Developing A Regenerative Futures Fund #10: Purpose, Vision & Beginnings of Design

Leah Black
2 min readSep 13, 2023

This is the 10th blog sharing through working in the open the developments, discoveries and challenges of designing, developing and working towards launch of a new 10-year pooled fund for communities in Edinburgh — Regenerative Futures Fund. Here is blog # 1 from just over 12 months ago.

This is a very brief update on a deep dive in July and August into the complexities of fund design, theory of change and governance. The goal was to pull together and distil all the brilliant thinking that happened in and across our learning groups since January. More to be shared soon on our theory of change, once we have had one more session next week to check-in with our community organisation and End Poverty Edinburgh learning and co-design groups. More to coming soon also on governance and plans for working with a host organisation.

For now — this is where we have got to. This is not a final version of anything. This has been worked on in our organisation learning group, End Poverty Edinburgh and Funders Community of Practice within the last two weeks. We had a heart-warming moment receiving feedback from the community organisations and End Poverty Edinburgh members that they felt listened to and what we showed them (below) reflected our conversations, workshops and what they had contributed to the process, since January 2023. That felt like a real win and absolute credit to Talat and Shasta who beautifully facilitated the sessions and Louise who has helped to distil this over the summer.

There are some aspects on which we will do more sense-checks with our co-design groups around before sharing (theory of change in particular) but in the spirit of working in the open, this is what we have so far:

  1. Purpose, Vision, What, Who

2. Draft Fund Design

3. Timeline to Launch

As ever, feedback is very welcome — drop me a line on leah.black@evoc.org.uk if you have ideas, feedback, you’d like to be involved. If you are a funder or philanthropist who would like to talk about partnering and contributing to the pooled fund just drop me an email.

More coming soon…

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Leah Black

Lead, Regenerative Futures Fund Edinburgh; Chief Executive, Whale Arts; Warden, Incorporation of Goldsmiths; MBA student, Edinburgh Business School.