Visionaries
The Visionaries programme supports people whose practice and thoughts might guide society to hopeful futures for all.
Through the Visionaries programme, JRF has committed to offering flexible funding, resources and space to individuals who hold alternative and even radical visions of possible futures. We’re seeking people with the wisdom, foresight, and tenacity needed to think beyond current systems and explore new realms of possibility.
This is our first attempt at launching a programme of this kind; supporting individuals who help us to expand our imaginations to what is possible, embody different ways of knowing and hold different approaches to systems change work. We see visionary individuals as having a critical role in helping society shift the deep code of current dominant systems, narrating paths towards alternatives that are regenerative by design.
Explore the visionaries
Mama D
Mama D's work focuses on understanding the wisdom of nature and the stories that emerge from the connection between humans and the natural world. She values knowledge that has developed across time and space and embraces ways of learning through sensory experiences and physical awareness. By creating imaginative and immersive explorations, her work aims to raise human awareness and foster healing and restorative ways of living in harmony with the natural world.
Alnoor Ladha
Alnoor’s work focuses on the intersection of political organising, systems thinking, structural change, inner/outer mirroring (the idea that your inner thoughts and emotions are reflected in the world around you) and narrative work. Alnoor comes from a Sufi lineage and thinks and writes about the crossroads of politics and spirituality in troubled times. He is the co-founder and Chair of Culture Hack Labs, a co-operatively run advisory for social movements and progressive organisations. He is currently the co-director of the Transition Resource Circle and co-author of Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse.
culturehack.io
transitionresourcecircle.org
Blessol Gathoni
Blessol Gathoni is a Kenyan activist, systems strategist, and co-founder of Sociable Weavers, a queer collective fostering socio-ecological regeneration. They invite others to examine the narrow ideas of what it means to be human and embrace opportunities that exist at the margins of these ideas. Grounded in black feminist and anti-capitalist principles, they reimagine disposability and loss as spaces of resilient refusal. Gathoni approaches each space as a portal for ancestral wisdom, unproductive love, and deep belonging within Earth’s sacred web of life.
Shrishtee Bajpai
Shrishtee Bajpai is a researcher, writer, and activist at the crossroads of environmental and social justice, indigenous worldviews, and systemic change. A member of Kalpavriksh, Vikalp Sangam, and the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, she also serves on the executive committee of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. Often travelling to remote corners of India, she works closely with local communities on these interconnected issues. When not advocating for the rights of nature, she can be found birdwatching, photographing tiny creatures, exploring new music, and collecting books she swears she'll read, eventually.
Jyoti Fernandes
Jyoti Fernandes is a smallholder farmer in West Dorset, UK. She promotes the peasant way of life, bringing old ways of knowing into the new way we need to live in this world. She has lived on the land raising cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, vegetables, fruit, herbs and 4 daughters. Jyoti advocates for social movements, such as the Landworkers Alliance in the UK and La Via Campesina who represent 200 million peasant farmers and indigenous people globally. She works with politicians in Westminster and in international advocacy spaces, such as the climate change talks, but is happiest in a field or at sea with land workers and activists rabble rousing, cooking, feasting, growing, sailing, connecting, singing, dancing or building power together.
Jack Ky Tan
I thought I had finally found myself when I came to Britain and became an artist, scholar, speaker, teacher and activist. But on arriving, I find I am lost. Lost and bewildered in the rationality, enlightenment, objectivity, supremacy, temperance and temperateness here. So now, I must make my way back to the beginning. To Tropical ways of being: of Monsoon Resilience, Jungle Abundance, Humid Patience, Salty Entropy and Mangrove Resistance. Ways I have known all along in my body from the start.