Flourishing FuturesFoundation
Our work

From inquiry to useful learning.

The Foundation's work is intended to move carefully from understanding toward action.

01/Areas of activity

Inquiry in service to life.

Flourishing Futures Foundation is in its early stage of development. Our initial work is focused on building a rigorous body of inquiry and testing practical ways to strengthen the conditions for flourishing.

  1. 01

    Research & Education

    Develop and share research, frameworks and educational resources that help people understand the conditions underlying individual, social and ecological flourishing. Examples may include interdisciplinary research, written frameworks, public educational resources and collaborations with researchers and practitioners.

  2. 02

    Listening & Dialogue

    Bring together diverse perspectives to better understand challenges, opportunities and lived experience. This may include interviews, facilitated dialogue, community listening, workshops and small convenings designed to improve understanding before action is taken.

  3. 03

    Practical Experiments

    Support carefully scoped charitable experiments that explore whether a promising idea can improve the conditions for flourishing. We seek to define the question, understand existing work, identify responsible participants and learn from consequences rather than assume an intervention will work.

  4. 04

    Shared Learning

    Document and share useful lessons so that knowledge generated through charitable work can contribute to wider public understanding. Where appropriate, research and educational outputs will be made accessible for public benefit.

02/How a question becomes work

Five steps, in order.

  1. Listen

    Understand the people, place, system and existing work.

  2. Learn

    Bring together relevant research, evidence and lived experience.

  3. Discern

    Clarify the question, assumptions, alternatives and potential consequences.

  4. Test

    Support a bounded charitable project, research effort or educational initiative where appropriate.

  5. Share

    Review what happened and make useful learning available to others.

03/A standard we hold ourselves to

Activity is not the same as impact.

A meeting, grant, publication or project is evidence that activity occurred. We also want to understand what changed, for whom, at what cost and with what unintended effects.

04/Where we are today

What we have, and have not, yet done.

The Foundation is early. We are establishing governance and operating practices, developing the research and educational framework published on this site, and building relationships with researchers and practitioners whose work is relevant to these questions.

We have not yet completed a grantmaking cycle, and we do not claim demonstrated outcomes. When charitable activities, research outputs or learning become available, we will publish them here and describe plainly what they do and do not show.

Governance & Transparency Get in touch