Our work begins with first-order questions.
Each ‘What If’ inquiry begins with something we usually take for granted. That education happens in classrooms. That rivers exist as resources. That ownership requires a human owner. These assumptions quietly shape laws, institutions and everyday decisions, often without being noticed.
A ‘What If’ is a way of making these assumptions visible, and testing what happens when they change. We work with partners asking questions like: What if education started in the soil? What if rivers were recognised as legal subjects? What if a house owned itself? These questions don’t sit outside the current system. They show how it works – and open pathways to alternative civilisational models.
We support this work through small, flexible grants that fund public experiments and connect them with other initiatives. Rather than looking for a single answer, we support multiple and continuous What Ifs in parallel. We learn together how their overlaps and tensions are shifting the patterns that we call ‘culture’.
Lead by Indy Johar and Dark Matter Labs
We take it for granted that every house must have an owner. Entire legal and financial systems are built around that assumption. Architect and social innovator Indy Johar argues that many of our housing crises stem from the way ownership itself is organised. Through FreeHouse, he explores legal and governance structures that separate stewardship from private ownership, allowing homes to be held in trust across generations and communities. The deeper implication is not simply about housing. If responsibility for land can be distributed across people, places and time, property begins to look less like possession and more like a relationship. We support FreeHouse’s experiments in developing and testing new stewardship-based ownership models.
Some questions stay as experiments. Others develop through practice – building a bioregional governance structure, teaching an ecological school curriculum, trialling a Rights of Rivers framework or testing a new model of home ownership.
We support people in the early stages of building these initiatives. Some create new organisational forms, others work within existing institutions to change them from within. This means helping initiatives launch, stabilise and learn during their formative years. We also bring together people working on similar questions from different fields and backgrounds. New ideas become stronger when they are tested from multiple perspectives.
These early pilots are tangible examples of how schools, economies, legal systems and communities can be organised differently. By showing what is possible in practice, they can be adapted and built on by others.
Some ideas can’t be tested in a single organisation. A bioregional governance initiative for example, involves farmers, producers, local organisations, schools and residents coordinating around a river catchment. These are experiments at the scale of social systems. As they develop, they give rise to new kinds of questions, practices and organisational forms.
Because of their scale and time horizon, we will support these efforts through direct investments from our endowment rather than through grants. We’ll invest early, when these models are still forming and their long-term value remains uncertain.
This area of our work is currently in development.
Our work is shaped by a particular view of cultural change. We see cultural change beginning in everyday life – on farms, in classrooms, in organisations and communities. It often starts at the edges of systems, where “that’s just how we do things” no longer makes sense.
At first, new ways of thinking and working remain marginal. Some are actively opposed. But as ecological, social and economic conditions change, systems begin to strain. What once worked no longer does. Space begins to open.
In these moments, people connect, experiments multiply and intersect, practices spread, ideas are taken up or adapted. Existing institutions often resist or reshape these ideas. Even so, something new begins to take shape.
We work in these early stages of emergence.