“I feel really passionately about the importance of this work. The Lab is no idle experiment, it’s vital.”
Jonny Wates, Wates Family Enterprise Trust
How it’s different
The Lab is an ongoing community of practice for funders and philanthropists who want to come together, ask different questions, and dig more deeply into how change happens. We work with questions about how to evolve philanthropy from within in order to support more sustainable and generative change.
Our approach to breakthrough change includes:
- Asking the question of ‘how’ should we fund beyond simply ‘what’ to fund;
- Setting courageous goals and objectives that compel us to work across silos;
- Following a set of guiding principles that challenge us to work in more impactful, systemic ways;
- Building deeper relationships between funders to enable greater collaboration;
- Offering supportive and challenging learning spaces that work around shared vision, values, and experience;
- Working as a constantly evolving ecosystem through reflection, learning and experimentation;
- Bringing the wisdom of nature and the principles of living systems into how we work in order to protect all life on our planet.
Participating Funders
Guiding principles
The Earth Funding Lab is based on the premise that to help create greater impact, we must change how philanthropy works.
To help us to do this, we worked with advisors and allies in the funding world to define a set of principles to guide our work. These are:
Placing life at the centre
Commitment to a systemic approach
Collective impact over attribution
Plurality of approaches and views
Learning, experimentation and inquiry
Actively addressing and disrupting power
Working from joy and fun
We believe that challenging ourselves to work in new ways, guided by these principles, will help open up to new forms of collaborative work and impact.
