The Regenerative Futures Fund is a ten-year fund for Edinburgh. It puts decision-making power into the hands of the people who are most often excluded. It gives organisations the opportunity to think and plan for the long-term.

This fund is designed by and for people in their own communities. The funding it distributes gives grassroots organisations and movements the opportunity to create change.  It supports approaches that strive to improve the lives of people living in poverty and experiencing racism, and contribute to a just green transition.

The fund has been set up to resource collectives, communities and organisations over a ten-year time period.  This longer-term funding is designed to enable the deep work needed to address the root causes of poverty and racism in an environmentally sustainable way and to create spaces for people to collectively imagine and build towards a regenerative and just future for Edinburgh.

We need to see transformation on a massive scale. To succeed, we need a model for civic participation that is humble, thoughtful and shares power in new ways.

10-15 collectives and organisations, who are addressing the root causes of poverty and racism in a just and environmentally sustainable way, open to working in a collective with others through a programme of shared learning and imagination activities throughout the grant and based in Edinburgh. Funding will be at a level of £50-£100K a year for 10 years. A minimum threshold of 50% of the full cohort of funded organisations will have diverse leadership with a focus on anti-racism in the context of ending poverty.

The funding for the 10-year fund will be from a mix of philanthropic foundations, local authority, individual philanthropists and through building partnerships with the private sector.

A decision-making group will be recruited made up of people from Edinburgh with experience of poverty and inequity.

The decision-making group will make decisions on who receives funding for both phases of the fund (capacity building phase and the 10-year programme) including any long or shortlisting decisions. These decisions will be made using consensus decision-making through facilitated discussions. .

Based on models of deliberative democratic civic participation, we will also include a set of advisors who will be on hand for the decision-making panel members to ask questions to during their decision-making.

These advisors will bring a mix of their lived and learned experience to the decision-making panel but will not have decision-making powers.

Both the individuals making funding decisions and organisations funded will be brought together in a cohort across the ten years to share what they are learning from their work, and to form and grow a more powerful and influential collective voice about ending poverty, inequality, and moving towards a just transition. We think that they will be able to build a more resilient network of organisations that are able to collaborate to secure further funding and develop new approaches together. This will in turn build a more resilient grassroots community in Edinburgh that enables more residents to thrive.

We plan to work with specialist partner(s) who will help with creating a ‘framework’ for monitoring, evaluation and learning. This framework will be based on our ‘theory of change’ which describes what change we hope to see over 10-years. This was been designed together with our three learning groups. It will also take into account the aims and outcomes of funders contributing to the fund.

The approach to evaluation and learning will aim to balance trust with rigour - collecting and analysing data and evidence to tell us if this way of working is making a difference to individuals, organisations, at a city-level and in funding organisations, and crucially, recording and sharing what partners at all levels are learning from working in this way.

For individual people interested in decision-making we will be recruiting a panel of local people as the Decision Making Group - find out more here.

For organisations interested in being part of the cohort - find out more about this here.

For funders who think they might like to contribute to pooled fund and learn more in action about collaborative funding - find out more here.

The pandemic showed us how important community organisations and grassroots groups and movements are to society. Funding was distributed to community organisations at scale, swiftly, with less restrictions, and more trust, to communities most in need of support.

Visionary people closest to or with experience of our biggest issues with ideas for change, exist in our communities, and they are well-placed to support genuine community-led change tackling complex, interconnected issues.

However the people with solutions and ideas continually face challenges with funding. Short-term funding drives short-term thinking and can break trust and damage relationships in communities.

Transformative thinking - and doing - requires long-term funding. Funding that gives people to time to build relationships, trust, and tackle the root causes rather than the symptoms of issues.

Between 2018 and 2021 the Edinburgh Poverty Commission found that despite Edinburgh being an affluent city, 82,000 people in the city live in relative poverty, an estimated 16% of the population, and as many as 1 in 5 children.

Layered onto this this CRER report which found in 2021 that Black and minority ethnic children in Scotland were disproportionately at risk of poverty, with 38% in relative poverty.

Joseph Rowntree Foundation found in 2023 over half of children in Scotland from a minority ethnic background are trapped in poverty, five times the 2031 target and twice the poverty rate for all children.

Edinburgh’s climate strategy talks of the need for action that is driven at the scale and pace needed to respond to the climate and nature emergency - one that builds on the capacity for collaborative action that communities demonstrated during the pandemic.

Research shows that people on low incomes and from ethnic minority communities are more adversely affected by the climate and nature crisis.

‘Regenerate in its essence, means ‘to create again’. And what is it that we are creating again? We're creating a healthy, thriving world for all, in which humans and all elements of the natural world are in healthy, mutually supportive, balanced relationship with each other. In a regenerative future, our economies are no longer extractive. Our approach to development isn't just human focused. Instead, we're embracing holistic processes, thriving ecosystems of which we humans are a part. Meaningful community participation, if there's excess resources, then we reuse and reabsorb those. And there's deep consideration for local contexts’ (Lisa Reyes Mason)

'We need to focus our energies on building alternatives we can move towards, rather than expending our energy and resources on trying to fix broken systems that are diminishing lives and hurting the planet’.

(Sophia Parker, Emerging Futures, Joseph Rowntree Foundation)