Lankelly had a relatively large endowment, very open purposes as defined in our governing document, and no wealthy donor or corporate entity overseeing us. This meant we were arguably one of the freest organisations in society.

 

We felt a huge responsibility to make the most of this position and to keep in mind the question “if we can’t then who can?”

Taking ‘severe and multiple disadvantage‘ as our starting point meant a sense of the interconnectedness of things was baked in.

 

We described ‘SMD’ as “the persistent clustering of severe social harms, particularly homelessness, substance misuse, mental and physical illness, extreme poverty, and violence and abuse”.

 

The commitment to work on this issue meant we were immediately in a space where simple or linear solutions were obviously inadequate.

Awareness that there were no straightforward routes to change, and that instead we were in the midst of a messy, unboundaried web of interdependencies, was daunting.

 

However, exposure to complexity theory and systems thinking meant we became aware of whole fields of relevant thought and practice, and communities of people worldwide grappling with similar issues to us.

Given the complexity and the absence of clear, linear pathways, processes of learning and adaptation were necessary to help us chart a course. We were open to where this learning took us.

The recognition that we weren’t somehow outside the systems we were trying to intervene in was important.

 

Once you start to see yourself as part of – rather than apart from – a system, then a lack of congruence between how you act and the change you want to see shows up pretty quickly.

 

The clearest example of this was in relation to Lankelly’s investments.

We knew that social problems are complex, and that any shift in a problem requires a corresponding shift in the system surrounding it. Outcomes emerge from the interrelation of parts in a system, not just from the parts themselves.

 

This position was a critique of the dominant charitable model, in which individual organisations are encouraged and incentivised to credit themselves with outcomes that can only be created by factors well beyond their control.

 

It meant we needed to focus on the underlying dynamics or conditions in a system, like the way power works, rather than any particular issue, intervention or organisation.

 

The ‘System Behaviours’ were a co-produced list of the conditions present in a healthy system that guided our work for several years.

This became a mantra for us in the years from about 2019 onwards as we fully accepted that many of the harms that charities exist to address are created by social, political and economic factors that sit outside the remit of charitable activity.

 

This was hardly a new argument (as the Mary Wollstonecraft quote above illustrates), but it was a development for us to build it into our thinking and it most certainly helped pave the way for the transition pathway decision.

 

This illustrated speech by Slavoj Žižek from 2009 sums it up nicely:

A particular mantra of Lankelly colleague Joe Doran.  As he says:

 

 “We [funders] need a massive reimagining of our purpose. Our purpose is too often to be ‘still around’, dribbling out bits of money. Part of what’s needed is for funders to stop seeing the little pot of gold they are sitting on as their money and start thinking about it as the system’s money in the wrong place”.

 

Though we talk about ‘our resources’ on this site, in general the team avoided this language. We wanted to rid ourselves of any sense of ownership or control, and to think more about the processes by which money could flow freely to where it was needed.

 

In coming to the transition pathway decision, the trustees asked themselves:

 

What does it mean to say ‘it’s not our money’? How deeply should the answer to that question shape our future?

The ‘Russian doll’ nature of our inquiries about the causes of severe and multiple disadvantage – one thing always leading to something else – meant we got to the harms of capitalism pretty quickly. In addition, our work on ‘knowledge‘ meant we started to question the fundamental logic of the systems we were dealing with and our movements work exposed us to more developed political thinking.

 

All of this led us to the awareness of the need for a fundamental shift in thinking and perspective – the ‘ontological shift’ – to “identify, untangle and actively unlearn the deep logics we have internalised.”