A 60-year-old British foundation worth an estimated £138 million (175.9 million U.S.) is closing because of what leaders say is an irreparably tainted model of traditional philanthropy that cannot be saved and must therefore be dismantled root and branch, starting with their own organization.
Lankelly Chase, based in London, has begun the process by giving approximately $11 million – about 6% of its endowment – to the Baobab Foundation, a self-described “new pro-Black foundation” dedicated to fighting “systemic racism and intersectional injustice” in the United Kingdom. The remaining funds will be distributed to other social justice nonprofits during the next five years, after which the organization will close.
“Philanthropy is a function of colonial capitalism, it has been shaped by it and is being driven it, and yet philanthropy tries to position itself as somehow a cure for the ills of colonial capitalism,” Lankelly Chase CEO Julian Comer said via a recorded message. “That contradiction needs to stop.”
Lankelly Chase trustees unanimously concluded that the conflict between the foundation’s stated mission to challenge injustice and its reliance on investments sullied by what they called the “social, climate and economic global crisis” of capitalism was irreconcilable and left them no alternative.
“We view the traditional philanthropy model as so entangled with colonial capitalism that it inevitably continues the harms of the past into the present,” Lankelly Chase trustees said via a statement detailing the plans. “We are breaking up our institution so that capital can be owned and controlled by others, who can make their own decisions about how to spend it.”
The impetus to reexamine the social justice implications of wealth and who controls it has led to similar soul-searching among philanthropic and foundation leaders in the United States, a movement that picked up even more steam following the racial justice protests of 2020.
“The social justice movement is very much about whose voices count, and yet philanthropy is very much a top-down enterprise where one person’s voice counts – and that’s the donor or the foundation or whoever the decision makers are at the foundation,” Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School who studies philanthropy and wealth inequality, told The NonProfit Times.
Foundations and megadonors have responded in part by increasing payout rates as well as the number of unrestricted grants in recent years. Still, “it’s a top-down system instead of a grassroots or bottom-up response to the world. And a number of foundations are now questioning their role in this system and finding that when taken it to its logical extreme, they need to start writing themselves out of the equation,” said Madoff, who also directs Boston College Law School’s Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good.
No similarly sized foundation in the U.S. is believed to have taken the step of putting itself out of existence for the reasons given by Lankelly Chase, however. And not everyone who agrees with the foundation’s broader social justice goals is convinced it’s the right solution.
Leaders at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, a social justice nonprofit based in London, released a statement Thursday criticizing the move and the fact that four of the six Lankelly Chase trustees who approved it were only appointed in 2020. “Lankelly Chase can abolish itself,” they wrote. “It cannot abolish the dirt on its money or the dynamics of capital accumulation that it finds so troubling. The new custodians of its wealth will face exactly the same dilemmas the foundation’s trustees concluded they were unable to resolve.”
Lankelly Chase was founded as Chase Charity in 1962 and merged in 2011 with the Lankelly Foundation. The foundation was the U.K.’s 79th largest with net assets of £143.8 million ($188 million) as of 2021, according to the Charity Commission for England and Wales.
