A UK charity foundation worth £130 million has announced it is going to abolish itself after concluding its "traditional philanthropy model is entangled with colonial capitalism".
Lankelly Chase, which gives grants to charities tackling racism and social injustice, said it had become part of the problem it was striving to fight.
In an announcement on its website, the 60-year-old institution said it needed to take "bold action". It said it will give away its assets "to those doing life-affirming social justice work".
"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.
"We acknowledge our role in maintaining this traditional model and know that these times demand bold action from us all in charitable organisations. This is our response.
"Over the next five years, we will dismantle and close Lankelly Chase. 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."
It said it has made the move because "humanity urgently needs to choose new pathways".
“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,” it said.
The foundation said social justice leaders have shown it that alternatives to traditional philanthropy are "both possible and necessary" and it is going to continue collaborating with them "to model and co-create the resourcing infrastructures that social justice work desperately needs."
It has identified Baobab Foundation, which helps under-resourced grassroots UK black and African community organisations, as one of the beneficiaries to which it will donate £8million – around 6 per cent of its total endowment fund.
"The ease of this decision has helped pave the way for the bolder step we have now taken," it 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," Lankelly Chase's chief executive, Julian Corner, said.
The foundation, which was created from the charitable bequests of property development entrepreneurs Alfred Allnatt and Ron Diggens, was ranked the 79th largest charitable foundation in the UK in 2021.
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
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Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
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