Emerging Futures – The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is building imagination infrastructure through collaborative experimentation and visionary leadership
Section
Case in Brief
The issue
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has identified in its UK Poverty 2025 report that 2.6 million (44% of the poorest fifth of households) were in arrears with their household bills or behind on scheduled lending repayments; 4.1 million households (69%) were going without essentials; and 3.2 million households (54%) cut back on food or went hungry. These stark figures underscore the need for systemic change through comprehensive, long-term policies to address the root causes of poverty and inequality.
The context
Addressing the broader “metacrisis” – the systemic challenge of how crises are responded to – requires a framing that expands the sense of what is possible, balancing immediate needs with deeper, visionary work. JRF has been working for over a century to address societal challenges and improve the lives of those in need. What began as an initiative to provide immediate relief has evolved into a broader mission to advocate for structural changes that create long-term equity and sustainability.
The path forward
JRF’s Emerging Futures initiative supports and shields pioneers and innovators building post-capitalist futures, through innovative funding models and equity-based practices. By prioritising interconnected ecosystems and reimagining philanthropy, the programme shifts away from traditional grant models to support holistic, sustainable solutions. Central to its approach is the cultivation of “imagination infrastructures”, empowering communities to envision and create alternative, equitable futures through collaborative experimentation and visionary leadership.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation: A Snapshot
JRF operates across multiple sectors to influence policy, amplify marginalised voices, and build a more just and inclusive society.
Mindset
- Drive policy change and deeper structural changes
- Influence power and amplify marginalised voices
- Focus on equity
- Embrace risk
- Infrastructure mindset
- Plurality of views and voices
Overview
Founded in 1904 by English philanthropist and businessman Joseph Rowntree using shares from his chocolate company, the foundation initially provided affordable housing for low-income individuals and tackled social issues in the UK. The foundation went on to focus on research and funding to combat poverty in the UK, pioneering critical insight tools like the Minimum Income Standard (MIS) that supports the Real Living Wage and guides poverty policy.
Now an independent social change organisation, it acts towards tackling deep poverty and destitution and building economic security guided by a mission of supporting and speeding up the transition to a more equitable and sustainable future. Its diverse activities across all four UK nations include policy development, advocacy, impact investment, supporting visionaries, field building and grass-roots movement support.
In 2021, JRF expanded its focus from solely focusing on poverty in the UK to include imagining and building fairer futures, alongside addressing immediate issues. While tackling poverty remains a core mission, the foundation now balances urgent policy and practice changes with the deeper structural shifts needed to create an economic and social model where people and the planet can thrive.
To further this mission, the foundation has launched the Emerging Futures programme, aimed at fostering better, more beautiful futures and accelerating the transition to a just economic, environmental and social landscape. Recognising its privileged position, the foundation is committed to investing in the deep work of imagining and building fairer futures, acknowledging that if it doesn’t lead this effort, few others will.
Challenge
Poverty remains a critical issue in the UK, affecting over 14 million people, including 4.2 million children and 8.1 million working-age adults, according to the foundation’s “UK Poverty in 2025” report. Since the publication of this report, they have seen more evidence of rising insecurity and desperate measures that households are having to take to get by. According to the foundation’s 2025 edition of the report, poverty has remained largely unchanged for over 20 years, with no sustained decline since the early 2000s. Economic shocks such as austerity, Brexit, and the cost-of-living crisis have worsened the situation. In 2022-2023, 6 million people were in very deep poverty, with incomes 57% below the poverty line.
Despite government support during the pandemic, many families are still struggling to meet basic needs, with certain groups like lone parents, disabled individuals and ethnic minorities facing disproportionately high rates of poverty. This deepening poverty and its
consequences mean long-term, comprehensive policies are needed to address the root causes of poverty and inequality.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, initially focused on addressing poverty in the UK, recognised that tackling the root causes – such as economic structures, access to resources and social injustices – was essential for creating lasting change. Without addressing these underlying factors, efforts to alleviate poverty would remain limited and unsustainable. JRF‘s approach acknowledges the interconnected challenges of the metacrisis, polycrisis, and permacrisis, which encompass environmental degradation, economic instability and social inequality. By focusing on systemic reforms, the foundation aims to prevent the recurrence of poverty and reduce the risks of these crises. Its vision includes reimagining global financial systems to prioritise equity, sustainability and fair wealth distribution, while steering resources toward community development and climate action.
As JRF shifted its mission from solely tackling poverty in the immediate present to accelerating equitable transitions for the future, it found itself grappling with how to redefine its priorities. The team has had to think hard about how to balance the urgent and growing need to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty today, with the need to intensify investments in alternative futures rooted in community and ecological wealth. Building a coherent strategy in this context has been challenging.
Its governance and financial strategies also posed significant challenges for JRF. With its endowment growing substantially (to over £400m/€475m) during Covid-19, questions emerged over how much to spend and invest, and critically, the degree to which those investments fully aligned with the mission. The foundation has ongoing commitments to the Housing Trust, which is part of its group structure, so while spending down wasn’t an option that Trustees considered, the Board have committed to moving towards a fully mission-aligned endowment over the coming years. In this way, the team have not only been working to realign JRF’s programmatic priorities, but also the overall assets of the foundation, to be in service of supporting and speeding up the transition.
The Emerging Futures initiative focuses on addressing long-term, interconnected crises like poverty, economic inequality and environmental degradation. Its bigger objectives include fostering innovative solutions and imagining more equitable futures. This initiative aligns with the foundation‘s role by pushing beyond short-term relief to tackle systemic causes of inequality, ensuring that JRF’s efforts are not just reactive but transformative. Through these efforts, Emerging Futures aims to create lasting societal change, shaping policies and practices that address deep-rooted disparities for a more just and sustainable future.
Approach
JRF has adopted a distinctive approach with its Emerging Futures initiative, designed to foster systemic change and build equitable futures. The initiative addresses long-term challenges through multiple interconnected efforts. These include:
- Supporting and shielding an ecosystem of organisations building post-capitalist futures across the UK
- Fostering and deepening practices of collective imagination (see for example the 800+ practice community, and the toolkit launched in 2024), to build hope and counter fatalism
- Backing visionaries and storytellers to promote different visions of what might be possible
- Nurturing a radical field of transformative investment that seeks to shape a finance system in service of people and planet
This approach aligns with the foundation‘s mission to accelerate the transition to a more just society by addressing the root causes of poverty and inequality.
Re-shaping philanthropy and investment
Driven by a deep commitment to equity, transformation and the creation of „imagination infrastructures“ – the foundational ideas, structures and processes that can enable new social and economic systems to emerge – the foundation draws from global examples of transformative economic models to inform its work in the UK. This involves exploring new financial instruments and investment strategies that are being successfully implemented in other parts of the world. The organisation’s commitment to equity and transformation is reflected in its recruitment and team-building efforts, where diversity of thought and experience is highly valued, and in its funding practices, which prioritise projects that challenge existing inequities and support systemic change.
As an organisation, JRF has been committed to continuous learning, engaging in hypothesis-driven sessions and sensemaking exercises to better understand its approach. The foundation has been inspired by the way that Luminate made use of a hypothesis/assumption framework in this space. Monthly sessions with imagination partners have been essential for refining understanding and making sense of the complex landscape. However, capturing these learnings in a meaningful way is an ongoing area of inquiry. Finding ways of linking learning to the foundation’s overall theory of change, rather than taking a traditional “impact” lens to individual organisations being funded, is an area in active development in early 2025.
Supporting and shielding “future-builders”
The Emerging Futures programme supports those developing ideas that draw us from the status quo, creating new systems and models that can replace them. Over the last two years, the foundation has backed a network of organisations who are working to build post-capitalist futures across the UK. These organisations represent critical nodes in a wider ecosystem uncovered by an innovative social network mapping project the foundation commissioned in 2024. This research suggests there are around 2000 organisations across the UK engaged in this kind of work.
Their efforts span multiple human systems, geographic scales and practices, but all are rooted in powerful ambitions, using words like joy, regeneration, solidarity, life-affirming and healing to describe their work. While this kind of work may not yet be completely re-shaping policy and politics, there is a growing coherence and power to it, and JRF hopes that its new five-year commitment to this ecosystem will bring further stability and power to the work.
Building imagination infrastructures
The Emerging Futures initiative supports “imagination infrastructures“ by nurturing collective creativity to envision and build more equitable futures. It resources communities and organisations to dream and imagine together how the world could look different, to think more expansively about what might be possible. Much of this work is directly concerned with tackling the “metacrisis” – helping us to see the world in new ways, moving us past the dominant modernist narratives of separation and scarcity. This approach emphasises that transformation is driven by new ways of thinking and collective action. But the foundation recognises this is a relatively nascent area for funder activity, and so the team is working closely with other leading thinkers and practitioners in this field from around the world, to shape its future responsibilities in relation to this work.
Results
Resourcing pathfinders and building a network of “future-builders”
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) supports a group of organisations known as “Pathfinders”, which are actively engaged in reimagining and redesigning societal structures to achieve transformative change. These organisations focus on practical, place-based initiatives that build operable frameworks, such as new legal contracts and governance models, rather than merely addressing specific issues. One such Pathfinder is the Centre for Knowledge Equity, which integrates lived, learned and practiced experiences to empower leaders in creating systems-level change. This initiative exemplifies JRF‘s commitment to supporting organisations that are not only envisioning alternative futures but also actively constructing the frameworks necessary to realise them.
JRF‘s funding approach for these Pathfinders includes not only unrestricted core funding but also support for accessing specialist resources and expanding potential funding. This comprehensive support enables organisations to build long-term systemic change in their local contexts. Through its support of Pathfinders, JRF aims at fostering anticipatory capacity within civil society, empowering communities to actively shape their futures.
Despite these efforts, there are challenges in determining when to experiment quietly versus when to escalate experiments across the organisation. Recruitment challenges related to the capabilities needed for such work, and the need to „walk the talk“ in recognising the realities of the work, have added further complications.
Key learnings have emerged, including the importance of collaboration on issues such as extreme wealth, and the underestimated need for specific competencies in hiring to meet the demands of this new approach. JRF’s broadened role – balancing grantmaking, field-building and catalytic collaboration – positions it among peers far beyond traditional philanthropy. By never having been confined to a grantmaking identity, JRF has been able to experiment with innovative models, advancing its mission to steward equitable and impactful transitions for the future.
Building an ecosystem
JRF is not just funding individual projects but is working to build an interconnected ecosystem of initiatives. By connecting different initiatives and encouraging collaboration, JRF is helping to amplify the effects of each project, creating a network of changemakers who can support and sustain each other’s work. By fostering collaboration, shared learning and resource-sharing, they create a more robust infrastructure for systemic change.
For example, JRF is encouraging their Pathfinders to build horizontal relationships and share learning among partners to co-create solutions, rather than work alone. The work involves exploring new approaches in areas such as grass-roots initiatives; emerging fields like community power and care systems; governance reforms; and shifting narratives to engage broader audiences. Central to this work is the preparation of communities – particularly marginalised ones – to imagine and help build more equitable futures through joint action and collective learning.
Reimagining investment
Over the last three years, JRF has convened a major annual conference designed to bring together leading global voices on the roles and responsibilities of philanthropists and investors in these times of polycrisis. The 2024 “Next Frontiers” conference focused on transformative approaches to wealth management and redistribution, philanthropy and investment.
Additionally, JRF‘s Emerging Futures programme exemplifies the foundation’s dedication to reimagining investment to transfer wealth and power. Through this initiative, JRF funds projects like the Good Ancestor Movement and ShareAction, focusing on wealth redistribution and influencing the „Great Wealth Transfer”. By supporting these organisations, JRF aims to play its part in dismantling the “wealth defence industry” and resource the hacks, investment approaches, governance models and ownership structures that together could reshape our finance systems to prioritise community and ecological well-being over traditional profit motives. These efforts demonstrate JRF‘s proactive role in shifting economic power, ensuring that the benefits of development are shared more equitably.
Culture of openness and transparency
The Emerging Futures programme exemplifies authentic leadership through its transparent approach to development. Sophia Parker, the Director of Emerging Futures, has offered candid insights into the programme’s evolution. In her blog post, “Emerging Futures at JRF – two years in, the story so far,” Parker reflects on the journey, acknowledging both successes and challenges encountered along the way. This openness not only fosters trust but also invites stakeholders to engage deeply with the programme’s development. By sharing these experiences, the programme demonstrates a commitment to learning and adapting, ensuring that it remains responsive to the needs of those it aims to serve.