The Mycelium Fund

Introduction

Lying just below our feet is an entire community at work, supporting above-ground life and shaping earth’s evolutionary history for more than 475 million years.

First, tiny strings of glucose and chitin begin to form from a single spore. Fibrous and microscopic, they join together to create even larger threads, known as mycelium, from which mycorrhizal fungi emerge. This fungi network interacts with 92% of all known plant families and for good reason too: they break down raw matter into usable form within the soil, enable flows of nutrients, and form symbiotic relationships with the roots of the towering Red Cedar and modest garden tomato alike.

Mycorrhizal fungi work unseen for the most part, their quiet presence strongest in fields and forested areas, like the Blue Mountains in Oregon where one such fungi network spreads over 10 square kilometres — one of the largest living organisms in the world. Underground, the web continues to grow, until one day, when the conditions are just right, it fruits. And almost overnight, a mushroom appears.

I think about this invisible structure often, as I visit new cities and walk around in my own. Wondering if we aren’t all just mushrooms sprouting out of some unseen matter; a hidden network of policies and technologies that shape how we show up in the world and how we show up for each other. Questioning if there wasn’t some unseen structure we’ve built and maintained for so long, that we’ve forgotten to check if it still meets its purpose, let alone whether that purpose was meant to serve us at all. Finding instead, we’ve come to accept its presence the same way we do of air: we don’t think about it.

Until we’re squeezed, that is.

So what would happen if we re-organized the network a bit, added and dropped some nodes, pruned some connections to allow others to grow? What new relationships and flows of value would be enabled through this reconfiguration? What new fruits would form? All too often our work is focused on dismantling current structures and systems. While this work is necessary and important, we’re witnessing these structures collapsing on themselves before our eyes, breaking under their own weight and instability. The challenge now is one of creating something new; to build new systems for people to move on to, not because they are innovative or shiny, but simply because they work better. For all of us.

As such, our focus is on building and funding relationships and points of connection, rather than siloed projects. Over the years, grant funding has become a competition, a necessary evil, despite the fact that many of us are working towards the same vision, though we do so with different approaches and using different tools. The current funding system asks us to leverage these differences to out-compete the other, but what if this kind of plurality is exactly what is needed to address the polycrisis we face today? The way we fund for creating deep systems change would do well to reflect and enable the need for collaboration in a way that honours complexity, as opposed to simplifying it.

Perhaps, by strengthening those entangled, invisible connections and illuminating differences, we’ll discover that each of us has been building a different piece for the same ship all along.

The Ecological Principles

There’s a saying that all good design borrows from nature. Today, we see shifts from corporations to cooperatives, from centralised to decentralised technology, and it seems as if all aspects of modern life, from the social to the bits and bytes, are shifting towards structures that emphasise relations and connections, mimicking natural forms of complex organisation and providing structure without the prescriptivism that all too often hinders progress and adaptation. Perhaps this shift is inevitable, after all life has had 3.7 billion years to practise and perfect, so why reinvent the wheel? We started the research phase of the Mycelium Fund with a literature review covering many different aspects of mycelial networks, from how these decentralised systems communicate from one area to another, to the different strategies they use to facilitate nutrient transfer to plant root systems. This was further supplemented with discussions from experts in soil biology and self-organizing systems to develop a clearer picture of how the science and theory can be put into practice.

As we dug deeper, we also entered other domains, learning how neurons in the brain use similar oscillatory patterns to communicate efficiently within a physical structure with no central command center, and how the narratives we use to describe how natural ecosystems functions can be changed from one of competition to cooperation and still hold true, allowing us to use new metaphors and explore how fungi and plants trade resources in much the same way humans operated gift and credit- based economies before debt and money was introduced.

The design of this fund is one small drop within a larger changing tide and is based on insights our team has uncovered through this research process. Stage 2 of the project will be mapping these principles onto the design of the fund and we expect to select our first cohort of grantees in summer 2023.

Explore the principles →

— Rithikha Rajamohan, Research Lead