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Alongside Endowing The Future, in April 2024 we also prepared the Investment Ask for Neighbourhood Public Square.
At the heart of the operating model for Neighbourhood Public Square is a multi-economy approach that seeks to nurture a perpetual cycle of neighbourhood and civic wealth creation, collective governance frameworks, and ongoing neighbourhood-led granting pool, that this chapter aims to articulate and visualise for potential investment.
We drew deeply on the teachings of Post Capitalist Philanthropy by Alnoor Ladha & Lynn Murphy ******throughout, intentionally grounding this invitation to speak to the current system, but not get obsessed with it; still able to move beyond it.
Together with the wider Neighbourhood Public Square proposal, this Investment Ask helped to unlock the Real Impact Investment layer of the Capital Stack to purchase of land and buildings for Neighbourhood Public Square in Ladywood, Birmingham in December 2024, held in perpetuity for neighbourhood benefit.
The process from Endowing The Future and this Investment Ask to the subsequent Real World Endowment publication built in August 2025 hopes to illustrate that you don’t need to have all the information in order to have a direction. From that direction we can speculate, give form, as a legitimate pathway to delivery, rooted in the reality of the here and now whilst orientated towards more regenerative futures.
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This chapter is co-authored with Dark Matter Labs, and is an invitation, in the first instance, directed at philanthropic institutions or wealth-holders who are looking to meet this moment of societal, ecological and economic transition.
We sought ambitious financial investors as part of a multi-capital approach, interested in providing transformative finance to a neighbourhood scale demonstration of social, civic and ecological infrastructure in service of community-led and stewarded transitions.
Our investment ask places financial capital as a key enabler of unlocking this work, moving it out of financial markets and into neighbourhood assets directly, but situated equally alongside multiple capitals that nurture and sustain neighbourhood life.
Read the Investment Ask chapter in full:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wC8dsnvPiXy6HY_O8S4BoToRdCuIdiEu/view
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wC8dsnvPiXy6HY_O8S4BoToRdCuIdiEu/view
The investment that has been and will be made into CIVIC SQUARE is made of multiple forms of capital. Financial capital which is invested sits alongside knowledge, social, human, cultural, intellectual and other capitals, all of which are critical to manifest civic infrastructure such as Neighbourhood Public Square, and without which the development and manifestation of CIVIC SQUARE’s work thus far would have been impossible.
We celebrate and acknowledge all the contributions that have brought us to this point, as well as those that will shape the future of Neighbourhood Public Square. We recognise the importance of sustaining this ongoing flow of multiple forms of capital as a virtuous cycle at the heart of our design of the Neighbourhood Public Square, that supports a range of interconnected neighbourhood demonstrations.
We recognise that these are often seen as second tier and less important as soon as financial investment requirements are introduced, which we feel fundamentally undermines taking a reparative and regenerative approach that is focused on mutual flourishing. We invite us all to consider multiple capitals as a fundamental ongoing part of the investment stack and to codify this into our agreements and approach.