<aside> <img src="/icons/briefcase_green.svg" alt="/icons/briefcase_green.svg" width="40px" /> It’s been eight months since we published our first paper on the Emerging Futures programme. This blog provides an update on the work and how 2023 is shaping up for it.

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We started 2022 with a set of questions with no easy answers. What should we do to address the underlying drivers of poverty, as well as tackling its more immediate manifestations? What would it take to back the changemakers and visionaries shaping alternative futures? What characterises this future-building work, and how do we find it? What is philanthropy’s role in supporting work that seeks to speed up the transition to a more equitable and just future?

To explore these, we’ve been in conversation with a huge number of organisations, individuals and movements also asking these questions across different issues including land, housing, governance design, youth justice; and spanning the worlds of movement building, cultural work, place-based change, research and policy, healing and restorative work. We are so grateful to people for the time they’ve taken to help us shape our thinking.

And of course, all this work was happening as a ‘cost of living crisis’ unfolded around us, and evidence mounted about the climate emergency. It seems increasingly fanciful to imagine we can address growing poverty without paying attention to deeper questions about the extractive and exploitative aspects of our current economic paradigm.

Poverty blights lives. It is essential that we continue to do all we can to address and ameliorate its worst impacts through our insights, policy and advocacy work. But we believe today’s crisis demands that we also engage in deeper questions about the foundational aspects of our economic and social systems - the concentration of wealth, for example, or the nature of corporate governance - that continue to drive inequality and ecological breakdown.

The ambition of the programme

The ambition of the Emerging Futures programme is threefold. We want to:

• Back the people, organisations and coalitions building new ideas that show us in practice what a more equitable and just future could look like – the people who are reimagining and redesigning the world they want to live in, and the world they hope to leave behind. We are searching out organisations who are developing their work explicitly in the context of a commitment to showing what it might take to realise more equitable and just futures.
• Back the work that is growing hope and possibility – work that grapples with questions about our economic models and proposes alternatives. This work often has a different starting point – it is rooted in concepts of solidarity, liberation, and interdependence. It recognises different sources of knowledge and value to shape a future grounded in people and planet flourishing.
• Build a stronger, deeper ecology of change makers, visionaries and pathfinders, supporting the work that’s happening, and building its resilience and robustness. This isn’t about JRF making a series of bilateral grants – we want to expand the field of what’s possible and nurture an ecology of changemakers with big ambitions; the people who are growing the new in the context of the old. This is challenging work at a time when many of these future builders up and down the country are describing overwhelm and burnout in their daily lives.

A major commitment of resources

Over the next two years we will be moving £5-6 million of our endowment to work that embodies these ambitions, as well as committing a further £2-3 million of our annual budget to the work. Our intention is to significantly grow the resources available. We are committed to making £50-100 million available from JRF’s own endowment over the next five to ten years, and we want to connect outwards and help expand the number of foundations that want to fund this kind of work.

As we grow the resources available, we are resisting the temptation of calling ourselves a ‘grant maker’, with all the unhelpful mental models that come with this label. Instead we see the Emerging Futures programme as an opportunity to take an active and intentional role in the redistribution of resources and assets. We won’t be importing traditional grant funding models or processes. Over the next two years we’ll be experimenting with alternative approaches to this redistribution, focusing on how we can fund an ecosystem rather than a series of individual organisations. How we do this is not yet completely clear and our commitment is to learn by doing, openly and transparently, as we go.

The shape of the programme

So what does this all translate into? Over the next two years we will focus our work around four parallel ‘tracks’:

• Pathfinders: the organisations who are actively building alternative futures in their communities - offering exemplars of how things could look (we’ll be writing more about this track next month).
• Visionaries: the people who are developing ideas that draw us away from the status quo and orient us towards something new.
• Imagination: building power and rigour in work that fosters hope and possibility across a diverse range of communities (sign up to an international event we’re hosting on this in March).
• Re-shaping philanthropy and investment: backing work that reorients flows of capital away from extraction and exploitation, towards economic democracy, and social and ecological justice (view all the content from our New Frontiers conference last year).

What’s coming up?