CASE STUDY 2: Regenerative Futures Fund (RFF)

For Leah, the work was about building a governance ecosystem - a living system of relationships between funders, residents, institutional hosts and others: not just distributing decisions, but shaping how power, responsibility and learning were held collectively. Some of the key things being disrupted in this approach are:

• How issues are understood and by whom (from single-point to system features, capacity building and training across the city)
• How funders collaborate (pooled fund and participating in the enabling board)
• Where power to allocate is held (alternative governance structures, e.g. resident leadership)
• Where sensemaking happens (facilitated spaces, peer learning, feedback loops)
• How to develop a shared legal framework (ecosystem agreement in development)

During the development phase Leah worked with End Poverty Edinburgh (a residents group), community organisations and funders to co-design the fund. They worked together to create funding themes - poverty, climate breakdown and racial justice, which emerged through shared dialogue - as well as making presentations to funders and thinking through how the fund should operate. During the operational phase, the Regenerative Futures Fund Residents Panel was recruited. The panel has been supported by Aala Ross and Andy Hyde to meet regularly and make decisions about how funding will be allocated. They were trained in frameworks like Three Horizons to support futures thinking and a focus on upstream systems change rather than crisis response.

Meanwhile, Leah worked behind the scenes and across boundaries - weaving relationships with funders, hosting organisations and civic institutions. She describes her role as holding political space, building trust, and acting as a translator between different worlds. Her employment model - being seconded and then being hosted within a well-networked organisation and working physically from the Edinburgh Futures Institute - gave her the reach and legitimacy to do this.

Much of the work was invisible: building alignment with funders, calming anxieties, and pacing the project to protect relationships.

“Moving faster can damage relationships. You need to hold your nerve.”

Funders were not just spectators. Several individuals within funder institutions played critical enabling roles - showing up as co-designers and demonstrating a willingness to learn, shift power and take reputational risks.

Leah didn’t begin with a fully formed idea of what the fund would become. She spoke about “surrendering into co-design with an open mind,” and how the direction shifted as new people came into the partnership. The goals and values of the project evolved in tandem with its participants. You can read more about the initial ingredients on Leah’s blog, and how the participation, decision-making and learning flows have evolved through their governance ecosystem, a way of bringing a variety of groups together that would normally be in a hierarchy.

They learnt to let go of premature structure. Leah emphasised that the governance approach they ended up with couldn’t have been designed in advance - it had to be discovered through dialogue and experimentation.

“We couldn’t have just made up a structure like this at the start. It had to come out of conversations.”

As the work unfolds, they are moving towards developing their “ecosystem agreement” - a flexible governance document that partners will gradually sign, co-created over time.

The idea of governance as a social process, rather than a fixed structure, became clearer over time. So did the understanding that funders must be willing to change if they want to enact any real systems change.

“We’re never going to change systems if the people who hold resources, power and influence aren’t committed to enabling change themselves.”

The boundaries of the work have shifted. For instance, when reviewing funding proposals, the Residents Panel wanted to build a wider network of funded organisations rather than selecting just a few to be funded. The project design has evolved in response to this.

• Pacing the work slowly enough to protect trust - especially when external timelines pushed for speed. Patience is needed.
• Invisible labour - particularly the political and emotional work of bridging institutions, listening across difference, and building safety. Connecting with the change-makers within organisations who could get senior-level buy-in was crucial.

Others frequently commented on Leah’s skills and intuition in doing this work. She is quick to instead point to the importance of knowing your limits and bringing others into the mix.

• Let structures emerge through relationship, not assumption.
• Be political and strategic - especially when working with funders and in how you open doors with mainstream institutions.
• Build trust in multiple directions - not just between “community” and “funder”, but across the entire system.
• Hold your nerve - and allow time for the work to unfold. It takes resource and flexible funding to support this kind of time-intensive approach.

Support participants to bring both systems thinking and lived experience. One without the other won’t shift anything.

The Fund is exploring how to sustain its principles beyond the pilot phase. The Residents Panel want to go further, bringing the funded organisations into a wider learning and peer network - which could shift the scale of the programme again.

Leah sees huge potential for this work to inspire other forms of regenerative funding and place-based change, but warns that deep system change requires more than tweaking old models. It demands that institutions change themselves too.