UK charity foundation to abolish itself and give away £130m Lankelly Chase announces move after concluding that traditional philanthropy is ‘function of colonial capitalism’

[Gunnar Larson]

UK charity foundation to abolish itself and give away £130m
Lankelly Chase announces move after concluding that traditional
philanthropy is ‘function of colonial capitalism’

Patrick Butler Social policy editor

Tue 11 Jul 2023 13.32 EDT

A major UK charitable foundation, with an endowment fortune of £130m, has
announced it is to abolish itself after concluding that traditional
philanthropy is a “function of colonial capitalism” and that it had itself
become part of the problem.

Lankelly Chase, which gives out about £13m a year in grants to hundreds of
charities operating in areas such as social, racial and climate justice,
said it wanted to find bold new alternatives to what it called
philanthropy’s “cult of benevolence”.


The 60-year-old institution said it would spend the next five years giving
away its assets to organisations and networks which are doing
“life-affirming social justice work” in communities around the UK.

It is understood Lankelly Chase’s trustee board had become increasingly
unable to reconcile its charitable mission to tackle racism, injustice and
inequality with its position as a major investor in global capital markets
it considers to be rooted in racial and colonial exploitation.

“We have recognised the gravity of the interlocking social, climate and
economic global crises we are experiencing today. At the same time, we view
the traditional philanthropy model as so entangled with colonial capitalism
that it inevitably continues the harms of the past into the present,” it
said in a statement.


It added: “We will relinquish control of our assets, including the
endowment and all resources, so that money can flow freely to those doing
life-affirming social justice work. We will make space to reimagine how
wealth, capital and social justice can co-exist in the service of all life,
now and for future generations.”

Although rare in the UK, the kind of radical re-imagining of charitable
funding announced by Lankelly Chase is more common in the US where, experts
say, “decolonising the endowment” is a much more active debate in
philanthropic and community circles.

“We know not everyone will agree with this decision, and we are not saying
every endowed foundation should follow our direction. However, we believe
that the case for profound change is now impossible to ignore, and each of
us must find our answer. This is ours,” Lankelly Chase said.

In a foretaste of how it might begin to redistribute its assets, it
announced it is to give £8m – around 6% of its total endowment fund – to
the Baobab Foundation, a funding body created in 2021 by black funders to
grow resources for under-resourced grassroots UK black and African
community organisations.


The Lankelly Chase chief executive, Julian Corner, said: “Philanthropy is a
function of colonial capitalism, it has been shaped by it, is being driven
by it, and yet philosophically it tries to position itself as somehow a
cure for the ills of colonial capitalism, and that contradiction needs to
stop.”

He said that having taken the decision to redistribute, they would spend
the next five years working out how this would work in practice. “It’s
going to create a space for a more honest debate in philanthropy about our
relevance, and ambitious conversations about whether we [as foundations]
are set up right,” he said.

Corner acknowledged there was a risk that simply shifting the capital to a
new set of funding gatekeepers and intermediaries could replicate existing
power imbalances. He said it would work with future asset holders to
explore alternative investment philosophies.

Fellow trustee Marai Larasi said it was “time to compost” Lankelly Chase as
an institution and allow new organisations to emerge in its stead. The aim
was not to “hold the cult of benevolence in place but to actually dismantle
that”, she added.


Lankelly Chase was created from the charitable bequests of entrepreneurs
Alfred Allnatt and Ron Diggens, who made millions from north London
property development in the middle of the last century. Allnatt was known
as an eccentric with a love of race horses, fine art and diamonds.

The foundation said that while its endowment might not appear to have
originated in overtly harmful colonising practices, it believed “capital
accumulation occurs through ongoing processes of colonial appropriation and
exploitation. Our endowment is embedded within the system of what scholars
such as Cedric J Robinson have called ‘racial capitalism’.”

Lankelly Chase was the 79th biggest charitable foundation in the UK in
2021, according to the Association of Charitable Foundations, supporting
hundreds of charities and community organisations a year. Between them the
UK’s top 300 charitable foundations gave out £3.7bn in 2021.


https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/11/uk-charity-foundation-to-abolish-itself-and-give-away-130m?mkt_tok=Njg1LUtCTC03NjUAAAGM6LyOf5IiN8dM2C4jOKbw8RRVtj_cDyX1rfJp9WQzs6EdCs_QTNDYyf4kBUhMcrIJFDcAxMeU5hgF6UQAsIQmlVmapHduueyvNP9NqTJm6r32Kbk
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