is now the most effective response to this mission.
The learning
The focus has been on ‘severe and multiple disadvantage’ in the UK, specifically the intersection of homelessness, mental ill health, drug misuse and offending.
We set that focus in 2012, in the wake of the Coalition Government’s austerity programme, which triggered greater focus on seeking smarter solutions to ‘wicked’ problems.
We soon saw that the boundary we had put around severe and multiple disadvantage was in some ways helpful, because it allowed many practitioners to see the relevance of our mission to the day-to-day reality of their work. However, it was also deeply problematic because it excluded a wider set of variables which, if unaddressed, would fatally undermine the effectiveness of the mission.
To some extent, the exclusion of variables is an inevitable result of where the boundary is drawn. For example, we had to quickly widen the boundary because the definition we were using tended to underrepresent critical factors such as gender, ethnicity and age. However, there were other variables that revealed a deeper problem with our methodology. Drawing on social research approaches, we mapped need based on available data, which produced a clear but relatively two-dimensional picture of the problem. However, these other variables introduced dimensions that ultimately disrupted the map completely.
Our initial strategy targeted public sector commissioning systems and policy. We tried to alert commissioners and policy makers to the complexity of severe and multiple disadvantage, the deeply relational approach that was needed to address it, and to the need to bend otherwise rigid commissioning approaches to the reality on the ground. We resourced and worked with highly innovative practitioners to model the degree of organisational change that was required when dealing with interconnected issues.
The frailty of the modelling approach was that it could only be sustained as long as the funding was sustained. As a charitable foundation, we have insufficient resources to act as a sustainable source of funding to address a problem that is so pervasive.
However, commissioning systems, where the sustainable resources lie, proved much harder to shift than we had hoped. In response, we deepened our approach through place-based work, in which we sought to use our resources and position to bring the people running services, people with lived experience of severe and multiple disadvantage and local commissioners and policy makers to create strategies collectively. Through the learning of this network, we distilled some ‘system behaviours’ designed to support collectives towards better outcomes.
These system behaviours have been taken up in many contexts internationally to guide system change work.
This evolving strategy undoubtedly achieved some change and a great deal of learning. However, it has also pointed insistently to the limitations of understanding the problem via a two-dimensional map, or the system as machinery that can be retuned or retooled.
Most people working in these systems referred repeatedly to power inequality as the single most important factor that determined the success or failure of their work.
Although our strategy had increasingly attempted to address power through relational work, particularly attending to interpersonal dynamics and storytelling, it became clear that the actors in these systems had only limited personal agency to shift the overall power dynamics, no matter how many change processes they engaged in.
It became inevitable that our strategy had to start addressing the fundamentals of power inequalities, including how decisions are made, by whom, using what or whose knowledge, with what or whose ideas of success, and with what or whose understanding of what causes the problem in the first place.
We spoke less of addressing ‘systems failure’ and more about addressing the nature of a system that produces disastrous results for people. This shifted our strategy towards engaging with practitioners who were steeped in work that addresses power inequalities head on. We supported these organisations individually and through communities of practice focused on governance, knowledge, place, movements and narratives.
The intention of this work was to gain a truer picture of the system that needed to change, and the methodologies for changing that system, so that social ills such as severe and multiple disadvantage could be sustainably resolved. It allowed us to travel beyond the charitable purposes of ‘relief of poverty’ and ‘saving of lives’ towards the charitable purposes of ‘prevention of poverty’ and ‘advancement of health’. In other words, we moved from addressing symptoms to addressing root causes.
The deepening learning from these unfurling phases of work pointed us towards a number of characteristics of the system that would need to change if people were to be free to model the system behaviours. In particular:
1. A separation of humans from each other through the celebration of
competition, commodification, scarcity and individualism as the sharpest
drivers of performance.
2. The separation of humans from their own nature through a mechanistic
worldview which reduces human beings to units of utility, labour and rational
economic action.
3. The separation of humans from their own context through institutional lag and
inertia, so that the social norms of previous times are taken through to the
future, whether they are relevant or not.
4. The separation of a small number of decision makers and wealth holders from
the many who are impacted by their decisions and the processes of wealth
accumulation.
These characteristics are observable every day in the challenges faced by peoplemtrying to bring about collaborative and sustainable change on the ground.
However, as already noted, attempts to address them through interpersonal processes have only limited effectiveness. The work and practice of many of our partners suggests that this is because these characteristics do not exist in isolation.
They are themselves a product of something bigger.
This is where we needed to move from what we have observed directly in our work to a wider analysis held by those who attend both to these characteristics of power at a macro-level and to their implications for strategy and practice. These thinkers, historians and practitioners point to two further characteristics:
5. A non-negotiable belief in capitalism, and therefore an acceptance of the
inevitability of winners and losers, extraction and separation.
6. Hardwired colonial structures which then shape the terms of any engagement.
Some writers have brought these two characteristics together in the concept of ‘colonial capitalism’, recognising that capitalism was created in the context of colonialism, as a system that could support colonialism’s objectives.
The systems change journey we have travelled in the past 12 years has been akin to opening up a set of Russian dolls. It has shown us X cannot be addressed unless Y is addressed, and that Y can’t be addressed unless Z is addressed. There is always another doll inside.
This has brought us to colonial capitalism, which is not a common domain for charitable purpose. However, given the context through which we are now moving, it has become an inescapable domain for action if we are to be genuinely effective in working towards our mission.
Our Context
We are in the midst of a polycrisis, in which environmental, social, technological, financial-economic, natural and other forces are interacting with ever increasing unpredictability, rapidity and power.
Our current trajectory has us on track for a three degree rise in temperature before the end of the century. First Nation leaders have expressed this differently, reminding us that it will be too late before we realise that we cannot eat money.
Western science has only recently caught up with what many Indigenous communities have known for hundreds of years; namely, we cannot exploitatively extract from mother earth without consequences.
We have already crossed six of the nine planetary boundaries. We are learning the hard way that we cannot have our cake and eat it.
Many models of a green transition assume or hope that this trajectory can be altered within the current economic system, particularly through new technologies relating to carbon reduction and capture.
However, there is very little evidence to support this hope, especially as it does not address the existing trend of escalating acquisition and production, and continues our reliance on the extraction of finite materials at enormous cost to biodiversity and people in the global South first, followed swiftly by the impoverished 99% in the global North.
Perhaps the starkest shift in our context is that this analysis is no longer a marginal view or concern, as it was in 2012 when we began. It is now the considered and consistent conclusion of the United Nations. Its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote in 2023:
More than a century of burning fossil fuels as well as unequal and unsustainable energy and land use have led to global warming of 1.1°C above pre -industrial levels. This has resulted in more frequent and more intense extreme weather events that have caused increasingly dangerous impacts on nature and people in every region of the world. […]
Taking effective and equitable climate action will not only reduce losses and damages for nature and people, it will also provide wider benefits, the report points out, underscoring the urgency of taking more ambitious action now to secure a liveable sustainable future for all.
The context for our mission to improve the lives of people facing severe and multiple disadvantage has now shifted from responding to fiscal austerity in 2012 to facing a global threat to a liveable future for anyone.
Confronting this context
One of the most prominent practitioners of Western systems thinking, Peter Senge, concluded after a lifetime’s practice that the first ‘gateway’ to effective leadership in changing systems is: “seeing that problems ‘out there’ are ‘in here’ also – and how the two are connected”.
He goes on to say:
“Continuing to do what we are currently doing but doing it harder or smarter is not likely to produce very different outcomes. Real change starts with recognizing that we are part of the systems we seek to change. The fear and distrust we seek to remedy also exist within us—as do the anger, sorrow, doubt, and frustration. Our actions will not become more effective until we shift the nature of the awareness and thinking behind the actions.”
Lankelly Chase has been guided by this insight from the very start of its work on systems change.
We have said consistently that the change has to start with ourselves. In the context of the polycrisis we understand this to require that we confront in ourselves the violence that has created, and now maintains, the rampant consumption and extraction described by the UN.
This violence includes ecocide, extinction, erasure, human and non-human exploitation, premature death, punitive debt, miseducation, enslavement, militarism, displacement, land-grabbing, white collar corruption and theft, domination over, racism, patriarchy and more.
To varying degrees, all of us are complicit in the maintenance of this violence. We separate ourselves from the histories that have brought us to this point, from the distant places, people and processes that have put food on our table and clothes on our backs and that have brought comfort to our homes. We lock it all in a black box, so that we don’t have to look at it and our part in it. We buy into the myth of progress that modernity offers us while denying how this has required the erasure of alternative wisdoms. We practise this myth-making and denial daily. It dictates what we think is and isn’t possible. It creates our reward and punishment systems. It sits in our nervous systems.
We yearn for thriving communities, but if we don’t accept that ‘out there’ is ‘in here’, and face the violence within ourselves, we will use the logic of separation to reproduce more violence, more extraction and more harm as we consume more.
The role of institutional philanthropy
In shifting our strategy to respond to our learning and context, we cannot view ourselves as a neutral or autonomous actor. We are always, as outlined above, “part of the systems we seek to change”.
In Lankelly Chase’s case, the system that most defines us is institutional philanthropy.
Philanthropy is a concept that Paul Vallely traces back to the ancient Greeks. In its institutional form, however, he points to its origins in the early twentieth century, when Andrew Carnegie and then John D. Rockefeller established a new organisational form, the endowed philanthropic foundation, through which they distributed the wealth that they had accumulated in the nineteenth century.
It was evident at the time that the manner in which this wealth had been accumulated and the purposes for which it would be spent were hard to square. No less a figure than the former US president Theodore Roosevelt said of Rockefeller: “No amount of charities in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them”.
The era in which this wealth was accumulated was the era of the ‘robber barons’, whose practices included unfettered consumption and destruction of natural resources, influencing high levels of government, wage slavery, squashing competition by acquiring their competitors to create monopolies, and schemes to sell stock at inflated prices to unsuspecting investors of the era of spiralling acquisition and production.
There is no doubt that the likes of Carnegie did enormous good with their philanthropy. But there’s also no doubt that he remained committed to a system that necessarily impoverished people. Inequality, he wrote, ‘is necessary to the future progress of the race”.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that institutional philanthropy was founded on a strategy of salving the ills and harms that its own processes of wealth accumulation had created.
The origins of institutional philanthropy are not just worth noting for historical interest. They set the pattern that we have followed. We are still pursuing charitable purposes through a strategy that is unable to account adequately for the extraction of value from fellow humans, non-humans and the earth. We are still engaged in strategies to relieve poverty and ill-health whose cornerstone is the perpetuation of inequality.
The well-documented failings of philanthropy are not failures of execution. They are part of its DNA.
Since Carnegie and Rockefeller’s time, institutional philanthropy has made big claims to solving entrenched social problems, but it has done nothing to resist or transform the dominant system that created them. If anything, it has given – and continues to give – an aura of benevolence to those who have achieved mastery in that system. Institutional philanthropy’s utility in this respect is what has kept its logic going all of this time.
It is the ultimate ‘cake and eat it’ strategy.
This also explains why institutional philanthropy is failing to rise to the current occasion. If we are to transition from this era of spiralling consumption, we urgently need to grow and spread alternatives to a system that threatens our very existence.
Yet institutional philanthropy continues to respond to symptoms while the root causes remain. This is because it is itself invested in those root causes.
Implications for our mission
Over the last 5 years, we have called for more honesty about the ability of our dominant charitable model to produce the social justice for which it strives.
Since we made that call, the polycrisis has started to make the implicit explicit. Namely, so long as the current system is allowed to continue undisturbed, charities’ ability to prevent poverty or advance health – or indeed to advance human rights or environmental protection – will not just be limited, it will be rendered irrelevant by the scale of the disaster facing us.
The times are now too urgent, and the escalating needs too large, to remain in this state of denial. We have to be honest with ourselves and each other: it is impossible to improve a system that is designed to produce the very opposite of what we are trying to achieve.
Within this context, Lankelly Chase can no longer act despite the fault-line in the logic of institutional philanthropy.
We have asked: can something cause necessary change at the level of a system when it is itself shaped by that same system? Our conclusion is ‘no’. The contradiction is too fundamental and we would not be true to our mission if we did not name and act on it.
If charity and philanthropy are to be genuinely effective in addressing the challenges ahead, we’re going to have to fundamentally reimagine their roles.
Transition pathways and embodied transformation
The task that awaits us is clear. Humanity needs to create new pathways which will allow us to transition through this era of poly-crisis to a future of mutual flourishing, where we exist in right relationship with each other and our planet.
What does this require of us? Nothing less, to repeat Senge’s words, than shifting “the nature of the awareness and thinking behind [our] actions”.
This suggests that we need to create alternative contexts, narratives and structures that shift our entire civilisation away from our addiction to escalating cycles of consumption and extraction. The scale of the task is daunting, and our actions need to be proportionate to it.
Our learning to date suggests that shifting awareness and thinking requires considerable investment in processes, architectures and spaces. This is because alternative awareness and thinking has to grow within a context that is designed to shut it down. As already mentioned, the hegemony of colonial capitalism was partly achieved through the suppression and extinction of alternative wisdoms.
Given the hold the current system has on us, the transformation required must be at the most fundamental level, namely at the level of ‘how and who we are being with each other’. This can’t be transformation ‘out there’, it has to be transformation ‘in here’. It has to be embodied by each of us. It has to collapse the separation of self/other, people/planet, investor/producer/labourer/consumer, theory/practice, mind/body, funder/grantee, winner/loser that capitalism has required of us.
What would embodied transformation take?
We have been in deep consultation with many whose work on systems change has played a significant role in shifting our strategy. These are practitioners in embodied transformation whose work gives us clues to where we should go next. From this consultation we have distilled four key elements:
1. Honouring the vision keepers. Leonard Cohen famously sang: “There’s a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”. There are cracks in the logic of colonial capitalism, and there are people among us who have long seen those cracks and have dedicated their lives to showing us where they are and to keeping them open. They have kept the vision and possibility of alternatives alive, when most of us have been shaped by the logic of colonial capitalism. This work takes a lifetime of practice, yet because we live in a world determined by the dominant system, they have had little or no help in doing their work, let alone in causing those cracks to grow.
2. Alternative architectures and technologies. Embodied transformation is not achieved through moments of inspiration or revelation. It requires discipline, practice and rigour to hold us in transformed ways of being. It took centuries of global violence to create the system we now inhabit. For other ways of being to flourish, we need to support ourselves individually and collectively to resist the pull of the dominant system and keep ourselves in right relationship. These architectures and technologies include how we organise ourselves, how we give language to the alternatives, how we understand knowledge and imagination, how we connect mind, body, spirit and earth, how we understand the purpose of the economic system and the earth’s resources, and how we understand the assets that each of us brings.
3. A ‘whole resource’ approach. We need to dislodge money or capital from its status as the primary resource around which everyone organises, as the resource that must be kept separate from all the other resources available to us, and that gives supremacy to whoever holds it. If it could take its right and proportionate place in the mix, then we would start to achieve a much deeper appreciation of all the resources we hold collectively. The money would stop being defined by its separateness: the thing that funds or buys the other resources, or the thing around which people convene. And given that concepts such as intellectual property are governed in part by the commodification of ideas and knowledge, then if the relationship to money shifts, the relationship to the other resources shifts.
4. An ecological approach. As the caterpillar to butterfly metamorphosis teaches us, transformation requires the dissolving and re-formation of structures at a cellular level. To dissolve the logic of colonial capitalism, we need to be prepared to dissolve the logic of our organisations, hierarchies and knowledge systems and find new forms of interconnection that model the mutual flourishing that we yearn for. Rather than viewing ourselves as separate ’sectors’, such as charity, philanthropy, high net worth individuals, the public, social businesses, activists, academia, consultancy, public and private sector, we need to view ourselves as part of an interdependent ecology, and we need to intentionally move into that that ecology, so that energy, information and resources can flow, and s that effects can emerge that are currently unimaginable and are unimaginably beautiful and daring.
Our new strategy: dissolving separation
Lankelly Chase has chosen to act because of not despite the fault line in institutional philanthropy. As we announced in June 2023: “We will relinquish control of our assets, including the endowment and all resources, so that money can flow freely to those doing life-affirming social justice work. We will make space to reimagine how wealth, capital and social justice can co-exist in the service of all life, now and for future generations”.
This choice seeks to dissolve the separation of capital wealth from the resources that communities hold. In doing so, we seek to liberate our resourcing models from the grip that Carnegie and Rockefeller still exert on our ways of thinking and acting, so that we can start to envision and enact alternatives.
This means much more than ‘handing over the money’, not least because the current logic of our system immediately responds with zero sum questions such as: To whom? With what criteria? What about me?
Instead, we view the work of dissolving separation as a strategy for transforming the logic of colonial capitalism.
Through this process, we need to address what money means to us, how it structures power and relationships, how it works between and through us, how it separates us from the land we inhabit, how it ties us to the dominant system, how it relates to all other resources we hold. And then we can start to reimagine the relationship we want with money, how we want it to act, how it can liberate the world we yearn for, how it can be in proportionate right relationship with all other resources.
Dissolving separation isn’t an event, or a moment. Like the metamorphosis of the caterpillar, it is a process of relinquishing the old structure and reforming our resources into new structures that can fly.
Lankelly Chase’s work of dissolving separation has been in train for a while:
• It began when we delegated grant-making decisions within our organisation from the Board to the staff and then (as far as possible) to communities.
• It was deepened when we dissolved the boundary separating severe and multiple disadvantage from wider determining systems.
• It was deepened further when we recruited people from communities and movements to our board who could start to dissolve artificial separations between the work and the governance.
• And this was followed by the implementation of our sustainable investment strategy which, we concluded, remained committed to a system that maintains the separation of people and profits, of growth and sustainability, and of the Global North and Global South.
Continuing the work of dissolving separations is a hopeful choice. We believe that fundamentally different ways of living together are available to us, that honour ourselves and our interdependence with our planet.
We believe that these ways of living together are infinitely more nourishing of our physical, mental, social and spiritual beings. We also believe that they honour and fulfil the true meaning of philanthropy, the love of humankind, as well as move beyond it to the love of the more-than-human, and the critical relationship between the two.
