Why JRF is investing in building alternative futures

Over the last year, we’ve been thinking hard about what role JRF needs to play to achieve our mission of solving UK poverty. The problems the UK faces around poverty are both urgent and deep. These two aspects require different responses from JRF and other organisations seeking to address the issues.

For the urgent work (and there is plenty of this), the task is to take action now to address the worst effects of rising poverty, using all the machinery and tools that exist. This might include campaigning, policy work and public engagement activities. But if we are being true to our mission to solve poverty, these efforts alone will not be enough. The ground is shifting beneath our feet. We have a decade at best to take action to stem the climate crisis, and this will require us to reimagine the underpinning economic models we’ve depended on for the last 50 years.

Add to this technological change, political polarisation, and a rapidly ageing population, and it is increasingly fanciful to assume that a pragmatic incrementalist approach alone will deliver anything close to the scale of deep change that is needed now to tackle the underlying drivers of poverty.

So JRF is now committing to adding a further dimension to our work – to create a major new funding programme that is centred on imagining and building a fairer future alongside improving the way things are now. We don’t see this as an either/or – it’s a both/and – and it is deeply connected to our founding memorandum, which sets out an ambition to tackle the root causes of ‘social evils’.

This paper sets out our thinking to date. We are sharing it as we think that many others are also grappling with this question of how to simultaneously tackle the urgent and the deep work of addressing poverty and inequality. We are looking for fellow travellers who share our interests. If this is you, please get in touch.

Finally, enormous and heartfelt thanks go to the many people who have contributed to the thinking we set out here. You can see a full list of people we’ve spoken to at the end of this paper.

Poverty is real and rising by every conceivable measure, with greater growth in deep poverty and for households experiencing intersectional challenges such as racism and disablism. Gaps in health, mental health and educational outcomes are growing. Children’s futures are shaped more than ever by their pasts, with inherited wealth becoming a more important indicator of wellbeing.

Efforts to tackle poverty are set today against a backdrop of interconnected, complex challenges. From the crisis in our welfare models, to the evolution of ‘platform capitalism’, the existing ways to enable people to break free from poverty seem less likely than ever to work. And of course, the climate crisis changes everything. We have a decade at best to rewrite our relationship with the planet, and that will require us to think differently about future priorities and strategies for change.

In fact, as the climate crisis intensifies, it is exposing cracks in our economic systems that are becoming harder and harder to ignore. The rate at which we are consuming natural resources far exceeds the rate at which we can replace them. Globalisation has involved the flow of raw materials from global south to global north, while toxic waste goes the other way. As well as catastrophic effects on the planet, from We Are the 99% to XR, from George Floyd to #MeToo, groups who have been silenced and marginalised are beginning to demand that there is greater recognition of the way in which contemporary Western economic and social systems are designed to benefit some of us, but by no means all of us.

Much of the wealth and lifestyles of those in the West have only been possible through extractive behaviour and practices, and colonisation. There are two ways to interpret what’s happening. One is to conclude that the human race is in terminal decline. Perhaps we are. Certainly, if we don’t alter our current patterns of consumption and production, if we don’t find ways of navigating political polarisation and rising inequality, then we are on a collision course that doesn’t look good for our children’s or grandchildren’s futures.

But what if we look for signs of hope, even amid these existential threats that we face? Like roses growing through the cracks in the concrete, there are possibilities to be found, even as the storm clouds gather. It can be hard to see these green shoots when so much of the ground obscures them, but they are here, and they offer us an alternative perspective from that of decline. They hint at the possibility instead of a transition – a deep shift that we are in the middle of. A transition which feels confusing, disorienting, exhausting: a time when the way things have been no longer makes sense, but a new way of being has not yet emerged.¹

Our view is that there are seeds of this fairer future already here in the present, even as temperatures and inequalities rise. There’s an emerging landscape of economic transformation, reflected in work around the green economy, the sharing economy, the circular economy. Some of these ideas have been around for a long time but the possibility seems to be in the knitting together of them now.²

The contours of these transitions are easier to trace in some places than others. For example, in energy, we are making real progress on reducing carbon and increasing investment in renewables. There are a number of local projects around the UK designed to empower communities as owners of their energy sources. Similarly, there is a growing movement around transitions in farming, with a focus on biodiversity, soil use, and regenerative practices. In Scotland in particular, this is moving into a lively field of practice and experiments in democratising land ownership.

We can also see signs of a transition in the social sector, with a convergence of projects around broad-based prosperity and ownership. Could the emergence of commons-based property rights be as profound as the individual property rights and enclosure that sparked so much change at the start of the industrial revolution? Could the emergence of employee-owned businesses spell the end of shareholder capitalism, as organisations understand their role in relation to the planet, to communities, and to their workers? Could community wealth-building initiatives shorten damaging global supply chains, to benefit both people and planet?

Even in the financial sector, there are some signs of transition, if only partial – but nevertheless the direction of travel is towards a broader understanding of value and capital, to include a more meaningful consideration of environmental and social factors as well as financial return.

Looking beyond sectors, to public attitudes, a striking feature of attitudinal work is the intergenerational differences between the generation coming of age today and their older cohorts. Young people today have a much more integrated understanding of environmental, social and democratic issues. They see them as symbols of a wider malaise, as different aspects of a deeper issue that needs addressing, around an extractive model of economic development that has centred consumption and individualism over community and planetary limits.

JRF’s Emerging Futures work is about nurturing those seeds, and planting more of them. It is about supporting and investing in work that speeds up these transitions, destabilising those systems that are driving up inequality and climate crisis, and moving us faster towards a fairer future.

As part of the development of our work, we conducted a series of interviews and workshops with the UK philanthropy sector. We explored our findings in relation to the ‘three horizons’ model developed by Bill Sharpe and the International Futures Forum. In brief, ‘horizon 1’ represents a managerial pattern: the way things are now. ‘Horizon 2’ is the entrepreneurial pattern: a space where innovations emerge. These innovations can get pulled back into sustaining ‘horizon 1’ systems; or they can pave the way to the more visionary space of ‘horizon 3’. Sharpe calls horizon 3 the ‘patterning of hope’: it is a space of possibility, containing the opportunities that can be imagined, even if they don’t yet exist.

Despite the urgency of the moment we are in, our landscape review of UK funder practice reveals that the vast majority of philanthropic assets continue to be directed at efforts to improve and sustain activities in horizons 1 and 2. Values in the sector are clustered around social justice, environmental protection, equity, and power. Work is centred around amelioration, exposing and quantifying the scale of problems, and campaigning against the worst effects of the issues. Much funding remains short term, even if funding of core costs has become more common. There’s also a dominant narrative around the comforting safety of ‘reform’ and continuous improvement, rather than an acknowledgement of the unknown territory of deep shifts and transformations that are required. 

Of course there are clear exceptions to this, but our review revealed a broad consensus that foundations are still struggling to invest in work that is more speculative, more experimental, and more explicitly focused on how as a sector we might steward and speed up the transition to an economy that is more sustainable for people and planet. This work is seen variously as too Utopian – ‘fiddling while Rome burns’; too risky – ‘Trustees like to know our money won’t be wasted’; and too long term for the funding frameworks that continue to dominate the sector.

We see an opportunity to boldly step into a new space – a space where we are willing to shape, forge and bring intent. A space that many funders acknowledged is needed, but that they struggle to operate from, because of the strength of their legacy funding approaches and models, which prioritise work that can show it’s ‘worked’. JRF is not constrained in the same way as we’ve not been a serious grant-maker in recent years: we can design what we think is needed from scratch and learn on behalf of the sector. We have political independence, and a large endowment. We are blessed with an incredible legacy and a founding memorandum that challenges us to stay focused on tackling the root causes.

Looking at the world around us – through the lens of Covid, and the climate crisis – gives an urgency to this work of transitions that feels hard to ignore. Can we be part of the efforts to harness this energy? Can we support the convergence of environmental and social transitions as they begin to add up to a possible future that is shaped by a more sustainable way of life and a commitment to broad-based prosperity?

While some of what we set out here may feel like a new departure from our more recent history, we think it is firmly rooted in the instincts of Joseph Rowntree himself. Back at the start of the 20th Century, Rowntree saw the state of worker housing, and the way it incubated ill health and low morale. Instead of writing a pamphlet about it, or campaigning for policy changes, he imagined how things could be different – and went on to build this utopia in the shape of the village of New Earswick. Here he specified that the gardens needed space for two fruit trees; that the development should have plenty of commons space, and communally owned buildings in which residents could gather. He aspired to ‘self-governing communities’. Rowntree wrote of his intention to create a village that others could come and see, to look at and emulate.

What would it mean for JRF to bring that kind of energy to our Emerging Futures work today? What futures do we want to support and grow, to show what a more equitable, sustainable future could look like?

We started our thinking on this work by asking the question: what might be different as a result of this work? What would be the real-world impact of our efforts, if we built the Emerging Futures programme and fund as we’re imagining it?

Our ambitions are twofold: to generate and nurture alternative visions for the future, built on the principles of regenerative approaches that centre people and planet; and to destabilise and decommission current systems that are not serving us well. Implicit in these ambitions is a desire for JRF to mobilise communities around a sense that there are opportunities for change: to skewer the fatalism that shows up so clearly in public polling, and create opportunities for people to play a more active role in imagining and shaping fairer futures.

We are assuming that in the initial years of the fund our focus might be on seeding and nurturing a wide range of ideas; but that in later years we may shift that focus from a larger number of small and medium investments to a smaller number of major investments, depending on learning from the first five years.

Finally, we want our ambition in this space to reflect the scale of the challenge. While JRF resources are significant, our intention would be to ensure that anything we do shapes the wider philanthropic and business landscape, and ultimately ensures that more resources are directed towards efforts to build fairer futures in the way we are imagining here. We will have succeeded if we attract other investment – philanthropic and corporate – to this work.

The Emerging Futures work is about knitting together a number of different ingredients that we believe are necessary to support the transition to a fairer, more sustainable economy for people and planet. In the sections below we describe five different types of work that we expect to resource through this programme:

• Building alternatives: supporting projects on the ground showing in practice what alternative futures might look like.
• Creating infrastructure: supporting work in areas that scaffold and nurture emerging fields, for example - ownership, care, community power, and growing capacity – these are all aspects of alternative futures.
• Tackling ‘hidden wiring’: supporting work to reveal and redesign the ‘hidden wiring’ that is reinforcing aspects of today’s system and driving inequality, for example – governance and tax regimes.
• Narrative shift: investing in efforts to tell the story of the transition in ways that mobilise and engage wider groups of people.
• System readiness: investing in work to prepare the ground, create the conditions, and ‘nurture the soil’, to grow capabilities in communities and places (especially those that have been marginalised) to participate in the work of re-imagining futures.

The next sections describe each of these in more detail.

Building alternatives

We have over 3000 museums we can visit if we want to gain a deeper understanding of our history. What if we invested in projects, places and coalitions where we could explore how a fairer, more sustainable future might look like, just as Joseph Rowntree did in the building of New Earswick? The things we’d look for in work we support would include:

• Regenerative perspective: viewing the work through this lens, a commitment to non-extractive practices in relation to people and planet.
• Thinking globally, acting locally: a focus on how to build belonging, connection and to share assets more equitably in places, whilst maintaining a global view on the interconnected nature of the challenges being addressed.
• Re-commoning goods with a public value: demonstrating alternatives to more profit or shareholder driven models in issues such as care, data and land.
• A focus on legacy and future generations: bringing a long-term focus into the heart of the work, focused on our environmental and social legacy to tomorrow’s world.
• Decision-making: systems that are designed to involve people meaningfully.
• Collective imagining: making space and time for communities to work together to imagine the possibilities – with specific care taken to bring marginalised communities and groups to the table.
• Storytelling: a desire to make sense of the work in the context of a deeper set of transitions in our economic and social systems. 

Creating infrastructure

We want to support and invest in infrastructure that scaffolds ‘third horizon’ work across the UK. This infrastructure may take a variety of forms, including organisations, coalitions, resource banks, and even newly commissioned data or insight. The point of infrastructure is to weave connections, deepen practice, spark new ideas, and help with the work of making sense of things. Effective infrastructure plays a catalysing role: attracting new projects and funding, and giving a platform to the grassroots work it enables. Things we’d look for include:

• Connectorship and relational approach: Work that explicitly seeks to build and deepen connection between projects.
• Skills to resource work: Organisations/coalitions who are able to play a role in resourcing networks.
• Focus on deepening practice: Commitments to deepening a field of practice (for example - imagination, good help, wealth sharing).
• Targeted focus: Infrastructure that is specifically about supporting marginalised groups and communities to play an active role in building alternative futures.
• Explicit ambition: Organisations/coalitions with an explicit ambition of facilitating a transition to a fairer, more sustainable future.

Tackling ‘hidden wiring’

JRF’s work in recent years has centred on three important outcome areas: housing, social security and work. Beneath all of these issues lies a complex web of ‘hidden wiring’ – the underpinning issues that are potentially driving or exacerbating inequality. This hidden wiring designs-in biases to our current system, for example, the benefits that accrue to wealth and asset holders, or the higher costs paid by low income households for certain goods such as energy.

Areas of ‘hidden wiring’ we might want to tackle over time include land and property laws, regulation of emerging technology, private equity in ‘public value’ sectors such as care, shareholder/wealth holder primacy, and tax policy. In this area, we would look to fund coalitions working to bring together a range of perspectives and expertise around a particular element of ‘hidden wiring’ that is driving inequality.

Narrative shift 

Rob Hopkins talks about the need in this ‘decisive decade’ to master the art of asking questions that address the gravity of our situation as well as creating a longing for the beauty of the world we might create: to tackle fatalism by building dreams that propel us forward and shape the steps we might take today.

The work we want to fund through the Emerging Futures programme might provide some gravitational pull towards that future. It needs to be supported by work to narrate the transition we need to move through. This will involve work that describes the vision, and explores what of today’s world needs closing and reshaping, and what needs growing and expanding. Often the most powerful narratives emerge organically from within a place, community or movement, achieving reach through authentic and skilled messengers. We will invest in individuals and organisations better placed than us to reach the large parts of the population who give only passing attention to mainstream news. What might we support:

• Creating and testing new frames: solidarity, legacy, stewardship, ‘enough’ (versus growth).
• Experimental work: what would politics look like if we centred the future generation not older generation?
• Immersive experiences: bursaries for talented creatives to produce work with mass audience appeal.
• Advocacy networks: enhance their capacity to reach people in the social and personal spaces that most shape their values (for example - schools, places of worship, and online groups).

System readiness

There are some significant differences of opinion about whether transformative ideas and projects exist, but we simply don’t know how to find them; or whether the soil in which transformation might be cultivated is so arid and dry that the conditions simply aren’t right to foster the imagination required to build the sorts of regenerative futures we need.

Our view is that there may be differences depending on where the lens is applied. For example, in land, the air is thick with possibility, and it feels like what’s needed most is adequate resourcing for the work. Whereas in care, the ideas are constrained and limited, lacking the transformative potential to re-imagine what care could be in the future.

This is true also if a community lens is applied. Some places are teeming with possibility; others much less so. These differences may well map structural inequalities, with ‘left behind’ communities having the fewest resources and assets to draw upon to imagine how things could be different and better.

We see this ‘soil preparation’ as a vital part of the Emerging Futures work for two reasons: first, to ensure that all communities get to imagine their futures, including those where the conditions have not made that work easy; and second, to create the conditions for the most transformative work to take shape. What might we support?

• Imagination infrastructure: supporting the evolution, deepening and broadening of collective imagination practice.
• Space to dream: supporting work that brings together communities, or particular groups, to engage in collective imagining for a better future.
• Future generations: specific support for work that brings together and mobilises young people to articulate their hopes for a fairer more sustainable future.
• Space to heal and recover: work to create space for marginalised communities to recover and heal from the trauma caused by poverty in order to play an active role in shaping their futures.

As we start to design the Emerging Futures fund, we have an opportunity to re-imagine what JRF’s role could be as a supporter and a steward of initiatives that shift us towards a fairer, more equitable future.

We want to bring together a multi-disciplinary team, spanning philanthropic giving and impact-led investment, to consider with potential recipients how best JRF can support the work. This is the model being deployed by forward thinking foundations such as Guy’s and St Thomas’ Foundation. And increasingly the social investment community are considering how to offer a mix of grant-based and investment-based finance.

The mainstream Trusts and Foundations practice of separating out routes into them by either grant or investment is likely to look increasingly dated. In the first phase of the fund, JRF wants to experiment with a blended approach to ‘mission-led support’, where we agree through dialogue the right mix of philanthropy, loans, equity and so on. We are really keen to learn from others who are already on this journey.

While we need the courage to act, we also need the humility to know that we don’t have all the answers in an environment of deep uncertainty, complexity and instability. The transition we described earlier in this paper can also be detected in the evaluation and impact community. Increasingly evaluators are challenging the heavy reliance the third sector has placed on statistical significance³, ‘what works’ and ‘theories of change’. These models might make sense when we know what we need to do, and the change is linear and measurable. But in a world where change is complex and contingent, they will not serve us well.

As part of the development of our thinking, we ran a workshop with a group of evaluation and risk experts to explore these issues. The key messages from this conversation are:

• Linear models of change will not serve us well in a time of change: in fact they risk over-emphasising certainty, and underplaying the urgent need for experimentation.
• Rigour has come to be equated with knowing what works, and defining outcomes at the outset. But rigour can equally come from designing learning frameworks carefully from the start, and building in accountability and reflection to all work as it unfolds.
• Trusts and Foundations are not well-versed in the design and engineering language of ‘prototyping’ and active learning through doing. We’re managing some of the risks of this more speculative approach to funding through our commitment to a year of prototyping the proposed approach we want to take to our Emerging Futures work, and through our proposal to embed an evaluation mindset in the design of this prototype.

In a world of uncertainty, people reach for certainty rather like a comfort blanket. But in this moment in time we need to look beyond the short-term comfort offered by the concrete linearity of theory of change models. Risk needs to be framed in terms of not doing something different, as well as trying something new. We will be publishing more thoughts on this in the next couple of months.

We want to spend the next 12-24 months testing our model of funding support. This will involve prototyping a wide range of approaches, with an intense focus on learning at the same time as getting money out of the door to support the kind of work we’ve described in this paper. We’ll be laying the tracks as we go, and we are committed to sharing the learning ‘live’ as things unfold.

There are a wide range of things we want to learn about, some specific, and some bigger picture, in this next phase of the work:

1. Should the future fund be built around issues or more general concepts of ‘new economy’ and ‘just transition’ and in any event how can we encourage systemic impact?
2. What models of grant-making do we want to embed? Which approaches to philanthropic giving best reflect our commitment to anti-racist practice and power sharing?
3. How might we deploy our financial resources with maximum impact? How would it work to blend grant-making practices with investment options for work we decide to support?
4. What other supportive investment do we need in aspects of ‘system readiness’ (competence and capacity for transformative work, the development of collective imagination, new tools, prompts and processes) in order to maximise the potential in our chosen grantees?
5. How will we design real learning as an integral feature of this prototyping phase?

We are convening a small group of experts from the fields of philanthropy, social investment, transformation design and evaluation, to help us shape up the first phase of this fund. Our ambition is to launch it in autumn this year.

The task for any of us wanting to tackle poverty is to focus on the urgent work, and the deep work. Both need to start from a place of real ambition and belief in the possibility of change. If we only focus on the urgent work, we are avoiding the work of “throwing ourselves actively into what is becoming”, in Ernst Bloch’s words. All the most radical ideas start in the same place – our imaginations. JRF occupies an enormously privileged position. If an organisation like ours isn’t willing to invest in the deep work of imagining and building fairer futures, then who else will?

The one who plants trees, knowing that they will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life

Rabindranath Tagore

Interviews

We have spoken to a wide range of UK Trusts and Foundations, including Barrow Cadbury Trust, Big Local, Blagrave Trust, City Bridge Trust, Esmee Fairbairn, Friends Provident, Lankelly Chase Foundation, Lloyds Bank Foundation, Nationwide Foundation, Oak Foundation, Partners for a New Economy, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Power to Change, Royal Foundation, Social Finance, The National Lottery Community Fund, Two Ridings, Unbound Philanthropy, and UnLtd.

We’ve also engaged with thinktanks and other thought leaders in this space. Meetings have been held with: Barrow City Council, Centre for Local and Economic Strategies, Centric Lab, Demos Helsinki, Demos, Design Council, Economic Change Unit, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, IPPR, Jon Alexander, Locality, New Economics Foundation, New Philanthropy Capital, Onward, Participatory City, Reclaim, Reset Narratives, Resolution Foundation, RSA, Save the Children, Share Action, West Midlands Combined Authority. 

Workshops

Jointly facilitated by Cassie Robinson and Sophia Parker, we’ve held two workshops on Emerging Futures, to explore the ambition of the work, and questions around risk and experimentation. In addition we’ve held four exploratory workshops on the collective imagination work that have also shaped our thinking on our wider approach to Emerging Futures.

We built a very wide-ranging group of participants, offering expertise and insight from many different perspectives and professional practices. Participants included: Amhara Spence (MAIA Collective), Anab Jain (Superflux), Christabel Reed (Initiative Earth), Clover Hogan (Force of Nature), Daze Aghaji (climate activist), Farah Elahi (GLA, and JRF Trustee), Farzana Khan (Healing Justice), Gemma Mortensen (New Constellations), Geoff Mulgan (UCL), Gina Crane (Esmee Fairbairn), Graham Leicester (International Futures Forum), Helen Goulden (Young Foundation), Immy Kaur (Civic Square), Jake Garber (Canopy), Joanna Choukeir (RSA), Keri Facer (Bristol University), Kerry Linde (KCLARITY), Michael Kenny (Bennett Institute), Panthea Lee (Reboot), Penny Hay (University of Bath), Rob Hopkins (Transition Network), Shelagh Wright. 

Desk research

Cassie Robinson mapped out the ‘funder landscape’ in which we are operating and looked across UK Foundations to review their values, offering reflections on what this could mean for JRF. She will share a blog on this later this month. Many of the ideas in this are ones we will test through the prototyping phase, and some will be ongoing enquiries we’ll want to reflect on as the work unfolds.

1. Schot and Kanger’s work to explore transitions define a transformation as a “series of connected and sustained fundamental transitions of a wide range of sociotechnical systems in a similar direction.” They argue there are different phases that can be identified in this process of change, and suggest that we are in the ‘frenzy’ phase – where we are at the beginning of being able to detect a new series of ‘meta-rules’ emerging from sub-sets of rules across sectors.
2. For example, Limits to Growth by Meadows 1974, Small is Beautiful by Schumacher 1973, Cradle-to-Cradle Thinking by Stahel 1981.
3. See for example Moving To a World Beyond “p<0.05”, The American Statistician, vol 73 issue 1, March 2019.

Drew, C Winhall, J and Robinson, C (2021) System Shifting Design: an emerging practice explored

Harraway, D (2016) Staying With The Trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene

Hopkins, R (2022) podcast: What Is to What If?

Leicester, G (2020) Transformative Innovation: a guide to practice and policy for system transition

Meadows, D (1999) Leverage Points: places to intervene in the system. 

Morales, A L (2019) Medicine Stories: essays for radicals

Muglan, G (2020) The Imaginary Crisis (and how we might quicken social and public imagination)

Schot, J Steinmueller, E and Keesman, S (2022) Deep Transitions Futures

Sharpe, B (2013) Three Horizons: the patterning of hope 

Warden, J (2021) Regenerative Futures: from sustaining to thriving together

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

Parker, S. (2022) Why JRF is investing in building alternative futures. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation