Lankelly Chase Foundation have declared that the system is broken and that they are shutting up shop. Last July it was announced that Lankelly Chase would close in the next five years and redistribute its more than £100m of assets.
The former chair of the Foundation, Myron Rogers, concluded that it had decided that redistributing its assets was the best way to ensure that the “money can flow freely to those doing life-affirming social justice work”.
Rogers felt that the system of “philanthropy” is separated from reality and that there needs to be a reimagination of what it means in today’s society, and what it might mean in the future. Rogers drew focus on the way income is earnt, e.g. on the stock market, and its use towards the charitable purposes could be seen as contradictory to the overall ethos of the charity sector.
He said that if charities try to operate within the system, “the requirements of that system will just creep in and take over”, and Lankelly Chase “struggled to overcome separateness for years”.
