At that point we didn’t know what the exact timelines would be or how things were going to unfold.

From the get-go there was a focus on trying to reassure and hold the team as best we could (‘we’ here being the Transition Leadership Team) but we were doing this without knowing what this thing would actually mean. We didn’t have any answers.

As an employer, we wanted to give reassurance and as much clarity as we could about what the next few years would look like. It was hard to get to that –  to be able to say ‘we know this’. It was also hard to say ‘we don’t know this’.

That filtered through to the team’s relationships in the fields they were working in. Holding this uncertainty was very hard.

People at Lankelly were used to driving their own work, following their noses, getting into relationships with lots of people in the field and pursuing lines of inquiry that interested them.

The team was all personally invested. The organisation had welcomed this and invited staff to ‘bring their whole selves to work’. The process of setting up sub-teams and inquiries, devolving decision making to the team and shifting agency further out into groups in the field was all underway.

Even though the idea of Lankelly changing form and dissolving was not new, our particular culture made the idea of stepping out of the work difficult. Someone said it felt like the brakes were slammed on. It was more or less painful for everybody, and some people found it really hard to let go.

At the time of the decision, Lankelly was moving towards a flatter structure. Hierarchy was starting to dissolve. In the wake of the redistribution decision, however, there was a sense that more of a container was needed: more parameters, more clarity and more boundaries to try to hold people through a difficult time. In fact, the call for more clarity and more parameters had been there in the organisation for a long time. But when it did come, it felt to some like a disjuncture or rupture. Arguably though, it was a necessary change.

At this point, the decision was taken to try to provide people with a clearer sense of the new and different purpose of their roles during this period. This included changing job titles. This was part of a practical and psychological move towards stopping what we were doing.

When the decision was taken, there was an explicit acknowledgement that if we didn’t put a date on it, we could end up going on forever. There would always be a good reason to continue.

This proved prescient. Our 2023 budget, put together by the team, was still very similar to the year before and the year before that. The trustees pushed back, telling us to rethink.

It seems obvious, but it was a significant realisation that Lankelly couldn’t stop doing the thing (institutional philanthropy) that it thought was problematic, unless it stopped doing the thing it was doing. It couldn’t stop being a funder unless and until it stopped being a funder.  There was always a good and valid rationale to make one more grant, or to get involved in one more promising area of work. We had to give ourselves a deadline.

We made a decision that our involvement in all the action inquiries – the programmes of work on themes like place, governance, and movements – should end by September 2024.

This wasn’t straightforward. How do you continue to support staff in their work in the field, and to maintain their confidence in that work whilst also knowing that Lankelly’s involvement would need to change, and then to end? We also had a keenly felt moral obligation to honour all our commitments and to act with care, so that organisations that were reliant on us didn’t experience a sudden cliff edge. Working out what this actually meant in practice for different organisations took several months.

Most people in the organisation felt the decision to transition from institutional philanthropy was the right one. But there were many times when the reality of what it meant for people inside and outside the organisation hit home, and this was difficult and emotional.

If you’re going to be a relational funder and then move towards spend out or closure (whether or not you subscribe to Lankelly’s philosophical reasoning), it is inevitably going to be difficult to untangle yourself. (There are some reflections on the realities of being a ‘time-limited funder’ from a community of practice we were part of here).

• Even if it feels like you don’t have the time to work some things through, prioritise making the time. In fact, give yourself extra time on top of that. When we’ve been able to find that time and sit down with something and think through ‘what will this mean?’ ‘What are the ramifications?’ ‘What are the things that we need to do to prepare people and prepare ourselves?’ then things have gone better.

• We haven’t always managed it, but we tried to be as open and transparent as we could, so that people know when you say to them, ‘I can’t tell you that yet’, or ‘I don’t know that yet’, that’s the honest truth and there is no gameplaying.

• Make sure you’ve got a clear understanding of what’s possible in terms of legal and regulatory stuff (including the Charity Commission), because you never know what you’re going to get asked.

• Leadership needs to be bought into the thing that is happening. This doesn’t mean group-think, but there does need to be shared buy-in to the ultimate direction of travel. It’s hard to do this level of change without it.

• Don’t buy into your own narrative of exceptionalism. Every organisation has its own thing – dynamics, history, culture. Lankelly had a way of working that gave the team huge latitude to lead their own change work. The transition pathway decision came as a shock to some in the midst of this, but it is normal for trustees to make big strategic decisions. We sometimes forgot this.

• Capture the journey. Even just in the form of a daily journal. We would like to be able to look back and recognise the points when something shifted that we might not have even noticed at the time.