Cassie Robinson

Cassie is currently working with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on establishing their Emerging Futures programme. She is the Co-founder of the Point People, a Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and has a Policy Fellowship at the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL. Cassie is also the founder of Stewarding Loss and Co-founder of Funder Ecosystems.

Previously Cassie was Deputy Director of Funding Strategy at The National Lottery Community Fund where she was responsible for Innovation, Policy and Practice across the Fund. In her time there she introduced 10 year grant-making, experimented with how to use funding as a way to develop policy, built a field of work around community-led collective imagination, seeded a new Foresight Observatory as shared infrastructure for civil society, demonstrated how to do emergent strategy, set up the Fund’s first partnership with a global business and set up the Digital Fund. She also introduced different ways of improving grantmaking practice - setting up a Futures Club, a Futures Digest and a Scanning + Sensemaking Network, and experimented with new practice - from drawing on different types of intelligence for grantmaking, connecting participatory grantmaking with digital and data expertise, and working with Roman Krznaric on grantmaking practices that centre future generations.

An experienced strategic designer, Cassie is a Nesta Creative Pioneer, sits on the Board of Organise HQ, and teaches on the MSc in Ecological Design at Schumacher College. She is on the Faculty of States of Change, and is one of the International Futures Forum Clan.