What happens when a foundation asks how its whole endowment, as well as its grants, can work towards its mission? JRF's Transforming Wealth Lab, a five-year, £10 million initiative, invests in the infrastructure of the field itself, creating the conditions that enable capital to flow in service of communities and the planet, rather than extracting from them.
For more than a century, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has focused on addressing the underlying causes of poverty. Increasingly, that has led the organisation to ask a different question: how wealth is created, owned and governed in the first place.
This shift sits behind JRF's Transforming Wealth Lab, a five-year, £10 million initiative designed to strengthen the emerging ecosystem around alternative approaches to ownership, capital and governance. As well as funding individual organisations, the programme invests in the infrastructure of the field itself: supporting communities of practice, developing new investment approaches, and connecting wealth holders with organisations experimenting with different models of enterprise.
The origins of the programme are practical. Emma Shaw, now leading the Transforming Wealth Lab within JRF, was previously a co-founder of Library of Things. There she encountered a structural gap within the investment system. Protecting the organisation's mission through alternative ownership meant it no longer fitted conventional categories: it was neither eligible for charitable grants nor attractive to investors seeking shareholder returns. As she describes it, the organisation found itself “being told no everywhere.”
What, she wondered, if the investment system itself needed redesigning?
The Transforming Wealth Lab reflects that shift in perspective. Its ambition is to create the conditions in which purpose-led organisations stop being isolated exceptions and become visible, connected and investable. Emma describes the current landscape as two disconnected worlds: progressive wealth holders looking to align their capital with their values, and regenerative organisations already working differently, but without the infrastructure to connect them. The challenge is building the “plumbing” that allows capital and purpose to find one another.
This work also illustrates a different role for philanthropy. JRF is exploring how its much larger endowment can become part of the solution, alongside grant-making. As Emma points out, many endowed foundations use only a small proportion of their assets directly for charitable purposes while the majority remains invested through conventional financial markets. Full mission alignment asks whether all of an institution's capital, including the majority held outside grant-making, can contribute to its social purpose.
Alongside this, JRF is grappling with another challenge: how to reshape the terms on which capital enters the field. For Erinch Sahan, who serves as Associate Director - Investment within JRF, the opportunity is to help create new financial infrastructure that makes alternative ownership models viable at scale, alongside deploying more investment. He describes a persistent disconnect: employee ownership, steward ownership and community ownership are all growing rapidly, yet the investment vehicles designed to support them remain underdeveloped. Alternative models have been shown to work, and the next step is creating capital systems capable of serving them.
Emma and Erinch’s experiences reveal the realities of institutional change. Working inside a large foundation means balancing long-term ambition with governance, fiduciary responsibility and organisational consensus. Emma describes her position as an “insider outsider”: using the resources of a major institution while remaining accountable to the wider field. Erinch reflects on the practical trade-offs involved in investment decisions, recognising that every allocation of capital involves choices about what cannot be funded elsewhere.
Yet both remain optimistic. What gives them hope is that the questions they have been asking themselves have started to become mainstream. Conversations about ownership, wealth and control that once sat at the margins are now appearing across philanthropy, business, investment and public policy. The challenge now is building the institutions, financial mechanisms and relationships that allow a wider range of governance and ownership models to flourish.