The next frontiers of funding are on a bumpy journey through time. We were sent off into the future from a present of exponential change, invited to consider whether our states of mind are useful right now, before taking a sharp turn backwards to the practices of our ancestors, and all in the first fifteen minutes. By the end of the first hour we’d looked ahead to 2035, and its regenerative neighbourhoods, and we hit the coffee break with the idea of July 2024 just ahead of us, tantalisingly within reach.

Time isn’t only moving back and forth, but it rushes in and out of sight dressed in bright moral colours. The distant past is good. The present is bad. The future is captive between these two time lords, which of them will win?

The answer to the dilemma of time, may lie, more hopefully, in place. Can we root the future in land both stabilised and collectively governed, can we learn from indigenous traditions, in Southampton, or even in Coventry?

If we orient our vision rightly, then we may reach that goal. The question then, is how.

Just as time is fugitive, so too is capital. It’s there, but it isn’t. It’s a tool of the master that cannot rebuild a better house, but there’s a tidy half billion for the rebuilding effort that came from somewhere. ‘Capital markets must be part of the solution’, but it’s hard to see them as ‘rooted in values of collective liberation’. High finance is bad, perhaps it should be dismantled, but we want more prosperous communities and redistributed wealth. We want to influence beyond philanthropic funding. We empathise with the plight of those who inherit the millions of dead patriarchs. We want to celebrate them when they pay their taxes. They must look less far ahead, but we must look ahead seven generations.

The dollar is ducking and diving, like time. It’s hard not to feel a little unsteady.

There’s an old Soviet joke that the future is nothing to worry about, it’s the past that’s always changing. Here at King’s Place, all of time is shifting as we are thrown backwards and forwards; the act of visioning distends and distorts.

Talk of time, and place, of a better past, a grim present, and a worrying future carries echoes of John Berger’s account of peasant time and the loss of peasant ways of life in Europe, in Pig Earth. Berger’s peasant time is cyclical, not linear. Modernity’s onward march of progress and growth has no place in his account of peasant culture. It is the peasant past that is full, the present narrow, the future forbidding. Ingenuity is welcome, innovation resisted. In Berger’s words, the peasantry is the only class with ‘an in-built resistance to consumerism’, surviving, as it does, without profit. Here at the conference, we heard that ‘people are no longer connected to the land’, and more of that full past, in the North American context. That kind of past, and collective myths of its bounty, vanished forty years ago in western Europe. Berger was writing of the last peasants in 1979. In 1954 there were 9.5 million peasants in France, in 2010 there were 600,000 agricultural workers.

The tacking back and forth through time, and through space, tends towards generalisation. It is hard to come away with a sense of the actions we might take here and now. We have been invited to wish for an alternative to capitalism’s future-orientation (credit is a tool for mortgaging the future). Today, though, there have been more words than practical examples.

Genevieve Maitland Hudson, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Social Investment Business