The Lankelly Chase foundation has said it is working on a new approach based on changing systems that perpetuate disadvantage, rather than addressing specific problems.
In a blog published earlier this week, Julian Corner, chief executive of Lankelly Chase, outlined the foundation's thinking. He said he wanted the charity to take a broader approach and look at how the whole system works, rather than attempting to solve problems after they had happened.
Corner said that he wanted to see more focus on improving relationships between parts of the system, to create a whole which worked more effectively together.
“Lankelly Chase has a growing conviction that the outcomes we seek can only happen through the actions of whole systems,” he wrote. “Although there are many parts of a system – projects, workers, organisations, rules, funding, communities, institutions – that have a bearing on a particular disadvantage or harm, they are all continually affecting each other.
“No individual part exists or has an effect in isolation of the others. This leads us to think that sustainable change depends on the way all the parts interact.
“What we find in the field of severe and multiple disadvantage is that the overwhelming majority of energy, attention and resource is dedicated to improving the parts of the system.
“This is understandable because those parts tend to be knowable and to an extent controllable, whereas the relationships between them take us into much less solid or definable territory.
“However, a collective focus on the parts has ultimately, in our view, been self-defeating because each can only be as good as its relationship with the rest.”
The charity says its aim is to create a critical mass of charities thinking and acting in a more systemic way.
It said it is currently thinking about what this means in practice for its funding model.
“We are currently not investing in new funding relationships,” the charity says on its website. “We are spending more time with existing partners to change the systems that perpetuate severe and multiple disadvantage.”
It said it has not yet decided when a grants application process will be re-opened.
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