Surviving on breadcrumbs: resourcing radical hope

Earlier this month, the Onion Collective published 4 pieces that shared findings from a network-mapping project JRF funded in 2024. These pieces explore the work and values of around 2,000 organisations across the UK working to build alternative futures, the power of social networks in fostering social change, and the role of funding and philanthropy in supporting these efforts. So what do their findings mean for JRF?

Solutions we have previously relied on seem unlikely to address the deep, transformative changes needed to relieve poverty and build a world where people and planet can thrive. Those most impacted by the current systems have known this for some time. But perhaps we’ve now arrived at a juncture where this reality seems impossible to ignore, even for those who currently benefit from the status quo.

Industrial economies have generated unparalleled wealth and wellbeing for many in the global north, yet they’ve also charted a perilous course of environmental degradation so severe it threatens us all. These economies have enabled an obscene concentration of wealth - and those inequities have fostered deep divisions and political instability. The geopolitical risks tied to inequality, unequal impacts of climate crisis, and state conflicts have turned the world into a frightening, unpredictable place, with heartbreaking and far-reaching consequences across the globe.

In this confusing time between worlds, we’ve been exploring how funders like JRF might play their part in bringing forth futures where people and planet can thrive once more. Our thinking has been informed by the work of Carlota Perez, Frank Geels and Johan Schot, who have chronicled past paradigm shifts and argue we are living through another profound transition. In times like these, our work is to support, shield and amplify a new emerging paradigm. This isn’t about refining what exists, or about optimising the existing system, but imagining and fostering something new.

‘Building the something else’

In this context, we wanted to explore how to find and resource organisations who are ‘building the something else’, to borrow from Brian Eno. We didn’t have a blueprint for what that meant we needed to back, but we did have a strong sense of what the direction of travel might need to be:

Shifting towards fairness and regeneration

We wanted to support work that embodied a series of shifts that seem foundational to more equitable and just futures. A shift away from degenerative and extractive design to regenerative design. A shift in focus from redistribution of income, to pre-distribution of wealth. A shift away from the primacy of financial capital towards a worldview that recognises the value of multiple forms of capital including human, natural and cultural. A shift away from private ownership of assets to a focus on stewardship, commons and custodianship.

Building real-world alternatives

We also wanted to find work that was engaged in practice: actively building alternatives, creating the ‘concrete utopias’ that Eric Olin Wright spoke of, and that our founder Joseph Rowntree believed in as he constructed New Earswick. Our primary interest was in organisations who explicitly saw their work as an endeavour to build beyond current economic and cultural paradigms. They are working to loosen the grip of neo-liberal industrial capitalism on defining our sense of what’s possible, and seeking to build from different foundations, in recognition that the current economic system is incompatible with a liveable planet. As Milton Friedman once argued, it’s important to have good-quality ideas lying around for when the Overton window shifts, which it can do very suddenly in times of crisis. These ideas need to have a degree of practical applicability: to be ‘proofs of possibility’ living among us.

Supporting a connected ecosystem

We wanted to explore how we might be able to support an ecosystem rather than individual organisations. Our sense was that much of the kind of work we were wanting to resource exists, but it remains trapped in niches, rendered fragile by unsupportive and sometimes hostile financial and political environments. Deep Transitions theory argues that in these times of transition, innovators are often operating in isolation, with few relationships and opportunities to build coherence across the many thematics and geographies in which they are operating. Impact is hard to measure in the value lenses of the dominant paradigm. We take inspiration from living systems theory and in particular the ‘two loop’ model developed by Margaret Wheatley of the Berkana Institute. She argues that there is a job to name, connect, nurture and illuminate these efforts in the emerging paradigm, helping the whole to add up to more than the sum of its parts.

For the last 2 years, we’ve moved small amounts of core funding to 28 organisations who are playing a leadership and storytelling role in this space - organisations that others look to as beacons of practice, lighthouses of hope. We wanted to support their individual organisational efforts, of course, but we also wanted to experiment with investing in spaces and places where different organisations could come together to begin to bring an ecosystem into consciousness, and to learn together about what it might take to do that well.

Mapping the ecosystem

Of course, we knew that there would be many more organisations building alternative futures beyond these 28 organisations. As the work has unfolded, and the sense of existential threat has increased, it has felt more and more urgent to understand the scale and health of this potential ecosystem. So early last year we asked the Onion Collective, in partnership with Free Ice Cream, to conduct an innovative network mapping experiment to see whether we could understand the state of the field in a little more depth.

This mapping revealed around 2,000 organisations across the UK operating in this liminal space between the world as it is and the world as it could be. These efforts are unfolding in communities up and down the country, criss-crossing multiple human systems and domains, and operating at different scales from the neighbourhood to the bioregion. These are organisations that invite us into the work of ‘rehearsing the futures we dream of’ (in Amahra Spence’s words), daring to imagine futures that take us beyond the decaying edges of late-stage capitalism.

One of the most striking findings of this research is the plurality and diversity of this work: it is pulsating with life, in constant evolution. Organisations are acting as community builders, network stewards, storytellers, system re-wirers. They are operating in the nexus between art and ecology; between economics and culture, between social justice, healing and imagination. They describe their work with powerful words like joy, regeneration, love, hope, liberation and justice.

The Onion Collective’s Jess Prendergrast and Sally Lowndes invite us to imagine what it might be to centre this work, rather than continuing to see it as ‘edge’ work, relegated to the niches. What if we take hope from the possibilities and potential it contains? What if we release ourselves from the mental traps of only doing that which seems ‘do-able’ in current systems? With this perspective, while the work may not yet be shaping dominant regimes, there is no question that there is a kind of coherence and energy to it – and an urgency – that is exciting and rich with potential.

John Thackara has argued that while these movements may be below the radar of mainstream media or politics, the work is gaining momentum: ‘quietly, for the most part, communities the world over are growing a replacement economy from the ground up.’

‘Whether it is populations across the global south fighting ongoing capitalist-colonial oppression, neglected communities in marginal places up and down the UK rejecting their characterisation as ‘left-behind’, an international generation of young people whose desperate protests are ridiculed and mental health is collapsing, or indigenous communities reasserting their ancient rights and wisdoms, viewed from here, what looks ‘thinkable’ is very different.’

A growing number of places and peoples are seeing the harms of late-stage capitalism: from this vantage point, conceiving of a post-capitalist future doesn’t look that radical or extreme.

3 questions for funders and wealth holders

But, as the final blog of the series outlines, this work is desperately under-resourced. We’re betting our future on breadcrumbs of funding and a cohort of exhausted and burnt-out leaders. So as I read the 4 blogs, I have been reflecting a lot on what they mean for funders and wealth-holders today. For the remainder of this post, I offer 3 questions that I think organisations like ours should be asking ourselves, based on the research findings, and everything we’ve learnt from our tentative experiments in this space over the last 2 years:

1. Looking at your funding decisions, what is the balance between supporting efforts that ‘optimise the system’, and efforts that build alternatives beyond the system? Consider the risks of your choices.

For all its possibility and joy and energy, this emerging ecosystem of alternative futures practitioners is struggling and starved of funding. At the very time we should be pouring everything we’ve got into experimenting and iterating alternatives, these organisations report that they’re securing a median of £5,000 a year of funding for this kind of work – with a full 40% of organisations reporting they have no direct funding for their futures-building efforts. A clear picture emerges from the research of organisations who are having to duck and dive to do this work – relying on cross subsidising from other lines of income, and slogging it out with sweat equity, overwork, and burnout to keep the show on the road. We are concerned to see the racialised patterns of funding flows which make these struggles even more pronounced for Black and Brown-led organisations.

It is a dizzying gulf between what is needed to properly support and shield this futures-building work, and what is actually happening. An optimistic estimate from this research is that £96 million – 2% of annual UK grant funding – flows into future-building efforts. Contrast this with the £948 million of taxpayers’ money given out via Innovate UK each year to support business-led growth, or the $3.9 trillion OECD estimate is needed each year to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Of course it’s crucial that we support initiatives and programmes that build resilience today, and ameliorate the worst effects of poverty. But to put such tiny amounts of capital into work that helps us move beyond a model that is so clearly unsustainable for people and planet – it just makes no sense to me. Even a small rebalancing could have a profound impact in terms of stabilising and shielding efforts to build alternatives. What is it that makes us blind to the risks of not investing in alternative futures?

2. To what extent does each pound of your endowment support your mission? Explain your rationale if any of your pounds do not directly contribute to your mission.

These troubling times make it impossible to defend the still-dominant traditional philanthropic model, where the lion’s share of wealth is invested in ways that work against people and planet, and sustain a model of extractive capitalism that causes harm. The defence that these choices generate the best returns is no longer tenable. Instead, philanthropic organisations and their Boards need to feel accountable for the impact of every single pound of the endowments they’re responsible for. Turning a blind eye to the negative impacts of current investment choices is an abdication of responsibility, and an active decision to support and sustain systems that are perpetuating harm, in the form of rising inequality and climate crisis.

In this context, JRF is in the process of reorienting its own endowment towards its mission. This won’t happen overnight, so our decision to commit a further £50-100 million spend over the next 5 years is also an important part of our strategy. We recognise that in these times of crisis and transition, there are really good arguments to spend more aggressively in the present to bring a different future into being, rather than leaving the wealth to sit in investment portfolios that get in the way of that future being able to emerge.

We know that the work being shaped by the ecosystem that this research has revealed has the potential to create different kinds of value: we might think about the work as a new kind of asset class, offering us clues about how we might invest in places in ways that grow community and ecological wealth. This is a critical area of learning for us as we advance this work; it is exciting to see the growing field of practice in this work both here in the UK and beyond, and we’re committed to playing our part in nurturing this field over the coming years.

3. What ecosystems and fields need support to realise your mission? What is your contribution to their healthy evolution?

Gal Beckerman in his book The Quiet Before explores how profound changes in our world happen. He argues that it comes not in the loud cry of revolution but the quiet conversations and exchanges over many years in which new ideas and ways of doing are built below the surface, ready to emerge when the time comes. His analysis is shared by living systems practitioners, systems thinkers, historians and ecologists: the shift from one state to another happens through a process of emergence, brought into being by a complex web of relationships where a whole range of different actors are at work.

So our view is that the health of the ecosystem of practitioners building alternatives is of critical importance. As a social change organisation with a mission to support and speed up the transition, we think we have a responsibility to tend to the health of this ecosystem. This is not familiar territory for funding organisations like JRF; as we have tentatively stepped into this space over the last 2 years we’ve inevitably made mistakes which we need to account for. There is still so much to learn together about what it means to tend to an ecosystem in ways that do not perpetuate unhealthy power dynamics.

But even while we learn, I think there’s a couple of things we can say with a good degree of confidence about what it means to nurture and support an ecosystem. First, attention is needed on investing in both the strong ties and the weak ties of the network. Strong ties bind people together; weak ties reach out into wider society and facilitate the flow of new information and ideas. Funders can stabilise and ground critical nodes in a network (as JRF attempted to do in its decision to resource the Pathfinders); but equally important is finding ways of growing connective tissue between the weak ties, through financial resources but also collaborative impetus, storytelling and shared learning infrastructure.

Second, it’s time to think hard about what ecosystemic governance, and associated approaches to decisions about resources, could look like. How can we move away from patterns of bilateral grants with the distorting power dynamics, scarcity mindset and competition they create? How can resource allocation be better connected to collective learning and sense-making? How can governance practices recognise the critical importance of investing in the quality of relationships? Initiatives like the Mycelium Fund offer important clues in response to these prompts; in our own plans at JRF we will be exploring these questions as we seek to find new ways of governing the additional spending commitment we’ve made.

Future potential, now

This research confirms my sense that we’re on the edge of a new level of coherence around the shape of the emerging paradigm. I see a growing network of organisations deepening their work and demonstrating in practice how things could look different. I see the ways in which developments in science, psychology and ecology are inviting us to see our relationship with each other and the planet differently, which in turn reveals the risks of our current economic models and underlines the need to reimagine things. I see a growing network of wealth holders recognising that how money flows, and where it flows to, can and must change if our children are to have a future. This research shows us something really important: there are better and more beautiful futures here already. I invite you to centre the joy, the repair, the hope, of the work, and see what becomes possible from there.

Illustration by Georgie Grant, part of series commissioned by the Onion Collective and JRF.