2nd week of April.

Noticing and narrating from my position in the landscape.

I’m giving something new a try. I’m going to keep my blog for longer posts, broader ideas and exploratory writing but try this out as a way of being more fluid in how I narrate what I’m noticing and paying attention to across all the work I’m doing specifically in funding and philanthropy.

I’m now working across 7 different organisations - Earth Percent, Active Philanthropy, P4NE, Impact on Urban Health, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Power to Change, and the Environmental Funders Network. These are all long-term contracts and in addition I also have a few days here and there with other organisations too. It’s a lot, all of it is interesting and my brain very naturally goes to noticing patterns across them. When Impact on Urban Health first brought me in, they talked about being an ‘Innovator in Residence’ and I asked whether we could shift that to something that felt more like an ‘Innovator in the Ecosystem’ and in a way, this weekly noticing-note is part of that work. It’s part of how I hope to create value and intelligence for the ecosystem(s) - to be generative outwards. As well as being a way for me to try and make strategic sense of all the different things I am doing.

So over the next weeks and months I’ll be sharing what I’m seeing and learning whilst doing the following - setting up a new Philanthropy Lab, designing a new conference for ‘whole funding ecologies’, prototyping new funding programmes focussed on the ‘third horizon’, setting up a new foundation (or type of foundation) in Europe focussed on systemic transitions, designing and hosting different spaces to support and grow the ‘new economy’ field, building the field of ‘collective imagination’ and the scaffolding of hope, designing a new fund for ‘community technology’ and exploring the relationship between the power of music and how it might resource the global commons.

This post is me making the commitment - next Friday I’ll publish the first one.