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In August 2025, Real World Endowment built a tangible next step for funders and investors to support bold demonstration of regenerative and distributive-by-design civic infrastructure for community and climate resilience at the heart of our homes, streets and neighbourhoods.
Having secured the first critical layers of funding for Neighbourhood Public Square, we poured all the deep preparatory work so far into a next stage invitation for the Real World Endowment layer of the Capital Stack — divesting capital from extractive financial markets and re-rooting it into the living economy and ecologies of place, in service of all life.
As outlined in the Investment Ask, this would invest into the deep retrofit of the Neighbourhood Public Square through enabling and construction works, equipping the building from its existing structure into a viable site for civic infrastructures.
This proposal was designed as a concise way to get into a complex array of information relating to a bold, long-term multi-faceted demonstrator of work, acting as a portal into the many other preparations to create a viable pathway for a re-endowment out of financial markets and into critical neighbourhood civic assets—from financial modelling and risk registers, to a Business Case and Delivery Plan.
The journey from Endowing The Future as an propositional paper, to the Investment Ask, Real World Endowment, and into delivery, show what it means to put out a vision, and then give it form, in parallel with the design stages of our architectural programme.
This demonstrates that moving through iterative, emergent thinking that is grounded in reality isn’t just a nice concept, but a real posture of how to build and make, particularly in increasing unpredictability and rising local and systemic risk.
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The dominant reflex is to centralise and control: states tightening surveillance, corporations extracting more from instability. Power moves upwards and is hoarded, away from the neighbourhoods, ecologies, and intertwined human and more-than-human lives it should serve.
We invite you to help us demonstrate and accelerate a different, more regenerative and just path — rebuilding the foundational capacities to hold material, social, and infrastructural resilience together at the scale of everyday life, so neighbourhoods can respond to crises and grow stronger through them.
In Ladywood, Birmingham, we are shaping the Neighbourhood Public Square as a living, breathing system demonstrator: a place where renewable energy, food growing, water systems, and adaptive spaces are woven together with collective governance, care, and shared imagination. A place to rebuild our relationships with land, materials, and each other — our human and more-than-human neighbours, near and far— so that communities are able to absorb shocks, adapt, and deepen connection under pressure.
We have already secured the first critical layers of funding, including the purchase of the land and buildings, held in perpetuity for neighbourhood benefit. We now seek a Real World Endowment — divesting capital from extractive financial markets and re-rooting it into the living economy and ecologies of place, in service of all life.
This deep demonstrator will show how philanthropic capital can step out of speculation and into long-term ecological and social wealth creation nurturing and learning about and supporting new societal models, imaginaries, ideas to emerge, while directly equipping neighbourhoods to meet escalating climate, ecological, and social crises. Surpluses will be reinvested into care, repair, ecological restoration, and a Neighbourhood Transitions Fund, fuelling shared stewardship and bold possibility in perpetuity.
Together, we can prepare for the worst and design for the best — growing hope, reciprocity, and life-affirming futures through crisis. This is not merely a project we are asking you to allocate capital to, but the foundations of new futures.
Read Real World Endowment in full:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fFpTUqk7aYGJPq31oPpO7BkcHtUjkieC/view
The accompanying phasing diagram to the Real World Endowment proposal incorporates an estimated timeline, costs, key milestones and learning questions as a way to show the multiple layers of work and learning interacting and happening together throughout the phases ahead.
![[preview quality] Real World Endowment x Open Source | Phasing Diagram.jpg](attachment:f7260c46-9bf2-4a6b-b858-a3b394b86644:preview_quality_Real_World_Endowment_x_Open_Source__Phasing_Diagram.jpg)