In 2010 the governance of the foundation was largely orientated around making grants. The majority of trustee time was spent reviewing and approving or (sometimes) rejecting grant applications. These decisions could be based on anything from ‘do we think this is a good project?’ all the way through to ‘are we happy with their overheads?’ There was a lot of detail.

When it came to the board meetings, there wasn’t an awful lot to be discussed.

When we developed our strategic focus on severe and multiple disadvantage, we recruited a number of trustees with specialist expertise in things like communications, social enterprise, social investment and research because our new mission meant we were moving into those territories more intentionally.

Grantmaking continued at board level for a while, but we were becoming increasingly relational as a funder and also trying to think more systemically. This required a lot more analysis, proactive relationship building and convening by the staff.

It became less and less relevant to for the trustees to focus on the parts, rather than zooming out to see the whole.

We went through a process with the board of understanding how they could delegate grants decisions to the staff. Trustees could then focus on strategy, learning and communications.

We were trying to involve them much more in the thinking about how we shift the system: what are the right interventions to really make a difference, and how can we use our position as a foundation to leverage change?

When they stopped making grants, we tried to provide trustees with narratives for how our understanding of severe multiple disadvantage and systems change was developing.

What became apparent over time was that the trustees felt distant. No matter how much we tried to help them get under the skin of the work, they felt like they were peering in from the outside.

We tried to address this by inviting them along to things and providing more and more information, to the extent that they ended up feeling overwhelmed by all the paperwork (a typical set of board papers was about 200 pages).

One of the issues we had is that we had recruited them for their specialist expertise; they didn’t necessarily have deep insight into severe multiple disadvantage. They hadn’t walked that path – with one exception, who was explicitly brought onto the board because of their lived experience.

And so the executive were increasingly finding that the trustees, who were all brilliant people, weren’t necessarily able to add value to the learning that we were producing.

A shift coincided with the recruitment of a new chair. We decided we wanted to recruit somebody with ‘systems’ expertise. Myron Rogers joined the board and brought with him the question of what it takes to govern in a systems world.

If everything is interconnected, and we are just one part of a complex, interconnected whole, and we’re trying to make interventions into systems, then what are the implications for governance, and what should trustees be paying attention to?

It became quickly apparent that there were no easy answers to these questions.

The trustees couldn’t answer because they were insufficiently connected to the work, and so their sense of intellectualised separation from it all was reinforced.

They were left feeling that they didn’t have a clear role.

How did they judge whether the organisation was doing a good job? Predetermined outcomes felt unsystemic. So they asked the staff team to furnish them with learning. They asked for stories to illustrate the kind of change we were looking for.

However, as one of our trustees commented, if everything is learning, if everything is a good story, there is no bad action that can be taken.

It meant the trustees weren’t able to judge what was good or effective or ethical action, because it was all learning. It didn’t help us to arrive at core principles or values or red lines, and it meant the individual staff were almost left to themselves to decide what effectiveness looked like.

We began a recruitment round to bring in new trustees who were much more connected with the work. They were connected with us through the action inquiries and were recommended by the staff as people who were both critically connected to the communities that we were talking about, and had keen strategic awareness of where change needed to come from.

We went through a process of trying to attract those people into our organisation, initially by engaging them in a dialogue about what systemic governance needed to look like.

This very process unearthed a realisation that Lankelly was hopelessly centring itself: we didn’t understand what accountability to communities looked like, and we were trapped in a separate, intellectualised analysis of the problem rather standing in solidarity with those facing disadvantage in communities.

If we were going to shift this, we needed to bring a sense of deep accountability, connection and lived expertise into the heart of our governance.

Five people agreed to join the board to bring these kind of qualities into the organisation.

It was at precisely that time that COVID struck, and then came the racist murder of George Floyd, and what that triggered, in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement.

This gave the new trustees an opening to start inquiring quite deeply into Lankelly’s positionality, its history, the genesis of its ideas, its connections (or lack thereof) with communities, what it had convinced itself of, and the limitations of its means for drawing insight and knowledge into the foundation.

Up until the recruitment of the new trustees in 2020, we’d had, at times, an entirely white board, a majority white team and an entirely white leadership.

As such, the leadership, both at executive and non executive level, was privileging manifestations of whiteness in the work, and there was a tacit agreement between the executive and non-executive leadership that this was appropriate and acceptable.

There was no questioning that knowledge creation and analysis was held overwhelmingly by white professionals and consultants.

That was when the privileging of certain knowledge and power systems came into serious question. This had ramifications for individuals within the organisation, who in turn were holding considerable delegated power and drawing in and privileging others around them.

This led us to shift who we reached out to and got alongside, and a number of our action inquiries became considerably more diverse as a result.

The accountabilities improved, but the accountability problem wasn’t solved because of the enduring role of money.

Our new trustees didn’t come in to protect philanthropy. They came in to work out how this thing called philanthropy could genuinely be at the service of change.

They saw that there were dynamics at work within Lankelly that kept us separate from the work, and that our stated mission of tackling systems of oppression couldn’t be met if we ourselves were hopelessly entangled in those systems.

They started to create the space for us to examine whether Lankelly itself was part of the problem that it was trying to solve, and therefore what shifts might be required.

In governance terms, it wasn’t just that they were bringing their lived and community expertise to govern our work better.

More than this, they brought that expertise to start asking different and more fundamental questions about the legitimacy, validity and effectiveness of that work, and whether a foundation could ever be effectively pursuing the kinds of inquiries that Lankelly had committed itself to.