Introduction

My guest this week is someone who is both right at the edge of the emerging futures and in a position to exert leverage at some of the highest points of the scale at which change happens. 

Sophia Parker is the Emerging Futures Director at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a philanthropic organisation with a long history of progressive work, aiming for social and cultural equity.  It is still committed to the research that sheds new light onto the nature and scale of poverty and injustice in the UK. It is still advocating for change and supporting the people who are making it happen - but newly it is supporting those who are at the leading edge of paradigm shift, exploring all the myriad ways we could break out of late stage capitalism and towards that more flourishing future our hearts know is possible. 

And there are so many ways - one of the many things I took on board from this conversation was the number of people and organisations around the world who are working in and expanding the radical spaces we've touched on recently with Indy Johar and then Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy.  

In her role as the Director of the Emerging Futures Programme, Sophia is working at the heart of the change, connecting ideas, exploring how best to support them in ways that will grow us forward and not just keep propping up the old system and the old narratives.  She's delving deeply into ways to change the narrative, the levels at which that happens, where are the tipping points in our culture and how do we support and entire ecosystem of transformation.  Near the top of the hour, we talked about hope and truly, I came away from this conversation a lot more hopeful than when we started. 

Bio:
Sophia Parker was CEO of Little Village, the London-based charity she founded in 2016 that works to tackle child poverty. Now, she is the Emerging Futures Director at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a philanthropic organisation with a long history of progressive work, aiming for social equity. The Emerging Futures programme was set up to imagine and grow radical new approaches to tackling poverty, in collaboration with partners and people with lived experience of poverty.
Previously she has held senior leadership positions in think tanks and charities, as well as working in government locally and nationally, and was a Research Associate at Harvard's Kennedy School).

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Sophia's Blog Emerging Futures at JRF - two years in, the story so far | JRF
Joseph Rowntree Foundation https://www.jrf.org.uk/
JRF Emerging Futures https://www.jrf.org.uk/society/emerging-futures/
Little Village https://littlevillagehq.org/
Geoff Mulgan Another World is Possible https://www.geoffmulgan.com/another-world-is-possible
Meg Wheatley - Two Loop theory  https://transformationallearningopportunities.com/two-loop-theory
EF/JRF Imagination Infrastructure Event https://www.imaginationinfrastructuring.com/imagination-infrastructure-initiatves/iievent-pw8gj
The Onion Collective: https://www.onioncollective.co.uk/
The Onion Collective: Liminal economics paper - https://medium.com/onioncollective/liminal-economics-swimming-at-the-edge-of-the-economy-f16fb476daa4
Centre for Public Impact https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/europe
Canopy https://www.canopy.si/
Center for Economic Democracy https://www.economicdemocracy.us/
York: New Constellations https://newconstellations.co/journey/york/
Opus in Sheffield https://weareopus.org/
CoLab Dudley https://dudleyhighstreet.uk/colab-dudley/
SuperFlux https://superflux.in/
Cassie Robinson Emerging Futures, Patterning the Emerging Horizon https://videos.theconference.se/cassie-robinson-emerging-futures
Lankelly Chase https://lankellychase.org.uk
ThirtyPercy https://thirtypercy.org/
Dimple Abichandani https://www.ncfp.org/people/dimple-abichandi/
Nkem Ndefo https://lumostransforms.com/team/nkem-ndefo/