Will Lankelly Chase trigger a long-awaited reckoning for the UK’s philanthropic sector?

In an attempt to obtain moral clarity, the UK’s 79th biggest charitable foundation has opted to dispossess itself of its endowment and all assets. For 60 years, Lankelly Chase has been funding organisations working in social, racial, and climate justice, drawing from a roughly £130 million endowment. The organisation announced recently that over the next 5 years it will work to “wholly redistribute its assets”. They have described the decision as coming from a place of wanting to “reimagine how wealth, capital and social justice can co-exist in the service of all life, now and for future generations”.

By taking this step, Lankelly Chase is further proof of the inherent awareness that exists on that side of the table. We completely support their movement in this direction and believe it should be fully considered across the sector. The current way of working is not helping, but harming the under-served communities we all seek to support. 

The traditional philanthropic model is rooted in colonialism and the language Black-led organisations use to describe our experiences reflect the same. It is harmful, exploitative, violent at times, dismissive, disingenuous and apathetic to the pain of the people that rely on it for survival.

The extractive nature of trust and foundation’s funding is unsupportive of wealth building. Organisations are asked for so much more than impact, small locally run grassroots organisations are expected to run similarly to fully realised charitable companies generating impact work, judged as such by disconnected trusts and foundations trustees who have determined what is valuable while ignoring the needs CSEs are calling for to be met. The industry churns out newness, organisations are forced to run back and forth between delivery and bids, and never is there a ladder to a world where that organisation can build its own wealth, can take care of itself and others, can become a fully fledged operation that is no longer dependent on the trusts and foundations for survival. The narrative we have been given for years is that this independence is what the trustees of these trusts and foundations want, but they do not systematically provide the support needed to achieve it, in fact they systematically hinder the opportunity to do so. 

There is a growing movement within Black civil society that is taking stock of the way funders have strategically moved within the past 12 to 18 months. The post-George Floyd spark has waned into lacklustre conversations, with many funders going back to their pre-2019 methods. Someendowed funders have refused to provide funding to charities and social enterprises during the cost of living crisis due to apparent over-spend after Covid. There is no recourse to challenge these closed room decisions despite the significant impact they have on the entire sector’s ability to keep float. 

Our values as Black civil society organisations do not inherently match up with the values of the small and disconnected groups of trustees that run the trusts and foundations that all charities and social enterprises rely on. We are not often seen as leaders in a partnership for the delivery of impact towards underserved communities. Instead we are made to feel like beggars within a system that cannot function without our passion, drive, personal sacrifice and impact work. 

Over 60% of the funding that goes into Black-led organisations comes from the salary sacrifice of their Directors. It has been proven through our own research that it is currently 4 times more likely for an applicant to get into Oxford or Cambridge university than it is for a Black or Global Majority led organisation to access funding from the traditional trusts and foundations. The system is inherently broken and a group of largely unregulated individuals is entirely responsible for the flow of capital within it. For the most part, as a community, we are finding that we wholeheartedly disagree with the ways in which they are choosing to apportion their finances and the methodology by which they make decisions. 

Our cost of living report, A Desert without Resources, found that 78% of Black-led organisations are facing closure by October 2023. In a recent fireside chat, Do it Now Now founder and CEO, Bayo Adelaja, spoke on the importance of assets for organisations to be able to weather the cost of living crisis as well as the deep lack of trust between Black-led CSEs and the funding sector:

“It is incredibly unfortunate that all of us got into this because we wanted to make a better world and a better society. We wanted to feed into a happier community, a safer community, a more mentally well community. But then when you think about what the funding sector is doing to leaders of these organisations, leadership teams, staff, service users, we’re essentially creating this idea that any organisation is replaceable and because of that, no organisation can stand the test of time. We end up in a space where newness is valued, because we don't really expect any organisations to last beyond five years. And if they do, there are heightened expectations of your ability to raise your own money and fend for yourself, but the support is never provided to help us get there. I genuinely think that funder trustee boards typically have an out of touch understanding of what it is like to run a community driven charity or social enterprise”.

Many Black and Global Majority-led organisations have been vocal about the trust issues with a chief complaint being that they do not feel heard or understood. As organisations crumble under pressure to deliver impact based on highly restrictive resources, it is no wonder that organisations like ours are speaking up. To survive the cost of living crisis in light of the lack of support being provided by trusts and foundations, charities and social enterprises have to take energy away from their operations, and devote time to navigating a broken system or to advocating to change the narrative on funding, trust, communication, power, and justice.

We are seeing increased call for a total divestment from trusts and foundations as a matter of safeguarding the mental and physical health of leaders and staff of Black-led organisations. There are no assistance measures for Black-leaders who are burnt out, who need emergency support. There is an expectation to continue, to be hardy enough to survive on very little. Black leaders are expected to have eternal energy and resilience to deliver in the face of hostile opposition from the part of the sector that is predominantly intended for the support of our impactful work.

If you haven’t already, please endeavour to read excerpts from Bayo’s recent fireside chat that digs into a lot of the core issues facing funders and CSEs and why everything feels so gloomy in the sector right now. 

In the coming weeks, DiNN will be releasing our manifesto as well as regular updates on the sector, how we plan to serve our community for changing landscapes, and more. Make sure you’ve signed up to our newsletters to be the first to know.