Prefiguring a Future We Want

(Illustration by Vicki Turner) 

“The possible has been tried and failed. Now it is time to try the impossible.”—Sun Ra

“Today we remember that we come from those who, even in the absence of agency over their bodies, possessed a mysterious freedom in the secret of their interior worlds. An interior liberation that no master can touch. May it survive in us.”—Cole Arthur Riley

In the last several years, movements for equity and liberation have faced chaos and increasingly complex challenges amid rising authoritarianism, racialized and gendered violence, and impending climate catastrophe. In retrospect, the cyclical nature of these struggles is clear. All of us working in movements in a variety of roles have had to shape-shift in wildly unpredictable ways, adopting different tactics and strategies to confront changing issues and priorities in response to the present moment.

Many groups have managed to cocreate pathways toward a more equitable, love-filled world by doing the necessary work of uncovering enduring harms and creating cultures of care that allow us to cultivate our interdependence with tender, rigorous, and loving accountability. And yet many organizations have at the same time been swimming against the currents caught in age-old riptides, hurting from the disconnection and dis-ease that comes from simultaneously trying to take down harmful systems while living in them and building new ones.

Many movement leaders are speaking out about some of the barriers to transformative change: Maurice Mitchell’s “Building Resilient Organizations” in The Forge, Sayu Bhojwani’s “Women Leaders of Color Are Exhausted: Philanthropy Needs to Step Up” in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and NorthStar Network’s “Long-Term Power Building: A Shared Analysis of Navigating Crises.” At Change Elemental, a movement infrastructure organization and home of the Prefiguring Futures Lab, we engage in these conversations with our clients, partners, and networks, and through it all, we continue to return to the same question: How might we build power with and power within (and appropriate uses of power over) to live the value of interdependent care and well-being? One thing we are certain of is that we need spaces to dream, play, imagine, and practice other worlds while living in our current one.

Freedom dwells in imagination, where the seemingly impossible becomes possible. Many portals can take us there and some of us can more freely access our imaginations, no matter what package we come in, whether racialized, gendered, disabled, and so on. (Mavis Staples even offered to take us there.) However, prioritizing imagination and then making the imagined real requires risk as well as space for failure that can seem, or actually be, treacherous for many people. Direct systemic impacts on marginalized people, and the internalization of those systems and impacts, often distort both the characterization and placement of risk and failure.

If we can only see and sense what is, we will continue to uphold the status quo. Imagination is the only way humans will be able to climb out of the many quagmires we have created: environmental, economic, political, and cultural. We must start to see ourselves differently and have a compelling vision of a different future. We must experience at least a modicum of joy (or relief, relaxation, or feeling seen) to sustain ourselves while moving along an unknown path toward an imagined destination.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. … If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core—the fountain—of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.—Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury”

Risk and Imagination

As a writer, dancer, and leadership facilitator and coach, the practice of conjuring worlds has always been central and rich soil for me. Recently, I was on a long flight and found myself watching Anthony Bourdain spending two days with Chef Ferran Adrià of the famed and now shuttered El Bulli restaurant near Barcelona, Spain. At the time of filming, Adrià had already announced the closing of his restaurant. When Bourdain asked what was next, Adrià described his desire to create and work in a place for exploration and imagination with other creative people, including artists and architects and other creatives. “You want the people who are going to ask, ‘Do we even need a dining room?’” Bourdain posited. “Exactly!” Adrià responded.

I realized that Adrià was describing a laboratory to explore, practice, and play with how we think of, source, prepare, and share food. While thinking about wanting to visit this place, I wondered, “Who gets to imagine, play, take risks, fail, and ask big questions—and how is this funded?” Who gets to play, explore, imagine, and experiment, and who gets to fail? What are the risks and for whom?

What Gets in the Way

Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. ... Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.—adrienne maree brown

Given our systems of oppression and othering, the very people who are most often resourced to imagine a way out of social problems such as poverty, homelessness, racism, and transphobia are often not the most affected and thus the least likely to imagine a true solution. We often get new ways for the relative few to access settler-colonialist and capitalist “solutions,” instead of true liberation whereby people and the planet can exist in mutually accountable, interdependent well-being.

In a recent conversation with Kaci Patterson of Black Equity Collective, she observed that white men frequently receive money for their ideas on the basis of trust. For Black women, however, money for an idea is typically based on a theory of change, a logic model, and proof of concept, including evidence that makes sense to a potential donor or grant maker. In the nonprofit industrial complex, serving the systems-change missions of our organizations often misses the mark. At worst, we create or exacerbate potentially life-threatening conditions for racialized people and other marginalized peoples. Philanthropy “invests” in ideas, incubators, and dream spaces for white men, based on trust that their idea is good, while the same grant makers “take a risk” on expanding ideas for marginalized (and largely racialized) groups using evidence deemed credible by individuals with financial resources. These investments and risks often translate into different dollar amounts, ranging from six-figure investments to “small bets” in the range of five figures. Who is taking the real risk? And at a cost to whom? If we reimagine wealth as an abundant, collective resource that nourishes restorative and liberating pathways, we can reimagine risk and failure, and redirect investment to those most impacted by failure.

We know that creating new neural pathways (new ideas) requires long-distance leaps in our brains that are most likely to happen when we are relaxed, at rest, or at play. Who has access to relaxation, rest, and play? New ideas also happen when we are exposed to different ways of thinking, being, and making meaning of the world. Who has access to those exposures?

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.— Albert Einstein

It was while singing … the idea of escaping slavery was first suggested to my mind.— Frederick Douglass

In our work at Change Elemental, we use an (imperfect) analogy based on a line I heard from Alexis Pauline Gumbs in a workshop she led. “I hear best with one foot in the water and one foot in the sand,” she said. The analogy is having a “water foot” and a “land foot.” Water, which represents what is imaginative and largely unknown, is where vision lives. Land, or the known world, is our current context. We dwell in the delta, the rich soil where land and water meet. The water foot leads—singing, dancing, seeing, creating—while the land foot is a necessary partner. What if Frederick Douglass never sang?

To reimagine systems and make these visions real in ways that advance mutually accountable and interdependent well-being for people and the planet, we must cultivate the soil of possibility. We must live in the delta with our water foot leading and nurture imagination.

One of many ways that we create space for and support imagination is our Prefiguring Futures Lab, where people in many movement roles, geographies, and identities are invited to play, dream, sing, dance, and draw as we design, conjure, experiment with, facilitate, and reflect on our steps forward to new worlds. It is a place to rest and be nourished together such that we can imagine and grow the fruit that will sustain us aboveground.

There are a great number of people, organizations, networks, communities of practice, collectives, and other groups engaged in the vital work of imagining new worlds. They work the compost, till the soil, plant seeds, and nurture saplings. This is how we’ve made it this far; the soil is not new. In making the soil rich again, we imagine what might be possible.

We imagine what the thing is we want to create. And we create from that vision. Otherwise we keep replicating poorly what we already know and things get worse. Courage and creativity are core. It is a failure of nerve and a failure of imagination that will lead to our failure. Our poetry, music, painting, dance, connections to nature, and the like, are keys. We have to ... be able to imagine. If creativity,
cultural ways, our ways of touching joy, don’t survive, nothing else will.—Larry Ward

A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind.—Grace Lee Boggs

For more information about our work and resources for your own explorations, visit the Prefiguring Futures Lab at the Change Elemental website.

Read more stories by Elissa Sloan Perry.