Stewardship Beyond Growth.

In 2019, I built something that I now realise was searching for a language I did not yet possess.

At the time, anne thomas was still taking shape, and I found myself preoccupied with what seemed like a practical question: How do we know whether a business is truly creating value? Profit felt necessary, but it never felt sufficient. Businesses operate within societies, draw upon public infrastructure, shape the lives of employees, influence suppliers and leave lasting marks on the communities they inhabit. Surely their success ought to be measured by more than financial performance alone.

The framework I developed became the Social Impact Index. Looking back at it now, I can see both its ambition and its limitations. It was still an attempt to measure organizations through a collection of indicators, yet hidden among the financial ratios were questions that felt strangely different. Alongside profitability sat transparency. Alongside operational efficiency sat supplier diversity, customer diversity and a score intended to reflect the wider contribution a business made to society.

At the time, I believed I was designing a better scorecard, looking back, I think I was asking a different question altogether. I was trying to understand what institutions exist to do and that question never really left me, it simply kept changing its clothes.

Through my artwork, it appeared as questions about inherited systems of knowledge. Through the Heritage AI Lab, it became a question about the stewardship of memory. Working with Nigerians in New York led me to think about belonging and the invisible systems that allow communities to endure. What once felt like separate projects now seem to be asking remarkably similar questions. How do institutions create value that outlives the moment? How do they remain useful to people they may never meet?

Earlier this week, I found myself reading "Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries," a review published in The Lancet Planetary Health. Rather than treating economic growth as society's primary objective, the authors argue that economies should be organised around a different purpose altogether: improving human wellbeing within planetary boundaries. GDP, they suggest, is an inadequate measure of progress because it tells us surprisingly little about whether societies are actually flourishing

One idea, in particular, stayed with me.

The paper describes economies as provisioning systems: the interconnected institutions, infrastructures and social arrangements through which societies meet human needs. Health care, education, housing, governance, transport and culture are not peripheral to the economy. They are among the very systems that determine whether people are able to live well.

Reading that definition, I realised why the paper felt strangely familiar. For years, I had been trying to improve the way we measure institutions. The paper invited me to ask whether measurement was ever the real question and to consider the deeper question of stewardship.

Stewardship begins with a different assumption. It assumes that institutions are not valuable because they exist, nor because they grow, but because they continue creating conditions in which people can flourish. Growth may be one consequence of that work, but it is not its purpose.

That distinction feels subtle until you begin applying it.

A museum is not successful because visitor numbers increase if curiosity declines. A community is not healthier simply because membership grows if trust becomes thinner. A business cannot claim success through quarterly profits alone if the communities from which it draws its labour, customers and legitimacy are left weaker than before. The metric is not the mission.

For a long time, I thought institutional stewardship meant protecting what already existed. Increasingly, I think it means preparing institutions for people we will never meet.

It asks whether knowledge will remain accessible long after we are gone. Whether communities will still generate belonging for newcomers. Whether cultural institutions will continue interpreting, not simply preserving, the societies they serve. Whether businesses strengthen the environments that make their own existence possible. Stewardship is, in many ways, an act of faith, that assumes the most valuable outcomes of our work may belong to another generation.

Looking back, I no longer think I have spent the past seven years trying to understand social impact. I think I have been trying to understand what it means to steward an institution. One asks how much difference we make in our own lifetime. The other asks what kind of inheritance we leave for those who come after us. Perhaps that is the more enduring measure of success. Not whether our institutions became larger or more influential, but whether they became better custodians of the people, knowledge and possibilities entrusted to them.