When we focused on severe and multiple disadvantage, we looked for organisations which were able to work with the whole reality of a person, rather than siloing them as a ‘drug user’, ‘released prisoner’ or ‘homeless person’. 

We found that these holistic and relational approaches required the organisations themselves to operate in highly relational and holistic ways.

We were inspired by the Holy Cross Trust (now Likewise) and the Mayday Trust. They were trying to embody in themselves the humanity that they thought was necessary in their work. They were asset-based internally so they could be asset-based in their relationships with their clients.

At the same time, we were learning more about systems thinking, and taking on board ideas about how everything is a ‘fractal’ of something else – a small part which embodies the qualities of the whole. So, if you’re trying to imagine a highly relational, holistic, person-centred world, then you have to view yourself as a fractal of that world. There has to be alignment.

This led us to ask ourselves what does a holistic person-centred, trust-based funder look like? How do we understand ourselves as part of the change we want to see? Our analysis became that the means and the ends need to align, and that what I’m being here is going to be amplified out in the world. We took this very seriously and in trying to live up to it, we changed many things about the organisation and how we did our work. Examples included equalising parental leave, dispensing with (some) explicit hierarchies, developing mutual due diligence and enabling grantees to take over our Twitter feed and use it to platform their work. These seem quite disparate but they all came from the belief that Lankelly needed to ‘be the change’.

While well intentioned, in retrospect, it seems naïve of us to think a foundation could model the thing that it wants to see in the world.

A foundation is an unfair accumulation of wealth, that it distributes to people who depend on it through a process of competition, leaving those people with a level of precarity, disempowerment and otherness that is everything we want to change.

It would have been more honest to say that we aren’t the thing we want to see in the world. We could have owned the discordance and said, “while this exists, we’re going to hold it with as much transparency, honesty and clarity as we can. This is the role that we have. It’s not ideal. But these are the rules of engagement so everybody knows where they stand.” We didn’t do this, and we held a flawed and muddled position as a result.

However, the mantra that we need to ‘be the change’ did lead to awareness of the discordance and the need to address it. The path we chose was to break through it to enable something different to emerge.