group of women holding hands (Photo by iStock/izusek)  

“Freedom is in the gaps, in the nascent and emergent, in the unexamined space between things—but it is there. We can call it down. We call it down when we listen to our dreams. When we let the unconscious and the imaginal show us the way around what it is we see right now. We call it down when our present can be in conversation with what could be. In prayer or meditation, in what we ritualize, our visions become more real the more space we give to them. There are already visions around you that have shaped most everything about our world. If they do not serve us, perhaps it is time to revisit our imaginations, perhaps it is time to dream new dreams.”—Prentis Hemphill

It is time to dream new dreams and invest in our imagination in ways that allow us to think about what is not yet present. By building infrastructure for imagination, we nourish the soil from which new perspectives and worldviews emerge. Who gets to imagine? How might the practices of collective imagination open us to the futures our kin might inherit and steward? These questions are at the heart of the field-building work to which the Collective Imagination Practice Community and the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit are committed. Both resources reflect our efforts to disseminate and deepen the practices they cultivate.

Practices for Transitions in a Time Between Worlds

There is no manual for living through our wildly unpredictable times. How do we imagine, prepare for, and shape an unknown future? Who do we need to be or become? Instead of a road map, we offer this supplement to illuminate inquiries, capacities, and practices that we believe can open consequential new pathways to a better tomorrow. Sponsored by Joseph Rowntree Foundation

An international group of practitioners developed the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit, which is a curated selection of tools and methods designed to foster civic imagination, temporal imagination, ecological imagination, collective and somatic intelligence, and frameworks for taking apart and reframing the systems and challenges of our time. The toolkit is an invitation for anyone hoping to grow their imaginative capacity, try out different practices, or create new ones.

Another field-building effort, the open-access Collective Imagination Practice Community (CIPC) and Fund, hosted by Canopy, Huddlecraft, and the Centre for Public Impact, was conceived to expand imagination and build infrastructure to support collective (un)learning, questioning, experimentation, and reflection. Now in its second year, CIPC has created spaces for peer learning and forging deeper relationships in response to demands by governments, organizations, place-based networks, and communities to share collective imagination practices. CIPC membership has quickly grown, a sign of increasing interest in the promise of collective imagination.

If you are curious to learn more, delve into what happened in year one, read about our plans for year two, learn how to access funding, and sign up for our mailing list. To explore the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit, we offer online learning spaces for folks to share imagination practices. We would love for you to join us.

Read more stories by Sepi Noohi & Hanna Thomas Uose.