Place

The place-based work Lankelly supports is led by groups of local people with different backgrounds, roles and experiences. They are immersed in the reality of failing systems, extreme poverty, oppression and injustice and are disturbed and frustrated by what they see. They know what’s wrong now and they are holding their nerve to keep the focus on what would ultimately help things to shift.

Increasingly they are the ones making the decisions about how Lankelly’s funds should be deployed.

Lankelly’s resources are put at the service of their work and are used in flexible ways to support the development of locally-led collaborative change processes.

This often means making sure people have the time and space to come together to think, learn and try out new ways of doing things. We think it is very important that resourcing should support people to strengthen relationships with each other and it should nurture not cut across the spirit of Ubuntu – “I am becoz we are” and solidarity.  

It is particularly important to ensure people who are often excluded can take on leadership in the work. 

We are now more than five years into this work and the journey has helped cement the conviction within Lankelly Chase that this isn’t our money for us to control, and that we need to deinstitutionalise grant making if we are to put our wealth at the service of local communities.

We ran a series on the place-based work in early 2022. Varied content from the Lankelly team and local partners can be found here.