There are two ways to interpret what is unfolding around us. Gripped by a series of crises - in climate, mental health, public health, cost of living - it wouldn’t be hard to conclude that the human race is in terminal decline. Perhaps we are. Certainly, if we don’t alter our current patterns of consumption and production, if we don’t find ways of navigating political polarisation and rising inequality, then we are on a collision course that doesn’t look good for our children’s or grandchildren’s futures.
But what if we look for signs of hope, even amid these existential threats that we face? Like roses growing through the cracks in the concrete, there are possibilities to be found, even as the storm clouds gather. It can be hard to see these green shoots when so much of the ground obscures them, but they are here, and they offer us an alternative perspective from that of decline. They hint at the possibility instead of a transition – a deep shift that we are in the middle of.
This transition can feel confusing, disorienting, exhausting. While the way things have been no longer makes sense, it is also possible to see a new way of being emerging. The seeds can be found in many places: from energy, where we are making progress on renewables, to farming, where we are seeing a huge increase in efforts to increase biodiversity and regenerative practices. And we can also see signs of new possibilities in the social sector, with a convergence of projects around broad-based prosperity and ownership. Could the emergence of commons-based property rights be as profound as the individual property rights and enclosure that sparked so much change at the start of the industrial revolution? Could the emergence of employee-owned businesses spell the end of shareholder capitalism, as organisations understand their role in relation to the planet, to communities, and to their workers? Could community wealth-building initiatives shorten damaging global supply chains, to benefit both people and planet?
It is possible to detect these transitions in the philanthropic world too. The ground is moving beneath our feet: our conversations across the last 6 months with UK funders underlines a powerful shared sense that ‘something different’ might be required.
There is increasing awareness and discomfort about the sector’s colonial past, and how the origins of many endowments have roots in shameful practices that caused deep suffering and created enduring harms. On the investment side of our organisations, we’re seeing that our practices historically are perpetuating the very problems philanthropy seeks to solve. On the spending side of our work, many Trusts and Foundations are recognising that existing grant-making practices privilege certain kinds of projects and grantees; models of grant making are simply not shifting the dial on the structural inequalities which on some counts are deepening.
With these efforts, alongside the efforts to be responsive to the immediate and urgent needs of a pandemic and cost of living crisis, it can feel hard to create the bandwidth for innovation, for new ideas and practices.
And in times of transition, it can also be tempting to reach for certainty - to define things oppositionally to create an illusion of simplicity: relational vs. evidence-based work; power-shifting vs. strategic grant-making. But perhaps instead we should be seeking out plurality in these times of change. Continually shifting ground presents us with an opportunity to shape a shared sense of intent, and then work across multiple timeframes and approaches.
We want this conference to be a space where we can do this work, together. We have deliberately sought to broaden the discussion out to investment as well as philanthropy to consider the whole funding ecology, because we believe that transformational change requires us to bring together different kinds of capital, and to consider the interconnected nature of spending and investment.
Transitions are times of uncertainty. We know things need to change; it’s not yet completely clear how we’ll get there. Inevitably then we are dealing in imperfect knowledge, contradictions, trade-offs and dilemmas. We are likely to have to recast our attitude to risk to navigate through this territory: to be willing to learn by trying things, and to step into unknown spaces together. We hope this conference is part of that work.