The future of philanthropy is about co-creating it with those who carry the weight of it today

As I navigate futuring practices across philanthropy, arts, design, democracy, urbanism and tech, I keep returning to one fundamental question: How can we approach futures not as prediction or control, but as a conversation with multiple pasts and presents beyond our own context and horizons? I write this as an invitation to imagine expansive futures beyond the established modernist framework and to re-anchor some of the tools of our trade through a lens of justice shaped by the communities our philanthropic efforts are meant to serve.

This question became urgent during my time in the Philea Futures School Sandbox in late summer 2025, which brought together philanthropic practitioners from across Europe to explore frameworks like horizon scanning, weak signals detection and scenario planning. With foresight experts and our collective expertise, we explored these futuring frameworks guided by Philea’s power-sharing principles. Approaches that let us explore the depths of causality and roots of current struggles pushed us to reassess current systems and devise alternative trajectories. Facing shrinking civic spaces and increased repression, despite overall giving increases, it was clear we needed to join forces.

These tools we practiced opened doors. What if there are more doors to push open to manoeuvre beyond linear paths?

Just as design thinking and the aid sector are not neutral processes operating in a power vacuum, the related field of futures in philanthropy needs to apply a critical lens. As cultural theorist Mark Fisher noted, ‘When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.’ This foundation reminds us that futures work must engage with the historical, social and political contexts that shape our possibilities today. As the Design Justice Principles determine, we must move beyond merely applying tools within extraction-based systems.

Most crucially, we must centre the principle of honouring that the lived reality of many may already be the disruptive or dystopian future that we may only imagine or fear at this point. Similarly, many embody just futures of belonging that existed or were conceived of in the past, often hindered or exploited by actors of the global North.

So what if we could design future tools that honour different experiences of time, conviviality and need for repair?

Tools are simplifications of processes, and thus an awareness of their frequent two-dimensionality and need for reconstruction and reconfiguration can support us in expanding our thinking. Recent inspirations, not extractions, can be drawn from works such ancestral futures thinking that focus on interconnection and commoning practices; matriarchial visioning that centres care or Roma futurism rooted in transgenerational efforts of healing and detaching modern technology from Eurocentricity. These methods honour multiple temporalities and challenge linear progress narratives.

As a moment of reckoning in philanthropy, it is from these approaches that we can learn to decentre ourselves and place communities, their needs and imagination front and centre. Many grassroots movements have navigated multiple interlinked crises for decades and developed adaptive mechanisms of resilience out of pure necessity. Critical futures literacy can push us to meet this moment and support working mechanisms through cross-sectoral collaboration and community governance.

Generative AI and changing resource needs are transforming grantmaking. Grassroots networks, giving circles and community redistribution offer alternative approaches that expand our philanthropic horizon and impact. Relational practices require us to navigate bureaucratic complexities and authoritarian risks while protecting grassroots work. To do this effectively, philanthropic actors should shoulder the burden of administration and compliance, rethinking infrastructure to meet contextual movement needs. Speculative and critical design can transform these processes to be both transparent for grantees and appropriately opaque for those in contested spaces.

This requires us to experiment, put aside resources to meet the moment, have daring conversations and become more welcoming to risk.

This theoretical shift needed practical grounding. Within FundAction, a decade-old activist-led participatory grantmaking network we began implementing these principles to shift decision-making power from funders to activists while building protective legal infrastructure. Our rotational governance shares organisational burden, providing agency and capacity across the network to activists often excluded from decision-making.

Our model is far from perfect yet sustains itself through trained expertise in practiced solidarity, anticipation and adaptability and a willingness to sit through discomfort around assessing and deconstructing privilege. As a futuring practice we regularly evaluate the different pasts that facilitated the conception of FundAction ten years ago and practice our imagination by crafting futures that disassemble our current need to operate.

To envision and simulate multiple futures in and beyond philanthropy, we cannot forget that these simulations begin from multiple pasts and multiple presents, carried over generations by those whose histories were often negated, overwritten or exploited. To tune into ourselves and our capacity to speculate within philanthropy, we must first centre the material lived realities of those we serve.

Futures thinking allows us to do exactly that when reframing methods through a critical lens that encapsulates the deeper dimensions of struggle, community and reciprocity across multiple timelines.

For me, the tension is not between old and new, traditional and progressive giving. There is no binary of good and evil approaches. It’s about embracing complexity, adapting to emerging contexts and centring those most marginalised based on a common good that serves just societies. Our task is now to ensure that ethics, processes and governance align toward just redistribution models. The future of philanthropy is about co-creating it with those who carry the weight of it today. This requires humility, solidarity and the courage to imagine beyond our own horizons toward futures that honour multiple pasts and presents.