About JRF Emerging Futures

What is JRF Emerging Futures?

JRF’s Emerging Futures programme is built on the belief that another world is possible.

We launched the Emerging Futures programme in 2022 when we published this paper, marking the beginning of our initial two year learning cycle for the work. During this cycle we wanted to understand - through actively funding work - what a longer-term programme might look like in the context of our mission to ‘support and speed up the transition to more equitable and just futures where people and planet can flourish’.

However, achieving this ambition is the work of a decade, not two years.

The Work We’re Doing

We’ve organised the work around four core tracks, all of which are deeply interconnected.

These tracks have helped us to stay accountable to depth as well as breadth in our efforts:

We deliberately took a very broad lens in this initial learning cycle - seeking to build as many partnerships and collaborations as possible, and using funding to commission specific pieces of learning and insight that we think might be important. It’s been an important principle in the work that we’ve lifted our eyes to what’s happening internationally too, given the context we’re operating in.

All this work is informing our thinking about where JRF should take the Emerging Futures programme next, in the context of the commitment made by Trustees to spend an additional £50-100million of the endowment over the next 5 to 10 years on mission-aligned work.

This has not been easy work to get off the ground. The scale of immediate need can lead to it being dismissed as indulgent and utopian, lacking political salience or appeal to leader writers. But our view is that very few organisations are in a position to think deeply and seriously about meeting this moment - and if independent philanthropic organisations don’t, who will? Of course there are risks in resourcing experimental and exploratory work - but we also see the risks of continuing on the path we are on now, and to us, these risks seem far greater, given the scale of the challenges we face.

Our commitment to growing the field of Collective Imagination - or the many other names that practitioners give this work - is rooted in our belief that other worlds are possible. However, those other worlds can’t come into being if we don’t invest in the soils from which different worlds, different patterns can emerge. This requires planting and nurturing new seeds, and for those seeds to have been conceived by a very different Collective Imagination.