When we decided on our new mission to ‘change the systems that perpetuate severe and multiple disadvantage’ back in 2011, we didn’t realise this set us on a path that would eventually lead to the closure of the foundation. 

By ‘severe and multiple disadvantage‘ we meant the interlocking nature of severe disadvantages in some people’s lives. We looked at the intersections of factors including extreme poverty, domestic abuse, substance misuse, homelessness, contact with the criminal justice system and mental ill health.

If we had taken a single issue such as homelessness, this may (or may not) have anchored us in a more conventional understanding of how change happens.

Instead, it was immediately and overwhelmingly clear that severe and multiple disadvantage (for all its problems as a concept) was anything but straightforward. As Hard Edges (2015) says, “severe and multiple disadvantage seems to result from a combination of structural, systemic, family and personal factors”. There was no project, intervention, campaign or legislative change that we could sponsor that would lead to the change we wanted to see. There were no clear routes. It was a complex problem.

We started to explore ideas that might help us. We knew of the disciplines of systems thinking and complexity theory but we were very far from being experts. Most of us had come from the voluntary sector – we were ex-policy workers, campaigners, frontline practitioners or CEOs of small charities in the field. We started to learn as a team.

It seemed that these ideas, and the methodologies associated with them, were appropriate to what we were trying to do – so we pursued them. This included building international partnerships to help us find examples, tools, and practices around systems change to bring back to the UK. We also learned about tools like the Three Horizons model, Systems Coaching and the Cynefin Framework and used these in our work.

We learnt that systems are messy, intricate webs that are constantly moving. They consist of tangible things like people and organisations, connected by intangible things like history, worldviews, context and culture.

An exploration of how to intervene to promote positive change became the work of the foundation, alongside many grantee partners, for the next ten years.

The absence of clear routes or solutions led to our action inquiry approach. Our learning about systems made us aware that Lankelly was fully implicated in the systems we wanted to change; we were part of it, not separate from it, and how we behaved was part of the change we wanted to see. Both of these realisations were important steps on the road to the transition pathway decision.