Reimagining realism: notes on the work of a time between worlds

For the last 4 years, I have been working with others to design and steward the Emerging Futures programme at JRF. This report of 3 parts shares reflections from that work, what has become clearer over time, and where we think our attention needs to go next.

We are living in a time between worlds: a place where the harms of old systems that have shaped life for generations are becoming clearer and starker by the day — and the new futures we hope for are still contested and unevenly emerging. We are already navigating a period of instability, precarity and uncertainty.

We'll reflect on the tension between the work of protection and transformation in times of deep transition and explore how we cling to familiar structures to stabilise ourselves, even as the capacity of those structures to deliver justice or ecological safety are further eroded. We feel the world shifting around us in ways we cannot fully control or predict, and that is frightening. In these conditions, ‘realism’ has to mean more than ‘making the familiar things work better’. The world those systems were built for is slipping away from us.

Then we turn to the work of nurturing alternatives — the fragile but powerful demonstrators in communities, organisations, and ideas that gesture towards a different kind of world, where economy, care, land and power are organised in ways that share abundance and offer solidarity. These efforts are not abstract, or marginal. They’re already here among us, carrying vital clues about what could come next.

Finally, we'll look at the capacities required if transformation is to endure. It focuses on the inner, relational, and systemic skills that we will need to navigate this confusing, destabilising time of transition. These are the muscles we need to grow, in order to let go of that which no longer serves us, and to tend to new possibilities.

I am writing this as someone who is doing my best to stand on the edge responsibly — knowing that there are many others here too, and that what I’m seeing is only one perspective. What I’m sharing here is grounded in my own experience of trying to steward resources and pay attention with care, in times of deep uncertainty. So I’ve not written with any pretence that I have the full picture, or a completely clear set of answers.

Despite these hesitations, I’m also writing with a conviction about what we’re seeing here: that familiar frames are no longer sufficient, and that this time of polycrisis and escalating chaos calls for a new depth of institutional honesty. My hope is that these reflections provoke thought and invite challenge — and in doing so, make a small contribution to the wider conversation about how we navigate this transition together.

Old systems that have shaped our lives for generations are now failing, their harms becoming sharper. At the same time, better, more beautiful futures are taking shape, but they are fragile, contested, and unevenly emerging. I write from this in-between place — aware of the fear and uncertainty it provokes, as well as the limits of my singular perspective. But I also write from a place of hope and care — seeing the promise and possibilities that are already taking shape and which represent the seeds of something different. This piece shares all this work, and explores what is being asked of us all, if transformation is to endure.

Over the past 4 years I’ve seen how often the idea of a mainstream ‘respectable’ foundation supporting work that challenges capitalism itself is treated with surprise. Words like ‘realism’ and ‘urgency’ are often invoked as if they are the only obvious imperatives; but what is defended as realism is often just familiarity — the horizon of the thinkable shaped by a late-stage industrial-age paradigm. In a world of intensifying, interconnected crises, simply improving existing systems isn’t enough. This chapter explores why institutions must see their responsibilities now as both stabilising the present, and nurturing the conditions for more equitable and just alternatives to emerge.

Over the last 4 years, I’ve lost count of the number of times that the notion of a ‘respectable’ organisation like JRF investing in work that builds beyond capitalism is met with surprise. I have a strong sense that structural analysis, especially when it questions capitalism itself, is treated by some people holding power today as something that belongs elsewhere: the dry academic realms of sociology seminars perhaps, or the angry meet-ups of activists. But it is rarely welcomed in policy environments that pride themselves on seriousness and pragmatism, where ‘real change’ is meant to happen.

I’m really beginning to lose my patience with this. I see that what is so often defended as realism is in fact familiarity — a very different thing. It reflects the default horizon of what we can see and fund, rooted in a belief that the world we inherited is still a viable terrain on which we can build the future. But in these unstable, disorienting times, that belief is misplaced, perhaps dangerously so. Ecological breakdown, deep geopolitical instability, and the fracturing of established economic and social models all mean we really can’t avoid deeper, more searching questions about the systems shaping our lives.

In saying this, I am not dismissing the urgent work of stabilising the present. Making broken systems work better for people and the planet today is essential work. But it cannot be the whole story. The definition of ‘practical’ and ‘realistic’ change that we’ve inherited and been schooled in is constrained by cultural assumptions about what’s possible — and increasingly mismatched to the world we’re living in.

When optimisation stops being enough

I spent the first 15 years of my adult life working in and around the world of thinktanks and Westminster, but the experience that most profoundly shaped my perspective on how to enact change in these times of economic and climate crisis was my time at Little Village, the charity that I set up and ran for 6 years. Our mission was to give every child in London the best possible start in life, through building small, warm communities of families to help one another.

Through this work, I saw how much effort it takes to simply stop things from getting worse — and how essential and morally vital that work is. I also saw, through proximity as well as theory and analysis, how poverty and destitution are patterned and reproduced by systems designed to concentrate wealth, hoard power, and extract value from communities and the planet alike. It was shockingly obvious how these patterns get shrouded and made invisible by a stigmatising narrative that instead directs blame towards individual choices and bad luck.

I remember one day in 2020, dropping off the final delivery of the day to a family living in a single room round the back of Kings Cross. I stepped back onto the street and into the shadows of the corporate towers of Facebook, Google and others. I was overcome by a visceral sense of utter despair: it didn’t matter how hard we worked around the edges — however many families we helped to steady, the centre would continue to hold. As I stood there in exhausted tears, I knew that wealth was still accelerating upwards, faster than ever during those awful Covid times. Ecological harm was and is worsening, as we career past nearly all the planetary boundaries — increasing the risk of large-scale abrupt or irreversible change. Communities continue to be asked to absorb costs and externalities that they did not create in the first place.

Of course optimisation can slow decline down. It can buffer immediate shocks and protect some lives from the worst outcomes of broken systems, both critically important in these times of permacrisis and austerity. Anywhere you look — in councils, local charities, campaigning organisations, or in neighbourhoods, estates and tower blocks — you will find careful, necessary, often invisible labour happening every day to prevent harm from worsening. At Little Village I saw so many amazing people working in inhumane systems to do everything they could to preserve people’s dignity even as those systems frayed.

This work is about survival, it’s about care and solidarity, and about staying alive and resilient enough for the next battle. It buys time and reduces suffering. And I want to be clear that there is not a binary between optimising work and transformational work: the kind of efforts I describe here can lay the groundwork for deeper forms of change, and that is often what keeps those leading this work going. So I have nothing but respect for this work, and those who choose to give their lives to it.

But it is also true that it cannot, on its own, reliably reshape the structures that keep producing harm at scale: that is not what it is primarily designed to do. For that, we also need work of a more explicitly transformative nature, that builds beyond the systems whose current functioning generates harm.

And what I notice in so many institutional conversations is how easily the leap is made from ‘optimisation work is necessary and vital’ to ‘optimisation work is sufficient, and we just need to do more of it’. That leap is often subtle, happening almost without anyone noticing — but it has profound consequences in times when stability and predictability are no longer givens. In that context, realism demands transformation, as well as optimisation.

Institutions and the local maximum

So how is it that stabilising work so often overshadows transformative work, if both are now vital? Partly it is because as systems fray, the effort to optimise them becomes more intense. Partly it’s because public institutions in the business of social change — including foundations, thinktanks, and government departments — naturally lean towards optimisation, where problems are more legible and possible solutions are somewhat clearer.

The consequence of this is that optimisation can start to feel like the only defensible work, by virtue of its urgency and the extent of current suffering. It becomes a moral shield, making it harder to recognise when transformative work is urgently needed.

I see these tensions clearly from inside a large philanthropic organisation, where we are trying to steward a programme that centres transformation, through resourcing the energy at the edges. The uncomfortable reality is that institutions now have to learn to live in 2 worlds at once —  one is the world they were built for: predictable, legible, stable. This is their comfort zone, and their architecture is designed around it. The other is the world as it actually is in these times: turbulent, complex, shaped by cascading and interconnected crises, and also by glimmers of possibilities that defy existing categories.

In this context, realism cannot mean staying close to what we already know. In a polycrisis, I think that kind of ‘realism’ becomes a mechanism for looking away: avoiding the grief and fear that come with accepting some familiar things will need to end, and relegating the work of imagining alternatives to the margins, rather than treating it as a central responsibility. The ‘realism’ that is familiarity in disguise makes us blind to the dense, pulsing life at the margins — the experiments, networks and practices that are crucial sites of deep change that offer us clues about where to pay attention next.

Of course I would say this, given the work I do. But — while it may have taken too long for this to happen — it’s also where plenty of mainstream evidence is now converging. The message from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear: urgent, effective action to build alternatives could still secure a liveable collective future for us all — and that work needs to place trust and equity at the heart of efforts to build alternatives. This isn’t the language of a few fringe radicals. We dismiss it at our peril.

Transformation is already underway

So, I believe that building that which does not yet fully exist is now part of our collective responsibility, particularly for those holding resources and capital. Lots of this work is already happening (albeit by organisations that are chronically under-resourced and overworked). Last year, we published research from the Onion Collective that revealed over 2,000 organisations up and down the country working to build alternatives — community-owned homes, new forms of democratic business ownership, care-centred local economies, regenerative finance. These aren’t abstract fantasies — they are already here, fragile but real, and offering powerful glimmers and glimpses of how life might be organised differently.

What I see in these efforts are not just great community projects, working within the constraints of current financial and investment models. They are also redesigning the flows of power, wealth, and resources. They are prioritising equity, justice and ecological health over extraction and exploitation. They are actively practising hope, embedding it in their work and their relationships.

Much of this work sits awkwardly inside funding and policy logics that are shaped by stability, predictability, and control. It’s been an uncomfortable journey for organisations like JRF, because stewarding this work has exposed the limits and biases of our own institutional wiring. Living in 2 worlds requires us to have a different posture towards power, and to recognise that we aren’t neutral observers of the transition. I have learnt that this discomfort is often a signal that something is being asked to change, rather than evidence of failure. But I see how hard institutions find it to listen and respond.

Trying to build differently, from inside

This is the institutional work in these times between worlds. Organisations need to reshape themselves to better support both optimisation and transformative work. For philanthropic organisations like ours, that means redefining what stewardship means, when the future needs to look very different to the past.

It is on us to think about reshaping governance to share power more equitably. We need to recalibrate risk — to not only consider the risks of doing something new, but also the risks of continuing to do the same. It’s on us to take a more considered approach to understanding impact when the qualities that we’re seeking to grow are not easy to measure, and when the landscape we’re seeking to contribute to is complex and non-linear. (James Plunkett and I are exploring these themes in more depth through our collaboration, The Centre for the Edge).

Everything I’ve shared here underpins the Emerging Futures programme. We support and shield the new models that are emerging, and we back work that changes narrow frames, to shift ways of seeing that no longer serve people or planet. The aim of our work is not to replace the work of optimisation with transformation, but rather to ensure that the work of today is not asked to also carry a future it cannot possibly sustain or build. We want to play our part in creating the conditions for these new models appearing all over the country, to move from the margins to the mainstream.

It is early days. We are still learning how to enact these commitments well, and in ways that don’t re-pattern that which we are trying to move away from. It’s clear already that to do this work, we need to invest in fields as well as individual projects, in relationships and ‘spaces between’ as well as in organisations themselves, in the invisible but vital cultural and inner capacities as well as the more visible prototypes, if communities are to navigate the transition without tearing themselves apart.

What makes all of this complicated is that as a philanthropic institution, JRF’s money, legitimacy, and influence are themselves shaped by the very systems we are now beginning to interrogate. That means that we need to act from a place of deep responsibility, not from the traditional philanthropic posture of ‘objective’ distance. Our task is not to direct the transition (for none of us can possibly do that), but to use the tools we already hold — in JRF’s case, capital, credibility, networks, influence — to make space for the new, to redistribute power, resources, and in doing so to expand what it possible.

There are inevitably risks in doing this propositional, future-building work. There will be things we get wrong, experiments that fail, money invested that doesn’t lead directly to impact. But the greatest risk of all now lies in treating continuity as the safest bet, while inequality deepens, ecological harm accelerates, and polarisation hardens.

When in fog, hold hands

In a polycrisis, the ‘incrementalism as realism’ frame no longer holds: it is an article of faith in a world that is already slipping away. The realistic response instead is to stabilise those things that will help us navigate this transition, while building that which has the potential to carry us forwards into a different future.

In the next chapters I reflect on the areas that feel especially alive in the work as we enter the second year of attempting to resource it at scale. First, a determined and wide-scale approach to fieldbuilding: resourcing and connecting people creating alternatives, supporting work to create the conditions — civic, cultural, narrative, financial, political — for these alternatives to flourish. And second, a larger and more strategic investment in cultivating the capacities for transition — inner, relational, and systemic — that allow these experiments and new models to endure. This is the invisible infrastructure for transition that requires as much resourcing and stewardship as the more concrete initiatives that are rehearsing and demonstrating alternatives.

As 2025 turned into 2026 I have been thinking about the energy I want to bring to this work. There’s a low-key but steely determination I feel, for sure. A clarity about what I’ve shared here that feels stronger than ever. I believe we are all being called to bring a new level of honesty to the table: about what is breaking, about what is possible, and about our own entanglement (within our own bodies, relationships, beliefs) in the systems we are trying to change. When I see this happening, messy as it is, I feel hope.

Whenever things were hard at Little Village I used to say, ‘when in fog, hold hands’. It feels like we need this now, too: joining up to face the complexity and crisis together and tending to what is emerging in its fragility and incompleteness — without trying to pretend we know exactly what the future looks like. This is the only way we’ll build the coalitions needed to traverse these intense, destabilising times of transition, towards something better and more beautiful for us all.

Here I explore what it actually means to support the emergence of alternatives. How can wealth holders and philanthropists back experiments that challenge current systems, that point towards futures that are more just and equitable for people and the planet? What does it look like to do that work with care and courage?

I have come to see the Emerging Futures programme as a necessary institutional response to the times we are living through: if we continue to pursue JRF’s mission using familiar pathways alone, we won’t reach that ambition of a future free from poverty, where people and planet can thrive. This chapter sets out what that commitment looks like when it is taken seriously, and lived into.

In the previous chapter, I argued that what is often defended as ‘realism’ is in fact familiarity. In times of deep transition, when something new is being called for, this error carries great risk. The question facing institutions like JRF is no longer whether to engage with alternatives beyond the current system, but how to do so responsibly, courageously, and without retreating back into the comfort of what we already know.

We are living in a time between worlds. I don’t offer that as a poetic flourish: it’s a practical description of where we are. The systems that have shaped people’s lives for generations — for example, how we organise work, care, housing, energy, food and money, are no longer reliably delivering security, dignity or justice. At the same time, the better, more beautiful futures that might replace them are contested, not yet formed, stable or widely trusted. Instead, they are emerging unevenly: in communities, movements, experiments, relationships and practices that are often fragile, marginal, chronically underfunded, and difficult to recognise through traditional institutional lenses. Alive, but not yet settled.

This is the context in which the Emerging Futures programme exists. We are working to support, shield and nourish the efforts at the edges that are already assembling the building blocks of a different world. This is concrete work unfolding in towns and neighbourhoods and networks across the UK. These are not side projects or abstract concepts: they are part of a living, moving ecosystem of organisations, around 2,000 of them, operating in a liminal space between the world as it is and the world as it could be.

These are community builders and network stewards; storytellers, healers and infrastructure designers, researchers and activists and artists. Together they are reimagining ownership, care, land, economy and governance in ways that refuse the logics of extraction, exploitation, and the false separation of nature from the human world.

This is work that centres stewardship over ownership, regeneration over accumulation, and work that values many forms of capital — human, natural, relational, cultural — alongside financial capital. In the words of those in this growing field, they are actively building the ‘something else’: the lived alternatives and concrete utopias that show what is possible when the grip of late-stage industrial capitalism is loosened, and other logics are allowed to shape the world around us.

So we are interested in work that goes beyond pointing at what is broken, to reconfigure the ‘hidden wiring’ — the flows of power, wealth, resources — so that value is no longer funneled upwards, but instead towards community power, ecological integrity, shared wellbeing.

The alternatives we seek to support and shield are not always large-scale operations, size isn’t really the vector of primary interest here. Their real significance lies in the logic they embody: a logic where the voices and concerns of communities, of nature, of future generations carry more weight than the pull of distant markets and elites. These aren’t future utopias, but lived experiments, demonstrations, rehearsals for more equitable and just futures, happening right now.

In short, this work is a grounded and practical response to a system already in transition, in a world where we are already living some way beyond safe or sustainable ecological limits. For example:

• Through our Transforming Wealth work, we are weaving across partners who together expose the assumptions that have long legitimised the extreme accumulation of wealth, with all the harms that brings, while simultaneously constructing new ownership models, financial tools and public narratives that make different economic patterns both imaginable, and credible.
• In the North East we are seeking to support the re-emergence of a solidarity economy rooted in community led democratic decision making, while also exploring how an alternative media infrastructure might make it easier to counter division and polarisation, and the damaging nativist narratives of nostalgia that are so present in these times of transition.
• Through our Regenerative Futures work we are providing grounding funding to the organisations that play a critical connecting role in this fragile field, as well as resourcing efforts to strengthen their collective capacity to influence and shape the wider context.
• Across all of this, we are trying to hold up a mirror, so that those leading this work can see one another, and recognise themselves as part of something larger, and feel less alone. This connective work is not an add-on; it’s a key part of how coherence and momentum begin to form at the edges.

Starting points for our work

The plural in our programme’s name — ‘Futures’, not ‘Future’ — is deliberate. It reflects our belief that this work is not about predicting a singular future. Instead, it is about staying in relationship with that future as it unfolds in the present, and learning about how to navigate this in-between period in ways that guide us towards better, more beautiful worlds, rather than towards the frightening and dystopian alternatives that are also very real possibilities if we fail to act.

That breaks down into some important starting points for our work:

• First, JRF’s mission is to ‘support and speed up the transition’. We understand this transition as something we are already living through, rather than some distant future horizon, or a technical pathway. It asks us to attend to a more entangled set of responsibilities: to notice the dissonances between current systems and our sense of what it means to be human; and to protect, learn from and strengthen the early forms of change that are already taking shape, often among those most affected by injustice.
• Second, not all of this work happens ‘outside’ of the current system. Some of the work we support on reimagining wealth, steward-owned enterprises and democratic finance tools, for example, challenges extraction while remaining embedded in current markets and institutions. Often this messy middle, the dance between insiders and outsiders, is exactly the place we need to be to catalyse change. But it can be an uncomfortable, imperfect place full of tensions that feel impossible to resolve.
• Third, we do not see this work as separate from JRF’s historic mission to tackle poverty and inequality. I see it as an expression of that mission in a context where continuity alone is no longer sufficient. The question before us is about how to remain faithful to justice, to the mission of people and planet thriving, when the systems we have relied on are in question. The task, as my previous piece explored, is to hold the urgency of both protection and future-building work simultaneously. Experience at JRF has taught us that this is much harder than it sounds.

Rooting our approaches in transitions theory and systems practice

The Emerging Futures programme draws on a long and rich history of transitions theory and systems thinking. Our approach is informed by 3 critical insights:

• Alternatives rarely survive without protection. This is because they are often hard to read through the lenses of the dominant system, and because their very existence threatens the status quo. We therefore see part of our role as standing alongside fragile alternatives, and playing our part in protecting them from being overwhelmed, extracted from, or prematurely judged.
• Conditions matter as much as ideas. Even the most compelling alternatives will remain marginal if the environments and conditions they exist in are hostile. So shifting these conditions, changing the soil ideas grow in, the policy, legal and regulatory environments that make some things seem more permissible than others, is as important as funding demonstrators themselves.
• Transitions demand a focus on inner, cultural and relational change too. Deep, sustaining change requires shifts in the level of narrative, belief systems and paradigms. We need to focus on human and institutional capacities — the energetic matter of fear, hope, habit, imagination — as well as on technical solutions.

For most of my career, it’s been fashionable to talk about how to ‘scale up social innovation’. But this language feels ill-suited to the work we’re doing. Premature scaling is not the priority. What matters more is the work to support, shield, connect, and nourish those leading this work of building alternatives. In a context of chronic under-funding and widespread precarity and burnout, it’s about helping alternatives stay alive long enough to learn, connect, adapt, cohere and start to act together.

In these in-between spaces, our feelings can be complex and often contradictory. We are pulled between hope and despair, longing and fatigue, clarity and confusion. This muddle adds to the uncertainty of how to act. What makes things even harder is that we are culturally and emotionally wired to prefer the familiar to the new. As I explored in my last chapter, there is a real risk that at the very moment we need bravery and boldness, we replace courage with caution, and allow familiarity to creep in as our proxy for realism.

Here’s what we’ve done to try and resist that pull so far. I’ve organised this into 2 closely related efforts: first, supporting and shielding emerging alternatives; and second, creating the wider conditions in which those alternatives might take root and flourish.

Supporting and shielding the new

The regenerative and just futures we hope for will not emerge from strengthening only what already exists. They are being built, right now, by people and communities experimenting with alternative ways of living, working, caring and organising — often in the cracks and crevices of the current system.

These experiments act as proofs of possibility. I notice that sometimes those invested in the status quo in some way label them as too small to matter, or too speculative and unproven to mean anything, but I see them as something quite different. This is work that is grounded, serious and deep. These are demonstrators of what becomes possible when communities are trusted with resources, legitimacy, and time to reimagine land, housing, belonging, governance, and economy. Of course they do not replace urgent protective work, that is not what they’re trying to do. They sit alongside this work, preparing the ground for what might follow.

As part of the Emerging Futures portfolio, we are providing grounding funding to the organisations that play a critical connecting role in this fragile field, offering a small amount of stability that enables them to focus on their work. These are by no means the only people building regenerative futures, but all of them inspiring and ambitious demonstrators of viable alternatives.

In housing and land stewardship We Can Make, in Bristol, prototypes genuinely affordable, low-carbon housing — and through that work, offers viable new models of what a less extractive planning and development system might look like at a national scale. In Grimsby, East Marsh United buys back homes from absentee landlords, reclaiming and restoring not only the houses, but also the community’s sense of dignity and belonging.

Meanwhile Open Systems Lab and Dark Matter Labs are building tools and platforms that offer the possibility of communities themselves building, navigating planning, and stewarding land collectively: enabling streets and neighbourhoods to become architects of their own futures. Organisations like CIVIC SQUARE and Hood Futures Studio bring this to life, offering spaces for communities to rehearse these new ways of living, caring and working together.

Community-owned assets and neighbourhood infrastructure projects around the country are already showing us what happens when patterns of wealth concentration and land ownership are interrupted. Stour Trust supports the acquisition and stewardship of community assets to support economic and racial justice, while Hastings Commons turns derelict buildings into affordable homes, workspace, cultural hubs and shared living rooms. Land In Our Names works through a reparative lens to support Black and global majority communities to reclaim land for collective use, addressing inequalities in access to land and food, while reimagining land stewardship towards climate and racial justice. The Onion Collective in Somerset and Redhills in the North East reclaim industrial and historic sites as engines of local enterprise, regenerative livelihoods, and social solidarity.

Alongside this, we see organisations working across the domains of knowledge, culture and narrative in ways that strengthen the broader ecosystem. RESOLVE Collective and Watershed nurture imagination and creativity in order to open out new horizons of possibility. Doughnut Economics Action Lab and the Centre for Knowledge Equity advance frameworks that embed power, equity, justice and regeneration into economic and civic life.

In our Transforming Wealth work, we are playing a similar shielding role. We support partners who are redefining ownership, governance and financial legitimacy. This includes work to build the infrastructure for steward-owned enterprises, to develop fossil-free bond indices, to develop a deeper evidence base on the link between extreme wealth and systemic and social harm.

Some will argue that this work is too small, or too experimental, to matter. That argument misunderstands how system change actually unfolds. Academics such as Carlota Perez, Frank Geels, and Johan Schot have each traced the contours of paradigm shifts over history, arguing we find ourselves in such a time now. They map how change takes hold through resourcing, bringing coherence and amplifying the new paradigm. In other words, before they start spreading, ideas need to grow coherence, legitimacy, relational strength. That’s harder than ever when the ideas run counter to dominant stories.

Our task then isn’t about acting like angel investors, extracting prototypes for rapid replication. Rather, it’s about supporting these initiatives and collaborations as living systems — enabling them to deepen their work, giving space for them to experiment with governance, strengthening their networks, and widening their spheres of influence.

Creating the conditions for alternatives to flourish

Supporting these efforts at the edges is necessary but not sufficient. If alternatives are to endure, then the environments around them also need to change: to become more supportive of this work, and less hostile. To me, ‘creating the conditions’ means reshaping the narrative, civic, financial and policy environments — in other words, the soil in which these seeds are growing.

This work can feel intangible, because it is often focused on ‘hidden wiring’ rather than visible outputs. But without it, alternatives will remain isolated and fragile.

Before I continue I want to acknowledge that while we do some of this soil work through the Emerging Futures programme, I see it as an area where much more concentrated and collective attention is needed, by JRF and others. Our work over the last few years shows how conditions rarely shift as quickly as ideas. Learning where to apply pressure, where to push resources, is part of the work.

What I share here is therefore an account of where we have begun, still incomplete and partial, and also where we are beginning to see further potential. I hope to hear from anyone reading this piece where they would add and extend what’s here.

Civic infrastructures

Civic infrastructures are the systems, practices and spaces that allow people to be active authors of the policies, priorities and processes that shape their communities and collective life. Strengthening these infrastructures is about growing civic agency, democratic engagement and collective intelligence at a moment when trust in institutions is fragile, and many people feel decisions are made elsewhere, by distant politicians who do not share their concerns or understand their lives.

As the populist right gains footholds across the country, it’s clear that where spaces for shared sense-making are absent, where precarity dominates, it’s much easier for fear and nostalgia to take hold, fuelled by false promises of control and certainty. Nurturing civic infrastructure is foundational to community resilience and to laying a path towards more equitable and just futures, rather than a darker alternative.

Some examples:

• In Sheffield, the Sheffield City Goals articulating long-term social, environmental and economic transitions have been co-defined by thousands of citizens working alongside civic, private, community and institutional partners. Stewarded by Opus, Dark Matter Labs, Citizen Network and Voluntary Action Sheffield, among many others, this work has moved from participatory goal-setting into shared civic infrastructures — spanning governance, metrics, intergenerational voice and finance. These are not projects, they are scaffolding for complex collaboration across neighbourhoods, the city and its bioregion.
• In Devon and Dorset, the Bioregional Learning Centre and This Living Place cultivate ecological literacy and participatory governance through learning journeys, deep listening and culture work, preparing communities to anticipate challenges and build regenerative futures together.
• In Hartlepool, Sea Change is supporting communities to research power and ownership dynamics as a basis of imagining and negotiating alternative futures.

This is about making civic life a space of transformational possibility, not as a one-off project, but through the creation of infrastructure that sustains.

Cultivating imagination and hope

Narrative work matters because it shapes what people believe is possible. Every system is sustained by stories, about what’s normal, what’s inevitable, and whose voices count. In times of transition, fear and uncertainty can harden into fatalism, which in turn creates fertile ground for populism and division, dangerous dynamics that hark to a nostalgic past rather than a hopeful future. In this context, imagination needs to be understood as infrastructure, the very opposite of escapism, as it’s sometimes presented. It helps communities stay oriented towards possibilities, enabling them to envision, rehearse, and inhabit alternative futures.

Examples include:

• experiments such as Seeds of Hope and Here Is Hope model storytelling and gathering people in ways that are rooted in possibility and potential
• the Collective Imagination Practice Community is an experiment in how to create a distributed form of imaginative capacity at scale
• the Visionaries programme supports people whose work stretches our collective capacity to imagine just and regenerative futures, to help us learn about how to create the conditions to protect and shield these radical thinkers
• partners like Rubber Republic and Inter-Narratives are growing the evidence about how to support this kind of work at scale — resourcing a movement of ‘hope activists’
• organisations like CoLab Dudley, CIVIC SQUARE, Centre for Knowledge Equity and Hood Futures Studio show how to embed imagination into everyday practice, as ongoing ‘rehearsals for the future’ rather than occasional workshops with a few post-it notes.

This work recognises that transitions are about worldviews and culture first and foremost. We need to collectively expand what feels thinkable in the first place, and to reckon with the fact that some futures are repeatedly rehearsed and resourced, while others struggle to be articulated at all. The work described here backs culture-makers, designers, and artists to help communities repattern the powerful narratives of scarcity, exclusion, and inevitability toward stories of possibility, regeneration and hope.

Cultivating alternative media infrastructure

As the media landscape transforms in a digital age, this work is increasingly urgent. We live in a world where algorithms reward outrage and polarisation. Traditional local journalism is in steep decline, and AI-driven news and social media consumption is accelerating trends towards misinformation, and minimising spaces for shared understanding. Our public reality is being shaped by an uncontrollable firehose of lies and half truths. Together these dynamics make it harder than ever to sustain broad and inclusive shared realities, or to find spaces for curiosity and constructive dialogue.

JRF’s founding memorandum notes media ownership as a vital enabler or blocker to more just and equitable societies. That part of the document feels particularly urgent now. Through our work, we see clearly how important alternative narrative and media infrastructures are. But there’s more to do to build this out. Our current hunches point us towards:

• supporting the regional storytellers, the cultural producers, the local community media who can tell the stories of interdependence, dignity, collective care
• experimenting with formats that work both with and beyond the algorithmic logics: newsletters, videos, festivals, place-based cultural activity
• reclaiming public space digitally and physically to create moments of joy, solidarity and shared meaning.

We need to be really careful that this work doesn’t end up feeling like an attempt to manufacture optimism, or to ignore the real conflicts that exist. This is about considering how we can support a media ecosystem which centres futures that feel both credible and hopeful, and makes people believe that they could play a part in getting there.

Transforming capital and finance infrastructure

Financial infrastructures are the hidden wiring that determines how wealth flows, who it benefits, and what kinds of activity are rewarded. In their current form, these infrastructures code extraction, exploitation and growth into the system, making these logics appear responsible and inevitable. These codes go almost entirely unchallenged, as political power and wealth become increasingly entangled.

In a world already breaching ecological limits, and sinking into extreme inequality, this coding actively undermines the chances of human and planetary flourishing. Creating the conditions for more transformational alternatives therefore requires us to go much further than redirecting small amounts of capital to the margins: we need to rewrite the whole code.

Some examples are:

• supporting partners such as Good Ancestor Movement, Impact Investing Institute and ClientEarth to challenge narrow interpretations of fiduciary duty, through movement building, legal work and advocacy work
• working with skilled partners, including Patriotic Millionaires UK and ShareAction, to open up political space to discuss the systemic harms of extreme wealth and concentrated models of ownership
• growing initiatives such as the Wealth Hackers Initiative, designed to disrupt orthodox wealth management practices and propose interventions that redirect capital toward reparative and regenerative purposes
• connecting financial reform to wider systemic goals, reframing prosperity as meeting human needs within planetary boundaries — see here for example the work of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab on regenerative futures, or Purpose Foundation and YOAK on regenerative governance and steward ownership.

By reshaping how capital is governed and deployed, these efforts begin to shift what is possible, materially and politically. They create the financial conditions for alternatives to flourish.

Policy to support and unlock transformational potential

As I explored in the first chapter, policy discourse often confuses realism with familiarity. Too often, incrementalism is treated as the only game in town when it comes to credibility. But in a period of transition, policy cannot simply manage decline or smooth volatility. It also has a responsibility to help bring forth new models of economy, care, and governance. If we are serious about creating the conditions where alternatives can flourish, policy must be about shaping the soil, as well as managing the weather (I will save my commentary on the role politicians need to play here for another day).

Some examples:

• we’ve supported a handful of individuals and organisations who are keen to push policy debates in these directions, for example The Centre for the Edge.
• we’re collaborating with the Fairness Foundation and the Predistribution Initiative, as they explore the systemic harms of extreme wealth concentration and propose policies that might minimise or eliminate these harms, for example by revaluing workers, communities and nature relative to financial gain; and by shifting the ownership and governance models that dominate most companies
• I am also curious about what it might look like to cultivate a network of organisations building policy frameworks that are more supportive of the kinds of edge work I’ve described in this report — in the UK I see organisations like the New Economics Foundation, Future Economy Scotland, and Common Wealth stepping into this space. How could we grow and expand that work?

This work is still rare. Much mainstream policy advocacy in the UK remains caught up within frameworks that assume continuity rather than transformation, in a bid to remain ‘credible’ and ‘relevant’ with politicians whose own imaginations seem to be calcifying as each year passes. Too few actors are focusing on the meta-rules that govern how wealth, capital and power circulate: who sets them, who benefits, and whose labour and lives are rendered invisible in how we account for value on the balance sheet. These are the questions that policy work in service of systems change needs to grapple with.

This soil work is essential for the seeds to take hold

All these efforts — scaffolding civic infrastructure, cultivating imagination and narrative infrastructure, shaping investment logics and policy choices — aim to loosen the invisible constraints that keep transformation at the margins. They are about creating a more hospitable environment in which alternatives can grow, connect, and eventually shift mainstream assumptions and priorities. In that way, this work is an essential part of any transformational change strategy.

The challenge in all this work is time. There is an urgency that comes from the scale of planetary crisis, and from witnessing the deep and growing geopolitical instability of our times. But we know that this soil work is slower and less tangible than project delivery. It requires patience, and collaboration across different worlds that can often feel hard. My view is that we need to stay with this work, learning as much as we can about how to do better, to help promising alternatives take root.

Standing in the in-between

In the second chapter of this report I explored how ‘realism’ is often familiarity in disguise, and how institutions can unconsciously protect the familiar at moments when bravery, instead, is required. This third chapter has shown what it means to act in the ‘in-between’, an often uncomfortable space where we are supporting, shielding and creating the conditions for alternatives that build the ‘something else’ beyond the systems we’re in, to create more equitable and just futures.

Supporting this work asks us to stay present with uncertainty, and to accept we cannot know everything as we shape futures that cannot yet be seen. It’s about offering resources in ways that ground and stabilise the work of those already leading the demonstrators, connecting the dots between them, and nurturing the soil in which transformative ideas can take root.

This isn’t about predicting the future — it’s about staying in relationship with the futures we dream of, as the present unfolds. Rebecca Solnit writes about pathways appearing as we walk, and I think that is a beautiful metaphor: I see this work as being alive to emerging patterns, noticing where and how hope takes shape, and making room for seeds to grow.

This really is the work of navigating a time between worlds. It needs us to keep our eyes on the horizon, our hands joined, and our hearts open.

In this chapter I have sketched out the work we support through the Emerging Futures programme, and the conditions we are seeking to shape. In the next chapter I’ll start to trace how we might need to grow new muscles to hold that space — things like resilience, trust-building, complexity consciousness. These are the capacities — inner, relational, systemic, institutional — that not only allow this work to exist, but also to endure.

In the earlier chapters I explored why protection and transformation must go hand in hand, and how the Emerging Futures programme supports and creates conditions for alternatives. In this chapter, I turn to what helps this work to endure. This is about the human, relational and systemic capacities required to live through the unravelling and remaking of systems, as we navigate this time between worlds.

Why capacities matter

Even when alternatives are supported, and conditions are made more hospitable, transformative efforts will struggle to endure without capacity. I do not mean financial and technical capacity here (though they obviously matter too). I mean the deeply human and more-than-human capacities we are going to need to cultivate to live through these times: the ability to think beyond inherited frames, to remain present in uncertainty, to learn across differences, to grieve what is ending, and to steward what is still fragile without collapsing into control or retreat.

Through the Emerging Futures work, we have learned — sometimes the hard way — that without deliberate investment in these capacities, the work described in this series falters and loses its footing. Urgency overrides reflection, and old power dynamics reassert themselves. We see the fragile magic of trust disappearing. And as all that happens, the likelihood increases that alternatives will collapse, or get pulled back into the very logics they set out to disrupt.

Building capacities is the invisible infrastructure that allows transformative efforts to endure, to deepen and to spread. I think this is the single most important lesson from our Emerging Futures work over the past 2 years. I see time and again that transformation work demands capacities — in ourselves, and in our institutions — that have not historically been cultivated, incentivised, or encouraged.

Without these capacities, even the best-resourced initiatives will struggle to hold coherence or deepen their work over time. And yet, here’s the paradox, I see no UK funding programme or portfolio that consistently invests in this work.

In this piece I’m going to dive into this in more depth, offering some reflections on the kinds of capacities that I think matter. There’s a caveat that these are my own reflections, informed by work we’ve commissioned, and the work we ourselves have stewarded. I’d love to hear where my notes and comments here resonate, and where you think I’ve missed something.

Inner and reflective capacities

I once heard someone say that the English language is very ‘thingy’. We have a lot of different words for nouns, but far fewer to describe intangible dimensions of reality. This bias towards the visible and measurable shapes how we imagine change, too. So often, I see transformation framed as a matter of new policies, new technologies, maybe new institutional designs. Yet enduring societal transformations have always depended on sustained investments in inner and collective development one way or another.

In this sense, I think we need to understand ‘transition’ as who we are becoming as we build the future, as well as what we are building — and how our ways of seeing, relating and deciding are reshaped in this process.

Last year, JRF funded Really Regenerative research into place-based, community-led regeneration. Across multiple case studies from around the world, it found that transformation only really takes root where people are able to reflect on how their assumptions, identities and incentives are shaping action.

I see this all the time in our own work too. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but drawing on our own work and that of leading thinkers and practitioners in this field, the core inner capacities we need to cultivate at scale include:

• meta-cognition and reflexivity: recognising how our own assumptions, habits, and frames shape what we see as possible, reflecting on our cognitive patterns to consider whether/where they may need attention
• tolerance for uncertainty, discomfort and contradiction: staying present to not knowing, without defaulting to familiar solutions; acknowledging complicity even as we work for change
• grieving and letting go: acknowledging loss and endings so that they are not unconsciously reproduced through new forms.

Without these inner capacities, structural change remains brittle — ineffective, easily reversed and diluted, and often pulled back into the orbit of dominant systems.

Relational and community capacities

Transformation does not happen in isolation: it depends on relationships. The ways in which actors in the margins and around the edges can come together and move in trust are critical ingredients in small-scale demonstrators growing their depth and power. But these relationships are strained, often intolerably, by urgency, scarcity and power imbalances. Where trust, reciprocity and shared meaning are weak, transformative potential diminishes. Where these qualities are actively cultivated, new possibilities come into view.

Key relational capacities include:

• right relationship and reciprocity: orienting action around shared accountability, rather than extraction and transaction, building genuinely mutual dynamics
• learning and acting across difference: navigating difference while forming, or staying in, coalition. Capacities for generative conflict. Cultivating plurality, resisting polarisation
• narrative and meaning-making: developing shared language and stories that expand collective ambition rather than narrowing it in the name of realism
• building ‘power-with’: navigating the dynamics of power/privilege that permeate our relationships, shifting from a position of zero-sum to collective power.

These capacities allow organisations and communities to let go of that which no longer serves them, to navigate conflict without collapse, to integrate multiple truths and perspectives, and to keep acting with integrity and intention, even when there are no easy answers or ready made paths. They are what allow people to stay in relationship under pressure, rather than fragmenting into blame, withdrawal, or performative consensus. Time and again in doing this work we see what a damaging impact dominant cultures of separation and scarcity have on these capacities: they need intensive and intentional cultivation to take hold.

Systemic capacities

Transformation is not a single intervention, or a programme of work that can be planned out from the start to end. It is an ongoing practice of bringing the future we long for into the present, and letting it shape how we act now. I believe that this kind of work endures only when people are able to perceive and work with living systems, rather than attempting to impose linear control (I wrote more about Jake Chapman, who has taught me so much about this).

Core systemic capabilities include:

• ecological and regenerative theory and practice: grounding action in living systems rather than extractive or optimisation logics
• imagination, foresight, and third-horizon seeing: sensing beyond present constraints and orienting action towards futures that are not yet fully visible
• complexity consciousness: working with emergence, feedback and adaptation, rather than forcing linear control, prediction and compliance
• edge-seeking: keeping alive an appetite for the discomfort of the new and not-yet-known, learning from those at the margins, reaching beyond our networks.

Without these capacities, initiatives remain trapped in short-term cycles of delivery, unable to sense and respond to changing conditions, or to scale across contexts.

Weaving, anchoring and political capacities

The Emerging Futures programme underlines how vital it is to hold coherence across multiple actors, scales and timeframes. We are learning just how important it is to resource the infrastructure and anchors that sustain learning, legitimacy and relational capital over time.

These capacities include:

• weaving, field-building, and network leadership: enabling co-ordination across diverse actors without centralisation or capture
• anchoring and stewardship: creating durable, long-lasting local structures that are capable of holding memory, trust and continuity
• hospicing and conscious endings: tending closures with care and dignity, rather than denial or abrupt withdrawal
• political and convening capacity: sharing power, brokering relationships across sectors and between the centre and the edges.

These are not neutral capacities. They shape whose knowledge counts and whose voices are heard: in short, whose imaginations are able to shape the future.

Healing as foundational infrastructure

We live in a world where the wellbeing economy has been co-opted by a voracious model of individualised capitalism. Alex Evans writes brilliantly about this. Offering a different, more collective view: Healing Justice Ldn see healing justice as a political and relational framework that interrupts cycles of violence and trauma and builds health and liberation, by investing in capacities and practices that help people to live well together.

The lessons we’ve learnt since the start of the Emerging Futures programme suggest that care and embodied resilience are not optional extras to transformation. Inner resourcing, nervous system regulation and repair are foundational infrastructure for transformative work. Without attention to trauma, precarity and structural harm, we will almost certainly carry yesterday’s harms into tomorrow’s systems, even when our intentions are well-meaning. Those conditions shape what is possible: how power is exercised, how conflict is handled, where people are able to stay in relationship through differences.

And, we are all living in systems that harm us. Without vigilance to unseen, hard-to-spot patterns of harm, even the most well-intentioned initiatives can end up reproducing logics of extraction and domination. That means that healing work is needed everywhere: in communities, in networks of change-makers, among wealth holders and in philanthropic organisations.

We now have early evidence that this reproduction of yesterday’s harms isn’t inevitable or unavoidable. Recent work we’ve supported with Lumos Transforms shows that even relatively light-touch, trauma-informed and embodied practices can significantly strengthen people’s capacity to ‘stay with the trouble’ under pressure, through regulating strong emotions, and acting with care towards others. Within a short period, participants reported greater relational safety and an increased ability to work through disagreement. These relational, somatic practices appear to help stabilise collective capacity in ways that create the conditions for deeper cultural and systemic change.

The kind of healing that organisations like Healing Justice Ldn and Lumos are working with is not about comfort, and it’s not about consensus. In fact, it’s almost the opposite of this: helping people to stay with discomfort, grief, harm, anger for long enough that they can feel it, and move to repair it, rather than denying or burying it.

I think we need to do much more learning here about the practices, their impact and their potential: but these early signals feel really significant, and I think we must take them seriously. Healing can’t be separated really from systems change: without it, the new worlds we’re trying to build will be made from the emotional and relational materials of the old world, which will not serve us well.

Why this matters for JRF

I know that the things I’ve written about here may appear distant from JRF’s preoccupation with poverty. I do not see it that way. Take, for example, our work on transforming wealth. We want to see a more equitable distribution of wealth, of course. But simply moving wealth from one part of the system to another will not be transformative. Capital will never be stewarded in service of just and regenerative futures unless wealth holders and institutions like ours develop different relationships to risk, return, power, ownership, time and responsibility. These are shifts in capacity and worldview, not technical ability — and they are what make different choices possible, about where and how money flows.

The same is true across the whole Emerging Futures programme. New housing models, land stewardship practices, civic infrastructures and financial frameworks will struggle to endure unless the capacities required to hold them are actively cultivated.

Capacity is a precondition for transformational work, not an optional refinement. That much is clear. But this is still a nascent field: we do not yet know what its mature forms look like, or how to resource it at a meaningful scale. However, we do know enough to be clear about the risk. Without sustained attention to how people and institutions learn, unlearn, and relearn, there’s a very good chance that our efforts to navigate towards more just and regenerative futures will stumble.

What we are trying to cultivate, ultimately, is a culture of transition: a shared capacity to live with uncertainty while still acting with care; a capacity to hold grief and hope together, without collapsing into feelings that paralyse action; to remain accountable to futures we may not live to see, but nevertheless bear responsibility to today.

I return to the phrase I shared in the second chapter: when in fog, hold hands. Really, I see this as a practice. It is a reminder that when we are operating in times of great complexity and uncertainty, our job is to remain connected and alive to what’s emerging, rather than pretending we know more than the map is showing us.

Supporting and shielding the new, creating the conditions, and building enduring capacities are essentially 3 different lenses on the same commitment we have in the Emerging Futures programme — to do our best to be good stewards of this deep transition we are living through.

Change is not linear, and nor is it entirely led from the centre. The energy at the edges matters. It is here that fragile experiments and glimmers of alternatives first begin to cohere into something that has the potential for deep transformation. As a team, we are trying to tend to that space with care and attention, humility and courage, as well as providing grounding and shielding through moving resources towards it.

There are loads of things we’ve got wrong over the last few years. Efforts that came to nothing, and harms that only became clear after we acted. But despite these I still believe that the investment in the Emerging Futures programme is a living example of what institutional courage can look like when the polycrisis is taken seriously. As current systems destabilise and atrophy, this kind of work is no longer optional. And while it feels tough, and challenges so much of how organisations like JRF operate, this is the work.

Of course, this work is always held in the tension I explored at the start of this report: the balance between protection work and transformation work. There are all sorts of debates to be had about the balance between these instincts, the enabling conditions for each of them and so on. But I don’t think we can be neutral about the fact that both are critical. We need to protect people and communities from the worst harms of current systems. And we also need to nurture and stay in relationship with what is trying to emerge.

This dance between protection and transformation is where we need to stand in this time between worlds. From here, we need to notice who is carrying the risks most heavily, whose knowledge is being overlooked. We need to pay attention to glimmers and new possibilities, to hold power with humility, and imagination with determination.

So, this is where we are. Learning alongside others, and trying to avoid mistaking familiarity for realism. Refusing to use uncertainty as an excuse for inaction or sticking with what we already know. Recognising that we are all a part of the systems we’re seeking to shift, and that this requires us to engage in our own learning and unlearning as we go. I’d love to hear from anyone else on this path about how these reflections land.

While these words may be mine, our work has been informed by many different frameworks and approaches including Three Horizons, Berkana Two Loops, Deep Transitions/Geels multi-level analysis, Theory U and Haumanu framework. We have listened and learned from many pioneers and elders in the field including Joanna Macy, Vanessa Andreotti and Gesturing towards Decolonial Futures, Sophie Strand, Bayo Akomolafe, adrienne maree brown, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Aurora Levins Morales.

Many other collaborators, fellow travellers and visionaries are mentioned in this piece, and there are many more who aren’t featured here who do critical work. We have learned so much from all these practitioners and the organisations we have been in relationship with, especially those most marginalised, who bring decades of experience in organising, healing and collective liberation work. We respect, honour and are grateful for their contributions in making change and in evolving funding practice.

Finally, I want to thank the Emerging Futures team, old and new, for their determination to ‘stay with the trouble’ and continue to dance in the messy middle between the institution we’re a part of, and the edges we’re seeking to support. Colleagues in wider JRF have been vital in this work too, my thanks go to them as well.

If you are using this document in your own writing, our preferred citation is:

Parker, S. (2026) Reimagining realism: notes on the work of a time between worlds. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.