We have produced this Notion site as a living place for all the work we are resourcing through JRF’s Emerging Futures programme. It’s full of live explorations and enquiries, and as the work evolves we’ll keep adding to what’s here. We invite you to dive in and find out more. We’ve organised this site around our four core tracks of work. Of course, so much of the work is deeply interconnected, but these tracks have helped us to stay accountable to depth as well as breadth in our efforts.
We launched the Emerging Futures programme two years ago when we published this paper, and we are now reaching the end of our initial learning cycle. During this cycle we wanted to understand - through actively funding work - what a longer-term programme might look like in the context of our mission to ‘support and speed up the transition to more equitable and just futures, free from poverty, where people and planet can flourish’.
We deliberately took a very broad lens in this initial learning cycle - seeking to build as many partnerships and collaborations as possible, and using funding to commission specific pieces of learning and insight that we think might be important. It’s been an important principle in the work that we’ve lifted our eyes to what’s happening internationally too, given the context we’re operating in. All this work is informing our thinking about where JRF should take the Emerging Futures programme next, in the context of the commitment made by Trustees to spend an additional £50-100m of the endowment over the next 5 to 10 years on mission-aligned work.
This has not been easy work to get off the ground. The scale of immediate need can lead to it being dismissed as indulgent and utopian, lacking political salience or appeal to leader writers. But our view is that very few organisations are in a position to think deeply and seriously about meeting this moment - and if independent philanthropic organisations don’t, who will? Of course there are risks in resourcing experimental and exploratory work - but we also see the risks of continuing on the path we are on now, and to us, these risks seem far greater, given the scale of the challenges we face.
You can read more about the starting point for this programme, and the assumptions that we have based our decisions on here:
The present and the future - both near and far - will demand things of us that we are mostly unprepared for, and in some instances can barely imagine. Our role as a responsible and effective field-builder requires us to do work beyond simply moving resources or acting as a convenor. We also believe we have a responsibility to create the conditions for more of the work we are resourcing to be recognised and sustained, and to grow our collective capacities to navigate this time of transition wisely.
When we think about ‘conditions’, we are considering the contextual barriers and enablers for the kind of work we’re resourcing to be seeded and sustained. That might include hidden wiring, power dynamics, and of course the ways we think about the world - the social imaginaries that Charles Taylor wrote of, that structure our patterns of thinking and sense-making of the world around us. In this sense, conditions include both external factors, but also crucially inner factors - what Lynn Murphy and Alnoor Ladha have called the ‘structures of feeling’ that shape how we see and experience the world. Metamodern theory points to the ways that the structures of Western thinking - dualism, rationalism and materialism - get in the way of ushering in more just and regenerative futures. We have seen this play out as our own work has unfolded, and it is clear to us that our future programme needs to engage directly in efforts to shape more conducive conditions on this basis.
When we talk about ‘capacities’, we are referring to the skills and practices that might help us to better navigate the transition in all its complexity. Collective imagination was where we started on this, but through this track we have also centred two other clusters of practices that have emerged as critical: foresight and leadership. Our assessment was that there are huge gaps in our collective understanding about what might be needed in this space, and our interest in this learning cycle has been in piecing together a clearer account of how we might grow these capacities: the kinds of practices, institutions and networks that might be necessary.
Find out more:
What we have done so far: Conditions and Capacities
