I’m not interested in maintaining the status quo.

And I care deeply about what is woven into the fabric of our futures. However impossible it sometimes might feel to shift existing structures and systems, there are always patterns of emergence and possibility alive, that signal towards the viable alternatives we need. This is why it matters what we are paying attention to at this time.

I am most useful working with one foot in the existing system and one foot in discerning, creating and stewarding the new - or as one person described it “working in the entanglement of what-is and what-might-be.”

Cassie works at both the Paul Hamlyn Foundation as an Associate Director and as Associate Director of Emerging Futures at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. In addition to these two roles she is working with Arising Quo, a transformative wealth redistribution project in Europe, in a field-building role with Partners for a New Econonomy globally and as a consultant to ClientEarth’s Innovation Lab. She’s the Co-founder of Stewarding Loss – supporting civil society organisations to die well, the Care + Climate cultural space in London, and The Point People. 

She runs a Philanthropy in Transitions Lab for Philea and has Policy Fellowships at both the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University. As a creative entrepreneur and strategic designer, she’s won awards from Nesta as a Creative Pioneer, an Ideas and Pioneers grant from Paul Hamlyn Foundation and a Leader in Philanthropy award from the European Foundation Centre. She holds a 1st Class BA hons in Fashion Design and Textiles, and an MSc in Applied Positive Psychology from UEL. Cassie is also certified as an ORSC practitioner, a CTI coach and has a certificate in energy chakra healing from the College of Psychic Studies.

Cassie currently has Board roles at Organise HQ and the Real Farming Trust, and is on the Strategy Group of the Funders’ Collaborative Hub. She teaches on the MSc in Ecological Design at Schumacher College, is on the Faculty of States of Change, and is one of the International Futures Forum Clan.

Until November 2021 Cassie was Deputy Director of Funding Strategy at The National Lottery Community Fund where she ran a £60 Million a year funding portfolio. She’s created an extensive archive of all the work, which tells her story and shares lots of resources too.

Cassie regularly blogs here.

My work in 2023.

I think of all my work and practice as rooted within systems transition and seeding enduring change - across three areas - resourcing the transition, hospicing and composting what’s no longer working and imagining and seeding the new. Transition is not an end-state. It is a journey of un-learning, experimentation, re-learning, integration, humility and unlearning all over again. It involves paying attention to what’s being birthed and what is dying at the same time.

Resourcing the transition.

The design of where resources go is one way to shape what emerges - it’s a way of giving attention to new patterns. And whilst philanthropy is not justice and I’m fully on board with not wanting to uphold capital expansion based on an extractive, growth-dependent system, I do think we can use existing capital to usher in the alternatives we need, in the short window of time that capital is still useful. If you situate it within the frame of systemic transition, philanthropy could be a critical catalyst.

I’m experienced in designing funding strategy, policy and programmes and am currently working as an Associate Director in two UK Foundations. I also co-run a Community of Practice for Funding Strategy Directors across Europe to introduce them to new practices and ideas. Most often I’m approached by funders who want to engage in critical thinking, future vision, hope, and an ability to hold multiple stories at once. They want to expand their perspective, be bolder, more imaginative and introduced to the latest practice because they are not shying away from the complexity and enormity of what’s at stake. I also bring my expertise in design to support funders in experimenting with how to put ideas into practice.

And whilst it is vital to directly oppose, expose, disrupt or resist, my work is primarily focused on how to notice, discern and resource building viable alternatives to the status quo. I am currently working with -

• Joseph Rowntree Foundation - I’m working as an Associate Director in the Emerging Futures unit . I now lead a programme of work on The Great Wealth Transfer, as well as being responsible for foresight, strategic learning and some of our imagination infrastructures work. Over the last 2 years I have -

  • Initiated and designed the Pathfinders programme.

  • Initiated the Visionaries programme.

  • Initiated and co-curated two Next Frontiers conferences

  • Growing ‘shared infrastructures’ for systemic transition. At JRF this currently looks like seeding a foresight commons, the work on imagination infrastructures and working with a group of other funders to resource both the hidden wiring ( legal, governance and ownership structures, financial instruments) and shared infrastructures (people, workforce and organisation, technology, strategic communications, care and wellbeing) that change-makers need to do ‘third horizon’ work.

• Paul Hamlyn Foundation - I’m working as an Associate Director on a new, future-focussed initiative with the trustees, that sits outside the main grant-making activity of the foundation. More information will be shared soon.

• Arising Quo - I’m part of a small team engaging in an emergent practice of transformative wealth redistribution. You can read more about the story of the work here, how we are currently considering the practice, and about some of the micro-demonstrators here.

• Partners For A New Economy - my role in the team is as Co-lead for field-building - using convening and communications to help build the field of “change catalysts” who are repurposing our economic system, so that it benefits people and nature, and is fit for the challenges of the 21st Century. The focus of field-building work is on shared missions, shifting systems and making progress together, not simply on scaling up an organisation or intervention. This is a practice that builds out networks, relationships, spheres of influence and collective power around a theme, mission, practice or place. It involves working with many moving parts, supporting those involved to find a shared compass, greater alignment and deepening interdependence. A few things you might be interested in >

  • Sign up for our monthly newsletter

  • The programme from our latest New Economies event in Rotterdam

  • The Mission Labs we’ve been hosting

• Philea - I am the Co-lead of the Philanthropy in Transitions Lab. Each month I curate and co-host a session with Funding Strategy Directors across Europe drawing on my networks and knowledge to explore different approaches.

• In 2022 and 2023 I also worked with Luminate and the Daniel Sachs Foundation on the Design Group for Multitudes Foundation, the Shuttleworth Foundation, Local Motion, EarthPercent and was Innovator in Residence for 18 months at Impact on Urban Health.

*I’ve written about the practices we need in grantmaking here, and about the skills and capabilities we need more of in the funding world.

* More information about field-building can be found in a blog post I wrote here, a SIG article here and in an SSIR article here.

Imagining and seeding the new alternatives

I’ve been working to build the field of collective imagination and seed ‘imagination infrastructures’ since 2019 in the UK - the story and framing of this work is covered in this blog post. I think of this as soil work - a time to invest in new soils being nourished and tended to. Who gets to imagine is so central to this - and without investing in this work we’ll never see new patterns emerge - we’ll just keep re-patterning the status quo. Much of this work can be found on the website Imagination Infrastructures. and includes a playbook, list of practitioners and other resources. Some particular initiatives that I’d highlight include -

• Recordings from two global events on Imagination Infrastructuring - the 2023 event and the 2021 event.

• Get involved in the Collective Imagination Practitioners Community and the Fund that is attached to it. We’ve seeded this at JRF and it’s continuing to grow and attract further funding.

• Some of my latest explorations about what we might mean by imagination infrastructures and what we are learning.

• The first Emerging Futures Fund whilst I was at the National Lottery Community Fund - that was a first attempt to seed imagination infrastructures across the UK.

Hospicing and composting the dying systems

What are the practices and mindsets that can be helpful to navigate loss, grief, change and transitions? And what does it mean to make good compost as we close ideas, forms, collective creations that no longer serve us? These are some of the questions that I work on with Stewarding Loss, with a particular focus at the moment on how we help organisations to die well.

• The Stewarding Loss website has more information and reading related to this work. Look out for our first one-day conference in early 2024.

• This is often the most over-looked aspect of systems transition work, as I describe here.

• Practices of Hospicing and Composting is a monthly meet-up for people developing practices for transitions - especially for endings, loss and systems abandonment. You can sign up here.