Why have we created the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit?
One of the greatest challenges we face is the way we’ve come to see our current economic and social models as fixed, even as they are failing us and the planet. We’re living through times of hardship and anguish, with many feeling a sense of hopelessness when thinking about the future.
If we want to speed up the transition to a more just and equitable society, then we’ll need to grow our collective capacity to imagine that future. We want to spread the message that it doesn’t have to be this way. That we’re all active agents of social change, and together can build new systems and ways of being that help us to heal and restore hope for a better tomorrow.
Our ambition is that over time, with continued investment and learning, more communities and organisations will feel equipped to use collective imagination practice and unleash its power. Collective imagination gives us the freedom to dream and rewild, breaking out of cycles of despair to move towards a more hope-filled future.
Having said that, the work of collective imagination is not a purely utopian, or future-oriented exercise. One of the major themes running throughout the toolkit is the idea of staying with the trouble, an approach put forward by the feminist theorist Donna Haraway. She says:
In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.
So, whilst the toolkit includes practices for future visioning, it is just as concerned with the collective imagination of the now, and the ongoing practices which we can enact in the present in order to bring about a new and different world. The practice of, as Amahra Spence says, being in continuous rehearsal of the worlds we’re growing.
Some of those practices will challenge people – there are a handful of guided meditations in the toolkit, to support practitioners to tap into another way of knowing and being, a skill that we believe must be collectively strengthened as we move deeper into the 21st century. There are rituals that help us to connect with the grief held in our bodies, that might block our ability to take action.
There are also exercises, games, and frameworks designed to help us play and feel more free. That will help us find sanctuary where we can (whether in the past, present, or future), communicate with our more-than-human kin, and challenge the existing narratives and institutional structures that dominate our lives.
