Social investment opportunities for funds supporting UK climate justice

What is JRF’s social investment programme for?

Our social investment programme manages £20 million of JRF’s endowment at the time of writing. We invest this capital into funds and enterprises that are aligned with JRF’s mission and vision, including distributive ownership of assets, and one or more of JRF’s focus areas:

• shifting the terms of the debate
• supporting and shielding the new
• and building infrastructure for transition.

For full context, see this reflection on the first 10 years of the programme.

Why climate justice is part of our social investment work

The reference to planet in JRF’s mission was added in 2024 ‘to support and speed up the transition to a more equitable and just future, free from poverty, where people and planet can flourish’. This gave us the mandate to expand the programme to include climate justice.

The same year, JRF appointed Tilly Cook to the new post of Senior Policy Adviser focused on climate justice. Tilly has been generously lending us her expertise as we develop our plans.

JRF’s policy work on climate justice aims to accelerate the transition to net zero while minimising the harms and maximising the gains for low- and middle-income households. In the context of our social investment work, we have framed the scope of climate justice as follows: climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience projects benefitting lower- and middle-income people and communities, especially through reducing costs, raising income, and increasing agency, empowerment and participation. In this framing, climate justice intersects with other priority themes for our social investment programme such as wealth redistribution - via the reference to agency, empowerment and participation — and place-based investing, via the reference to communities.

We made some first investments into climate justice as opportunities organically arose. In each case, the investment also fell under another JRF priority theme:

• Ethex is a crowd-funding platform for impact investment, enabling people to align their money with their values by investing in projects ranging from renewable community energy to affordable finance initiatives. This also fell under the theme of widening access to impact investment. We invested £217,000 in loan notes in 2025.
• Future Impact Ventures (FIV) is a pre-seed venture fund, backing mission-driven companies building an equitable transition to net zero. This also fell under our racial justice theme. We made a commitment in 2025 to invest £1 million, subject to FIV reaching first close (in progress).
• Switchee is the smart thermostat for social housing and has been part of our portfolio for several years, under the theme of reducing the poverty premium. The product saves tenants money on their energy bills. It also belongs to the climate justice investment theme. We invested in Switchee both indirectly through our investment in the Fair by Design fund (which invested £800,000 into Switchee over 3 rounds) and directly through a managed account with Mustard Seed (£100,000).

How we built our understanding of climate justice investment

In 2025 we wanted to better understand the range of sub-sectors related to climate justice where social investment could be most impactful. We partnered with Church of England and Esmee Fairbairn Foundation to commission a team from New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) to research the investment landscape. Better Society Capital (BSC) convened a Roundtable in July to share NPC’s draft findings with key policy makers, investors, and sector bodies to stimulate discussion to inform the final report.

NPC’s report identifies 35 sub-sectors where impact-focused capital could support climate justice. It applies a classification system including type of climate impact — mitigation, adaptation and resilience — highlighting that significantly more investment flows to mitigation than adaptation and resilience.

Investment focus on community and local energy

Although NPC’s research highlighted the breadth of need and opportunity in climate justice investing, we decided that a focused approach was appropriate for JRF. We only make a very small number of social investments every year, and climate justice is one of many themes we cover, so we need to specialise. We applied the JRF lens - mission, vision, focus areas - to the NPC findings, and were very fortunate to be able to benefit from the insights of Erinch Sahan who joined JRF as Associate Director for Investment in September.

We have selected community and local energy projects as our sub-theme to focus on, especially:

• community-owned energy projects, especially where communities are disadvantaged
• shared community ownership of larger-scale energy infrastructure
• decarbonisation, energy and heat solutions for community and social infrastructure, including community facilities and social housing.

We selected this sub-theme because these types of projects have the potential to deliver benefits with very strong alignment with JRF’s mission, vision and focus areas. While the concept can be diverse, some key benefits include:

• lower energy bills for households and potential for increased income
• increased participation and agency, decentralising power and democratising ownership
• community benefits — where the benefits extend beyond mitigation into adaptation and resilience
• more local jobs and investment
• stronger democracy — for example, local participation and ownership fosters civic skills and a sense of community/public good
• broader buy-in for the energy transition — if communities co-create and own it, they are more likely to stand behind it.

We are planning to focus on investing in pooled vehicles, or funds that have the capability and scale to provide appropriate support to community energy projects. We do not intend to invest directly in community energy projects.

Ultimately, we are seeking to be as catalytic as possible through our social investments, where possible seizing opportunities where they could drive a more ambitious agenda. For example, we are excited about the potential to pursue broader systemic change through initiatives and models that can:

• galvanise bolder policy action, such as by local governments
• crowd-in further capital, such as from local pension funds
• be replicated by others, such as in locally-oriented models of community ownership — we are especially interested in place-based funds in the North East of England, given JRF’s origins and current work in that region
• help drive ambition across a range of stakeholders by getting the attention of key people or institutions.

Community energy in a wider UK and global context

Situating this work in its wider context, we note that UK community ownership of renewable energy assets is part of a global movement to drive community-owned renewable energy. For example, rescoop across Europe now has 2,500 such communities. The UK community energy movement also draws from a long history of distributive ownership in the UK, beyond community energy: there is long history of co-ops, a growing movement of employee-ownership of businesses, and plenty of examples of the use of community ownership to retain places such as pubs.

Apply for social investment, or partner with us

If you are raising a fund which supports renewable energy projects which benefit communities, especially through community ownership, do get in touch with us by filling out our Initial Enquiry Form. We aim to review enquiries and respond within a month.

In the interests of being respectful of your time, we want to flag that we only make a small number of social investments in a year across our entire social investment programme, so we would expect to make a very small number of investments into this sub-theme.

We may also consider other climate justice opportunities, for example green jobs, and circular economy business models with a social equity lens. If you’re looking for social investment for an opportunity such as this, please note that it is much less likely that we would take this forward.

If you’d like to make us aware, please do fill out the Initial Enquiry Form.