Doing and Learning Update #8 - July & August 2026
Download the PDF of the Doing & Learning Report (May to June 2026) - here
What is Regenerative Futures Fund?
The Regenerative Futures Fund is a new, ten-year, £15m pooled fund for communities in Edinburgh that puts decision-making power into the hands of those who are most often excluded. This fund is designed by and for people in their own communities.
The funding will give grassroots organisations, collectives, and movements the opportunity to think and plan for the long-term, tackling the root causes of poverty, racism, and the environmental crisis. It supports approaches to improve the lives of people living in poverty and experiencing racism and contribute towards a just green transition by enabling equity, power-sharing, and long-term change.
Doing & Learning Report #8 – Covering July and August 2026
What is the purpose of this update? We are committed to ‘working in the open’ as we develop the Regenerative Futures Fund. In our team updates, we share what we have been doing, learning, and a bit about how we move forward. These updates are shared with our Oversight & Enabling Board and on the Regenerative Futures Fund website. We – Leah Black, Aala Ross, Andy Hyde, Joe Yauch and Maddy Cross – have written this collaboratively, with future versions to be contributed to by the wider ecosystem.
This update is structured around our seven project plans areas:
Fund Design — Process, Programme, & Participation
Fund Design — Process, Programme
We have been:
We have been working closely with colleagues across Foundation Scotland’s CSS, Finance, and Philanthropy teams to support the grantmaking and due diligence processes — with huge thanks to Conor, Kathryn, and Helen for their care, flexibility and support.
Continuing to prepare for a process where the 26 projects that applied and did not receive funding can hopefully and potentially be linked into Foundation Scotland donor networks.
Engaging and contributing to the forthcoming independent evaluation by Phronesis Partnership, with a clear opportunity to shape and contribute to the evaluation of our grantmaking approach, the capacity-building phase, and our residents’ processes.
Thinking and planning for the field-building and systems convening process and space.
Preparing for a three-week onboarding process for the cohort of funded projects (to take place in September 2026): creating space to build relationships, develop a shared sense of purpose, and begin to explore what it might mean to work collectively. We are also developing a communications channel for the cohort, alongside a live anonymous feedback mechanism, so that we can continue to learn from and improve how we connect and work with organisations. We want to keep asking what it will take for projects to work together across themes, places, and theories of change, and what forms of support might enable that collaboration to emerge on their own terms.
Engaging with Edinburgh culture and history as a cohort and residents.
We took a field trip to the Craigmillar Tapestry with some community organisations in the cohort, working and/or living in and around Craigmillar.
We took a field trip to the City Art Centre Sandra George exhibition with residents.
Through this we have been learning:
The critical role that Foundation Scotland plays in enabling the work of our small team. From support with hiring and recruitment, to impromptu training, advice, and direct, responsive support when we need it, the contribution of our colleagues and host organisation is difficult to measure. We are deeply grateful for the generosity, trust, and practical solidarity that Foundation Scotland continues to extend to us.
A big shout out to our colleagues at Edinburgh Futures Institute, and particularly Noreen, for supporting and accommodating us at every turn. We really would still be lost in the building without Noreen!
That some of the most valuable opportunities for connection and learning come from stepping outside the more structured parts of the programme. Spending time together in places and spaces connected to Edinburgh’s history, culture and communities has created different kinds of conversations and connections between residents, the RFF team and organisations in the cohort. We want to keep making space for these less formal ways of being together as the Fund develops.
That bringing people together who are working in different places, with different communities, and through different approaches takes time. We are beginning to see relationships form across the cohort, but we are also learning that our role is less about trying to make collaboration happen and more about creating the conditions, time, and space in which relationships and shared work can develop on their own terms.
Fund Design — Participation
We have been:
Considering plans for the Residents as a group. It is taking time for the residents to move on from a focus on decision-making to one of new possibilities. Seeing the evaluation of their experience -- a legacy for others to learn from -- will hopefully help to draw this chapter of their work together to a close. We have had various discussions that have led to drafting a charter that begins to define what the group’s aims are becoming.
A further, tangible legacy of the group’s work together could be a learning series – a set of modules designed to enable other residents to develop similar skills and a systems-thinking approach. We are in discussions with the University of Edinburgh about how to make this possible.
We’ve also invited ideas for developing individual plans for thriving. Some residents have come forward with embryonic ideas while others are taking time to consider.
We will have a strategy day together in September that will aim to put some answers against some of these outstanding questions.
The group is keen to connect with others in the city with similar aims and objectives to develop a sense of how participatory work is carried out across the city. A few of the group recently met with some of the End Poverty Edinburgh group, ‘a group of independent citizens aiming to raise awareness of poverty in Edinburgh, influence decision-making, and hold the city to account’. We met at the City Art Centre, learned about each other’s work and enjoyed a wonderful tour of the current exhibition, showcasing the work of Sandra George, a community organiser and advocate with ‘...a prolific photographic practice, documenting everyday life across Edinburgh and beyond from the late 1970s through to the early 2000s.’
The Residents’ Panel has identified that learning and visiting places together can be valuable, so a few group members visited the recent Festival of Politics at the Scottish Parliament, along with some members of the Clackmannanshire Transformation Space resident group, Community Voice. We attended discussions on the challenges around Housing in Scotland and how the economy could work better for communities.
Through this we have been learning:
...from the group: ‘we have become good at describing how the group works together, but the why has changed’. Having moved on from the focused and intense experience (and responsibility) of making funding decisions, the group is now developing a new ‘why’. There is a sense of grieving, of needing to let go as we move on to new challenges. Reading ‘The grief of grantmaking‘ has put this into context.
The tangible task of creating a learning legacy (the Learning Series) offers a hopeful step forward for the group if we can find the different resources that will be needed to make this happen.
Asking how the Regenerative Futures Fund can support an individual’s development is sometimes a difficult question to answer, and we have learned from colleagues at Turn2Us Edinburgh Trust who generously shared the approach of their Thriving Future Fund.
Considering how meeting others in different groups around the city could not only provide enjoyable and valuable experiences, but it could also potentially start to develop collective action or at least, collective group development.
Highlighting related opportunities and enabling residents to attend (such as the Festival of Politics) to connect our work with wider debate and provide a broader context. We identified how difficult it felt to ask questions at such events and decided that the environment, how welcome we feel, can make a big difference. Something we need to take into our own events and approach to convening.
Recruitment and Team Development
We have been:
Settling into our new ways of working as a team of five! Four commuting by bike, sometimes tram, and one on foot, split across different working days but coalescing around our love for Edinburgh.
Continuing to benefit from the expertise, networks, and support of Margaret Morton, our fundraising consultant and lawyer who is helping with fundraising and funder and donor development. We plan to continue working with Margaret until Autumn 2026.
Through this we have been learning:
The strength and power we have as a team, spread across the city and with different paths to RFF. We are noticing new gaps, identifying strengths, and finding new ways to build on what each of us brings to the team.
Communications and Open Working
We have been:
Preparing to publish our second Annual Report in November! This document will summarise the work that we have done between September 2025 and 2026, and it will indicate the direction we are heading in for the next year. In this concise report, you can expect to find descriptions of how the pooled fund has grown, our cohort onboarding events, the residents’ panel’s stewardship of the grantmaking process, and much more.
We recently put out a call for an artist to create some graphics for this report, and we are excited to be working with local illustrator Liz Rowland. Her beautiful artwork will make our report eye-catching and connect the report even more to Edinburgh and the communities that our cohort serves.
The annual report will be published alongside the independent evaluation of our Year Zero that we commissioned, which we are hoping to share in autumn.
Continuing our general communications strategy across our website, LinkedIn, Instagram, and email-- with an eye toward publishing more reflective and analytical pieces going forward.
We continue to post pieces of writing, news updates, opportunities, and more on the “News and Notes” page on our website. Andy recently wrote pieces about the necessity for people to change in order to change systems, and what it means to think more about approaches than processes. Everything that we’ve written can be found here!
We also published the second edition of our newsletter, What’s Growing, via MailChimp. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, please click this link and fill out the form, or email Joe (joseph@foundationscotland.org.uk).
Issuing a statement of solidarity and support in the wake of the racist attacks in Leith. We took our time to issue this public response because we wanted to first ensure that we offered genuine, practical support to our communities. Our cohort responded with a variety of valuable ideas and thoughts, most of which emphasised the need to create and protect safe spaces for BPOC communities and the people supporting them. To read the entire statement, follow this link.
Participating in wider conversations about our citizen-led pooled funds led by the Institute for Voluntary Action Research (IVAR). IVAR recently published a report that compared, contrasted, and analysed the work of the Regenerative Futures Fund, The Clackmannanshire Transformation Space and The Independent Human Rights Fund for Scotland -- three funds pioneering new ways of combining different sources of funding to shift grant-making power to residents with a lived experience of poverty, racism, and the climate crisis. You can read the report here, but our very own Andy and Leah also presented about our work as part of a panel on 9 September, where there was a lot of interest in our ways of working.
Through this we have been learning:
That in order for our work to spread beyond Edinburgh and our cohort, we need to share our work (in ways like this report)! Andy remarked on how many people were excited about the Regenerative Futures Fund. There are many people who want to implement similar ways of pooling funding and shifting power toward citizens. If we want our ethos to “ripple” out, we need to share what we’ve done, what’s gone right, what’s gone wrong, and where we’re going with the broader systems change community.
Governance Ecosystem
We have been:
Meeting with our Oversight & Enabling Board – Meeting #1 happened in December 2024, Meeting #2 in March 2025, Meeting #3 in June 2025, Meeting #4 in September 2025, Meeting #5 was in December 2025, Meeting #6 was in-person in February 2026, Meeting #7 was in May 2026, Meeting #8 was in August 2026. Our next meeting will be in November 2026.
At our August meeting we spoke together with the OEB about risk, our risk register and risk appetite. We are going to work more on this in the winter with a view to bringing more voices into this, bearing in mind that risks don’t only sit with or impact funders.
Continuing to think about how to include and engage residents in the wider governance ecosystem, including the Oversight & Enabling Board.
Through this we have been learning:
How important it is for us to approach areas such as risk as shared responsibility.
Fundraising and Contracting
We have been:
Sharing our newly updated our 2-page case for support (May 2026 version) - on the website here and PDF version here. This has been updated to include a link to the newly announced cohort.
Celebrating that we are sitting at £9,278,500 committed to the £15.8 million pooled fund! This total now includes four local philanthropists who give through their own trusts, in addition to larger UK and Scotland-wide focused Foundations and the Local Authority (City of Edinburgh Council).
Building on the first Professional Connectors Circle, a new group of professional advisors who we brought together over lunch to share our learning about the ambitions of Regenerative Futures Fund, our newly announced cohort, residents' decision making, and more, learning which they can then pass to clients if the conversation arises. The first gathering in May was a resounding success! Leah is now working with colleagues towards Professional Connectors Circle #2 in September hosted by Hampden Bank. We are excited to see how this new network develops.
Continually thankful to the funders and donors who have been open to coffees, conversations, introductions, online meetings, and who continue to challenge us on many aspects of the Regenerative Futures Fund.
Deeply appreciative of each introduction or new connection between our existing network and new funders and donors.
Working with a range of UK-wide Trusts and Foundations to develop proposals towards joining the pooled fund.
Continuing our internal work with our colleagues within Foundation Scotland – especially the philanthropy, communications, people and development teams. Thanks to everyone who is helping us in so many ways, this really is a huge collective effort.
Thoroughly enjoying working with our wonderful new colleague Maddy, now fully embedded in the team working as our new Senior Trusts and Foundations Development Advisor.
Continuing conversations with public sector partners in Scotland, working towards meeting with Tom Arthur MSP, Minister for Business and Fair Work in September.
Through this we have been learning:
This type of fundraising – long-term, collaborative, bold, strategic – must be rooted in relationship building and trust, which means it takes time.
There has been national and international interest in the model from funders, community foundations, local authorities, and community organisations.
There is particular interest in the collaboration with the local authority, as it is seen as a bold move for a local authority to collaborate with funders and charities in this way.
Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL)
We have been:
Working with Nasim Forootan to intentionally craft a Learning Space for our cohort, residents, and funders to participate in as part of our September cohort onboarding. We are delighted to be working with Nasim, who is helping us develop an event that shifts power towards those with lived experience of poverty, celebrates personal stories, and creates space for lasting relationships across our community.
Beginning to craft a bespoke MEAL system with our funded cohort. During the September onboarding, we will hold a series of workshops and conversations to better understand: where organisations are now in relation to different M&E tools and their comfort with them; how they currently experience and perceive M&E; and what support from RFF might make the use of particular tools and practices regenerative for individual projects and the cohort as a whole, rather than extractive. We are also thinking about how RFF can share the work involved in developing and maintaining these processes, including supporting regular data collection and analysis, rather than creating additional demands on organisations already focused on their community work. More on this in the next Doing and Learning report.
Through this we have been learning:
That MEAL needs to be designed with the cohort, rather than simply designed for them. We are interested not only in what information we need to understand how the Fund is progressing, but in what will be useful to organisations and their communities in understanding, reflecting on and adapting their own work.
That there is a tension between the value of good monitoring and evaluation and the risk of creating additional work that takes people away from their communities. We want to be honest about this tension and explore what RFF can do to carry more of the work, while still building approaches that are meaningful and useful to projects themselves.
That our role as a funder is not simply to collect evidence of impact. We also have a responsibility to create the conditions for learning: making space to notice what is changing, what is not working, what is surprising, and what we might need to do differently. This feels particularly important for a ten-year fund working towards systems change, where much of what matters will not be captured through conventional measures of short-term impact.
That we are still learning what a good MEAL system for a fund like RFF looks and feels like. We expect the approach to evolve with the cohort, rather than being something we finalise at the beginning and then ask everyone to follow.
Field Building & Systems With Others, Learning Partnerships, Sharing the Model
We have been:
Trying to get all our field learning and field building into one place here - this is a work in progress that we will continue to populate as an alternative to listing the developments here. While we develop that resource, however, here are a few highlights:
Continuing conversations with a UK foundation about how funders can ‘robustly resource field building’, we have been thinking as a team about our field building work and how we can expand it beyond our own ecosystem. More on this soon.
In May we launched the report concluding our research project looking into pooled funds for systemic change with community voice at their hearts, which is being generously led by Ben Cairns and Chris Mills from IVAR. The research project includes three Scotland-based pooled funds: Clackmannanshire Transformation Space, the Scottish Human Rights Fund (led by Corra Foundation), and our fund in Edinburgh. The report was launched with an online webinar in May 2026, and there was an in-person launch and panel discussion in Edinburgh on 9 September 2026.
Andy has continued to invite us and our EFI coworking-colleagues to meet and share ideas over an early coffee. We have common interests but rarely get (make) the time to connect intentionally. We are Islands of Coherence that can benefit from connecting, away from the ‘sea of chaos’. Some topics we have covered are field building, the wellbeing economy, the practice of participation, and the role of design in our work.
Leah & Aala are planning with the team at UKCF for our session at the annual conference in November 2026.
We were invited to bring our learning to help shape a new collaborative fund led by Gemma Drake at Big Change, through taking part in an interview and being part of a collective co-design group to consult into a new fund for young people.
We convened our first Professional Connectors Circle, a learning space for a new group of professional advisors in Scotland working in law, finance and wealth advice, to share learning with them about Regenerative Futures Fund as a different way of approaching philanthropy. Professional Connectors Circle #2 is happening in September 2026 and #3 is planned for January 2027.
Leah & Aala were invited by Liz Gadd to join a group of funders thinking together about how to fund system change. The first meeting was in July 2026. Thanks to Liz for setting this up, we look forward to continuing to be part of this group and learning with other system change funders,
Leah joined a meeting at Edinburgh Futures Institute organised by the Growth & Reform Network with a focus on place-based prevention. We are looking forward to any follow up from this meeting.
Aala has joined the Third Sector Poverty Prevention steering group, working with other third sector leaders in Edinburgh to contribute to the co-design of a“£2.5m programme to support third sector delivered activity to prevent and mitigate poverty in Edinburgh.” This work will continue for the next six months, and involve workshops, fora, and facilitated conversations with residents, organisations, and public bodies in the city.
Through this we have been learning:
About the massive appetite for continued system convening and field building through a range of conversations with funders over the last few weeks.
About the interest in field building approaches from funders. Also love to see Jo from UKCF and her newly expanded and named role – Director of Field Building. - look forward to learning more from Jo as she grows into this role.
We are thrilled to begin working with the cohort of 11 projects to continue exploring how we can best contribute to building the third sector, in a range of areas including pooled funds, participation, shifting power to residents, philanthropy advising, place-based system change, and much more.
If anything chimes with you and you’d like to know more, please do get in touch:
Aala Ross (Co-Head) – aala@foundationscotland.org.uk
Leah Black (Co-Head) – leah@foundationscotland.org.uk
Andy Hyde (Participation Lead) – andy@foundationscotland.org.uk
Joe Yauch (Programme Coordinator) - joseph@foundationscotland.org.uk
Maddy Cross (Senior Partnerships Advisor) - maddy@foundationscotland.org.uk
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