Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Our work

JRF supports and undertakes many different types of work in all four nations of the UK. This includes policy development and insight gathering, advocacy and campaigns, impact investment, funding pioneers and visionaries, field building, and supporting those building grassroots movements.

We are perhaps unusual as an organisation in embracing so many methods. But we see value in building bridges between people working across different disciplines and horizons, shaping new coalitions for change. 

We use a three-part framework for categorising the different kinds of contribution that these strands of our work make to our mission.

Directional change

This pathway is critical to working with power structures as they exist now, and in acting quickly to address hardship and insecurity. You can see this pathway in the work we are doing to advocate for changes to tackle deep poverty and destitution and build economic security.

It is present in our campaign to ensure the basic rate of Universal Credit is set at a level which would guarantee that people can afford the essentials, as well as our propositional policy work on housing and care.

Systemic change

In this work we are often leading with questions, rather than proposing specific answers, which means JRF acting not as expert but as explorer - a curious, values-driven field-builder and risk-taker. The contribution to our mission in this work is found less in the concept of impact, but in learning. 

Working with others who are building alternative futures or counteracting sources of power, are we deepening understanding about what is needed to shape the conditions for more radical change?

This pathway is central to much of the work in our new Emerging Futures programme. In particular we are working with a group of Pathfinder organisations who are doing the difficult and important work of reimagining and redesigning the world they want to live in to achieve deep, transformative change, and we are also bringing together partners to explore questions around wealth and philanthropy.

Infrastructure for change

JRF has a proud history of building elements of insight infrastructure which have become essential parts of social policymaking in the UK – from the Minimum Income Standard (MIS) which underpins the Real Living Wage, to our essential guides to the scale and nature of poverty and destitution in the UK. We will continue to build on these anchor studies with new elements of insight infrastructure. In addition, we are building new infrastructure to support other elements we believe are essential to social change – including imagination, storytelling and movement building.