Next Frontiers: Stewarding Wealth for People & Planet, is the third year of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s funding, philanthropy and investment conference – paying attention to the whole wealth and finance ecology. This year, much of the motivations, intentions and contexts that informed the first two conferences were still very much alive as they asked questions about how best to be stewards of wealth in the time of the Great Wealth Transfer and in the context of the metacrisis and the polycrisis.

Conference report

Resistance against hopelessness at JRF’s Next Frontiers Conference

Andrew Milner, Alliance magazine

JRF’s director of emerging futures, posed three questions for participants at the Foundation’s 2024 Next Frontier’s conference: what is this moment we are living through and how should we respond to it? Where does wealth need to flow for the future welfare of people and planet? How can we use wealth in ways that are not exploitative and extractive?

The first panel reminded us of the urgency of the questions. Everything is on the brink of change, said Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs, yet we are still tinkering. Philanthropy, he argued, should be looking at its funding and its mission from a climate breakdown perspective. It’s not. The choice – which is no choice – is between mutually assured thriving or mutually assured destruction. Read more…

Interview

If enough millionaires and billionaires get scared off, then the right wins, says executive director of Solidaire Network

Elaine Stabler, Alliance magazine

Rajasvini Bhansali is the Executive Director of Solidaire Network and Solidare Action, a community of donor organisers mobilising critical resources to the frontlines of social justice. After participating in a panel discussion titled ‘Humanising and organising the rich’ at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation conference (June 2024), Bhansali sat down with Alliance’s Magazine editor Elaine Stabler, to discuss political homes, putting wealth to work, and the right’s fifty-year ‘concerted strategy to win the battle of ideas’. Read more…

Reflections from delegates

Next Frontiers through the lens of steward-ownership

Maike Kauffmann, the Purpose Foundation

One day at the Next Frontiers conference felt like a week, and left me both invigorated and exhausted, inspired and disillusioned. It left me feeling part of a movement and quite alone, moving forward and standing still.

A great group of people came together with concrete ideas, formulated challenges, practical approaches and solutions. From our side with the Purpose Foundation, we brought the concrete alternative ownership model of steward-ownership and aligned financing into the conversation – a rethinking of ownership and financing in a way that the purpose of companies, not shareholder value, remains in focus in the long run – and consequently fundamentally changing the power and incentive structure of business and its role in society. Read more…

Embracing Change Now: JRF Next Frontiers Conference

Lindsay Storie, Patriotic Millionaires

I came to the conference not only as the Head of Community for Patriotic Millionaires, a community of millionaires using their unusual voice of wealth to create systemic change through the advocation of a wealth tax, but also as someone with an inherent interest in new thinking on wealth and its redistribution. Read more…

Somewhere between a lot and not enough!

Leonardo Letelier, Sitawi Finance for Good

I lead Sitawi Finance for Good, a Brazilian nonprofit that develops infrastructure for the Impact Economy in Brazil – in other words, we try to accelerate the flow of funds for positive social and environmental impact.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the ‘Next Frontiers – Stewarding Wealth for People and the Planet’ conference, organized by Joseph Roundtree Foundation (JRF) with the support of Be the Earth, among others. One of the many great aspects of the conference was the privilege to meet – in person – several people with similar interests. The conference had many very interesting sessions, including Humanising & Organising wealthy people; Hacking the Wealth Defence Industry; Beyond Impact Investing – Driving a greener, fairer more resilient economy; and Decolonizing Wealth: Practices for transition, hospice and emergence. Read more…

The importance of mentality

Dilys Winterkorn, Pathway Fund

Some conferences have the power to ignite movements. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Next Frontiers was one such event, offering a space to confront the poly-crisis and initiate a far-reaching movement. This movement, long championed by many communities, centres on one crucial idea: good economics for a healthy economy. This means investment into community wealth building, climate interventions, and fundamentally, sharing the wealth to those who need it the most. Read more…

Reflections on the Next Frontiers Conference

Aubrey Yee, Our Beloved Futures

The etymology of the word ‘frontier’ refers to the spaces on the border, the borderlands, those places that are between one world and another. In 2024, what does it mean to be on the frontier, the borderlands, of philanthropy? A field foundationally grounded on the highly structured performativity of excess, hoarded financial capital. Read more…

Unpicking the wiring

Sophia Omar, Impact Investing Institute

It’s been over two weeks since the 2024 edition of the Next Frontier’s conference, and a statement from the opening session keeps playing in my mind: “The biggest risk we take is carrying on as usual.”

The Impact Investing Institute had the pleasure of hosting Kunle Apampa, Harry Davies, and Rasmus Nørgaard for a discussion on impact investing. The overwhelming message from the session was encouragement to action. Impact investors must have confidence in the market and allocate more, but they should also have the courage to back progressive business models that truly contribute to new economy outcomes, and different conceptualisations of wealth and value.

However, transforming the whole economy is more than just impact investing. Read more…

Grappling with role of Wealth (and Conferences) in times of Crisis

Lynn Murphy, Transition Resource Circle

Earlier this month hundreds of people came together (and hundreds more online) in London for the annual Next Frontiers event convened by Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Unlike other 1 day events, there was an almost palpable feeling of something emerging asking us to be on a course of different, to be disruptive, boldly creative, and actually responsive to the interlocking crisis- the polycrisis- we are in. Read more…