Emergence is a new cultural trust, part of the JJ Charitable Trust and one of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts.

The ways we organise human life are contributing to profound ecological damage. This is partly cultural: it reflects what we value and how we understand our place in the living world.

We want to help build a culture that takes interdependence seriously. We support people who question what we take for granted and try different ways of living, learning and organising. We fund work that is practical and experimental, often before there is a proven model or an obvious source of funding.

Over two decades, the JJ Charitable Trust supported work in environmental education, communications, literacy and systems change. We began by helping people understand environmental issues, but found that understanding the problems wasn’t always enough to change how people lived or how institutions worked. The issues are bound up with deeper assumptions about nature, progress, education and the economy itself.

We are shaped by these assumptions too. They influence not only how we see the world, but what we can imagine and make instead.

We don’t know what different ways of living and organising will look like. Some of the institutions and practices we need may not even exist yet. So, we fund people to question what we take for granted and try alternatives before anyone knows whether they will work. Most experiments will remain small. Some will fail. Others will adapt and travel. As the work develops and people connect, unexpected possibilities can open up.

Emergence Trust was created to support this process.

Where most funding begins with a plan, we often begin with a question. We fund work early, while people are still experimenting, finding collaborators or working out what form an idea might take.

Our work is rooted in the UK, but extends internationally. We fund individuals, groups and early-stage organisations. Grants range from £5,000 to £100,000. Short-term What If? grants fund exploratory experiments; larger, multi-year grants help new organisational forms develop. Early-stage doesn’t necessarily mean new. We also fund established organisations exploring a fundamentally different way of working.

The problems we’re trying to understand show up in different fields, so they need to be addressed in different fields too. We fund across fields, from science, farming and economics to art, education and community organising. We look for people with the experience and relationships to take a question into the real world. We stay close as the work develops, connecting people and, where we can, funding new directions as they emerge.

We’re trying to understand what role philanthropy can play in giving the future a chance. Being a trust means we can take risks on ideas before anyone knows where they will lead. We can start small, see what happens and give unusual ideas space to develop.

The questions we support also apply to us. We’re learning alongside the people we support, questioning our own assumptions about ownership, governance and how we work. We don’t see ourselves as standing outside the work.