Seeding alternative futures in our neighbourhoods and communities

JRF’s Emerging Futures Pathfinders

Doughnut Economics Peer to Peer Learning Journey Launch, February 2022, Ladywood, Birmingham

Back in the depths of winter, just before finishing off for the year,  the CoLab Dudley team (which is convened by Dudley CVS) received a most unexpected letter by email. It was from the Emerging Futures team at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and opened with:

We are writing to you because firstly, the work you do is amazing – the deep, hard, long work of transformative change. You inspire us daily and we know that as an initiative who is building the new in the context of the old, there are so many layers to your work. And that takes skill, tenacity and courage.

This letter brought the news that the CoLab Dudley team was being invited to become part of an ecosystem of people and initiatives ‘working to reimagine and redesign the world they want to live in, and the world they hope to leave behind’.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation want to get alongside us all, and support people who are ‘building new ideas that show us in practice what a more equitable and just future could look like’. The support takes many forms, and isn’t grants – as Sophia Parker, the Emerging Futures Director, explains:

“…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.”

Images from CoLab Dudley’s work 2021-2022

Joseph Rowntree Foundation Emerging Futures team have described the kind of work they wanted to bring into relationship:

We want to support the survival and flourishing of organisations and collaborations which are reimagining and redesigning the world they want to live in, and the world they hope to leave behind. The organisations who are visibly and loudly challenging and rewiring the deep structure of current systems.

We are looking for work that is charting a path to a more equitable and just future. We think that often this work has a different starting point: it is rooted in the concepts of solidarity, liberation, and interdependence. It seeks to explicitly move away from systems that depend on extractive and exploitative practices. It draws on multiple kinds of knowledge and practice, as well as developing new ideas. It operates in tangible ways: showing what’s possible in a way that others can engage with – but importantly, it relates this work to the less tangible shifts that might also be needed in our narratives, identities and imaginations. This kind of work is rarely grounded in a single theme such as ‘care’ or ‘housing’. Instead it seeks to tackle injustice as it shows up in multiple interlocking systems.

In a blog post titled: Our first steps towards resourcing a network of future builders, Sophia and Associate Director Cassie Robinson share an evolving set of characteristics that they think are common across this future-building work. In short they are:

• Bringing a propositional approach
• Starting from a different place
• Addressing change in multiple, interlocking systems simultaneously
• Revealing what else needs redesigning as they build
• Ecosystem mindset
• Plural practices

These were shared with us alongside the letter in December and felt like such affirmation of the work that Dudley CVS has been shaping through CoLab Dudley. They also help to make sense of why we would come into relationship and share knowledge with people leading initiatives ranging from in a people-led response to the housing crisis in Bristol (We Can Make), to a science lab focused on health justice (Centric Lab), or a social enterprise tackling social, cultural and environmental injustice in Watchet, Somerset (Onion Collective) to the team behind climate transition infrastructure in Birmingham (Civic Square)… and many more.

Over a mini-series of blogs posts / photo diaries in the next two to three weeks I’ll be sharing stories about our growing connections with six of the Pathfinders, and ways that you can get involved in their work / our collaborations. You’ll be able to find out more about:

• How WeCanMake in Bristol are imagining and making new ways to create homes, and opportunities to connect with them through Retrofit Reimagined 2023.
• How we’re working with Onion Collective (based in Watchet) to test out a digital mapping that allows communities to reveal the hidden connections that bind them together.
• Our involvement in peer learning programmes led by Civic Square (based in Birmingham), including photos and stories from Dudley residents exploring Doughnut Economics.
• How the team at Centric Lab are supporting a UK wide peer-to-peer learning journey with people interested in addressing systemic inequities to communally create neighbourhoods that are life-sustaining.
• MAIA’s vision of a world towards liberation, and their mission to grow capacity for collective world-building, where Black imagination and culture are lenses to explore how we get free.
• 50 years of research and innovation in alternative technologies as a response to concerns around the environmental impact of fossil fuels, led by the Centre for Alternative Technology in Mid Wales.

I hope that you will find the work and approaches of these Pathfinders as inspiring as we do.