Lankelly’s first steps into place-based funding in 2015 felt inevitable. Every project or organisation we supported was struggling with serious challenges in their own local system. 

Each was aiming for impact that was reliant on a web of interdependent factors. Increasingly, we were being drawn into advocacy with local commissioners and decision makers.

By far the best thing we did early on was to take it slowly and do our homework. We spent a lot of time in consultation with hundreds of people in our networks trying to distil their wisdom about the conditions for healthy place-based work.

This resulted in the ‘System Behaviours’ which provided some of the coordinates on the compass that we would use to navigate our way through the work.

We commissioned a historical review of place-based approaches. One of the standout lessons from that review was the importance of a ‘year zero’ phase.  In a nutshell, most funders or development agencies arrive in places with a Year One plan that slowly unravels as its false assumptions are exposed by the reality on the ground.

The ‘year zero’ approach suggests the importance of starting with a state of ‘not knowing’, so that the interconnections and resources of the place can reveal themselves. Of course there are reasons for having a plan, or for pretending to know what you’re doing. Trustees in particular are often not comfortable with authorising an open-ended process of exploration without clear parameters on action or spend. Despite having remarkably permissive trustees at Lankelly at the time, our board still struggled with the notion of going into place-based work without a clear structure, role or timeframe.

Perhaps the biggest single shift in our place-based journey was asking our board to relinquish the comfortable territory of making grants to defensible projects by known organisations.

Another question we struggled with at the start was how to choose the places. We concluded that there was no good answer to that question, and so we decided to go where we were invited.

There are all kinds of problems with this approach, but we made the clear decision that we would not ask places to pitch to us (to do what?) and that we didn’t want to choose areas based on indices of deprivation, because we wanted to focus on relationships. Again, this was a big leap for Trustees who needed to trust staff to act resourcefully without clear criteria.

From this entry point we engaged in a ‘year zero’ of conversations, inquiries and some small grant making. This phase allowed us to find people who were chafing at the limitations of the existing systems and were hankering for a space to create new possibility and difference.

The intention on our part wasn’t necessarily to move from ‘not knowing’ to ‘knowing’. We weren’t doing the research that would enable us to launch a grants programme. We were slowly nurturing an alliance of the willing who wanted to hold a local space of uncertainty and exploration.

This is the alchemy of place-based work at its best: creating the space for a resourceful group of interconnected actors to share a vision for change that is bigger than any one of them or their organisations. What we did was use our status as a funder to draw people into a process that they quickly started to own and control themselves.

None of this work was plain sailing, and the story above is far too neat. We made many mistakes when trying to reconcile the power dynamics between the national and the local, the ‘funder’ and the ‘funded’.

But the journey helped cement the conviction within Lankelly Chase that this wasn’t our money for us to control, and that we need to deinstitutionalise resourcing if we were to put our wealth at the service of social justice work.