By 2018, the Lankelly team had changed, with more women of colour joining the organisation.

Each started to ask questions in different ways. Why are we doing it like this? Why are we framing things in this way? Why are our networks so white?

At a similar time, the organisation’s naivety and clumsiness around race was being exposed.

One example was a convening by Lankelly on how the fields of system change and racial justice could relate to each other, and what action we could take to draw them together. A lot of people were invited, it was led by a white facilitator, and it went into issues of racism. This event clearly demonstrated that Lankelly didn’t know how to host hold conversations about race and racism in a safe and effective way. Attendees felt harmed. People of colour in the organisation felt angry and embarrassed.

Following this, women of colour in the organisation stepped forward and led a facilitated conversation in the team about colonialism and the relationship between colonialism and philanthropy. This demonstrated that to a person, the white people in the organisation didn’t know how to talk about this.

They didn’t know that colonialism, racism and philanthropy needed to be joined up in one analysis. They thought that colonialism was something from the past. This laid bare that different colleagues were holding vastly different expertise and understandings.

Colleagues of colour approached the Chief Executive to say that something needed to change.

A small working group called ‘isms’ was set up and expert consultancy support was invited into the organisation. The first workshops in this process exposed even further the crassness and clumsiness of white colleagues, their conscious and unconscious bias, and indeed, how clumsily the white leadership team were holding power.

The process continued, and white colleagues in the team formed a book group to work through Layla Saad’s ‘Me and White Supremacy’ together.

At the same time, the process to develop Lankelly’s board was beginning. This included a session bringing together a group of people as prospective trustees. Half of the room were white. Half of the room were Black. The room split in two. There was strong challenge around Lankelly’s inability to understand its own power and its relationship with community.

We followed up with all of the people in the room, nearly all of whom agreed to continue their involvement to work through what had come up. Some of them agreed to join the board.

This all amounted to an organisational awakening. We didn’t necessarily do more than scratch the surface, but we did at least have some kind of reckoning with ourselves.

This included bringing people onto our board who could start to hold things a bit differently.

By 2020, we could, with a level of integrity that wouldn’t have been possible previously, make a statement in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, ‘Standing in Solidarity with the Black Community‘, acknowledging our faults and saying we would commit to “reflecting on the impact of our position and privilege, to be transparent about our practices and open to critique. We also commit to directing increasing resources to communities of colour as a matter of urgency and to offering our platform to others if it can amplify their voice and message.”

We developed our networks, described our work with a more explicit anti-oppression framing (and were clearer what this actually meant), changed our comms to provide more platforms to people working on racial justice issues and made more targeted grants.