Through our grant funding, we supported and profiled the deeply relational approaches that were needed to address severe and multiple disadvantage. 

This complemented the work we’d done to alert commissioners and policymakers to the complexity of social harm, through research like Hard Edges.

These approaches were often initiated and led by people with lived or frontline experience of severe and multiple disadvantage. Their work tended to be highly relational, values-driven, flexible and person-centred. Lankelly tried to journey alongside them, offering grant funding (often deployed tactically and with much flexibility) and very tailored packages of ‘funder+’ support, sometimes over many years.

This experience changed our grantmaking practice across the board. It also meant we had very strong relationships with many of the leaders funded by Lankelly. We felt we were ‘in it’ with them (though of course as foundation staff we were heavily insulated from the real precarity they felt).

It was extremely hard, if not impossible, to normalise and mainstream these approaches in rigid, risk-averse, outcomes-driven commissioning systems. The innovators we supported kept going in spite of the systems around them.

This realisation led to us exploring the underlying conditions in systems that prevented them from taking root, even with strong evidence of their efficacy.