Launching our new website

Lankelly Chase has launched a new website! This is an exciting moment for us, but also the culmination of some important reflection that I wanted to share briefly here.

Redesigning a website is an opportunity to notice how far you’ve shifted since the last redesign. A lot of an organisation’s ethos and ways of working get hard wired into a website’s structure and functionality. What we noticed is how much of our old site’s structure was a brochure for our work. In other words, a one-way broadcast.

Since we designed our last website, Lankelly Chase has become increasingly embedded in its networks, places and relationships. Yes, we retain a lot of decision making power within our team still, but the idea that Lankelly Chase is just its team, or that we should just be talking about ‘our work’, now feels plain wrong.

As one of our trustees said recently, Lankelly Chase needs to find more ways of ‘honouring its beloved community’. We need to recognise that we are nothing without that community, and  that our organisational identity is a function of innumerable relationships that make us who we are.

Our home page now describes Lankelly Chase as ‘a funder and network. We know that we can’t simply declare ourselves to be a network, but we do want to assert this as an ambition, a journey and an emerging reality in some areas of our work. We want Lankelly Chase to be increasingly owned by and accountable to the community it serves, because we know that change comes from communities of people working together, not from any one organisation.

The money Lankelly Chase holds is not our money, it belongs to our mission and to those who enact that mission every day. If we are to make this meaningful, we have to find as many ways as possible of putting that money, and the privilege its gives us organisationally, at the service of our beloved community.  This is the intention of our new website. We want it to be less a brochure for Lankelly Chase’s ideas, and more a platform for honouring and enabling the work of change that so many are engaged in.

The community section of the website is designed to showcase the work of our partners much more clearly. It is designed in a way that they can post regular updates about their work, their social media feeds can easily be seen and they can connect with one another.

This new design builds on how we’ve been using our twitter account in recent years to host ‘twitter takeovers’, so that our partners can reach different audiences through us.  It also reflects a role that funders can play in helping join up the dots between different networks and actors from the vantage point that we hold. And it also us to show transparently where the money goes, and who is involved in the work.

We’ve got a lot of work to do to breathe life into the new structure, and we’d welcome feedback and contributions as we do. Please contact Renee Davis via renee@lankellychase.org.uk, our Communications Manager, who has put a lot of love and graft into this new site.