The Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit
The world, the values of the world, are shaped by the choices each of us make. Which means my thinking, my actions, my relationships, and my life create a front line for the possibilities of the entire species. Each one of us is an individual practice ground for what the whole can or cannot do, will or will not do….
We live (and die) inside of systems that were imagined centuries ago by those ambitious and narrow minds of colonists and patriarchs. We live inside the lineage of relatively ignorant imaginations, which were obsessed with protection and domination. But we know so much more now — adrienne maree brown
What is the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit?
This Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit is designed to platform and collate the wisdom of international collective imagination practitioners. The aim is to create an accessible and curated set of tools for anyone who wants to build the capacity to explore, learn and unlearn a range of practices related to the field of collective imagination. The structure and content of the toolkit has been developed by a range of people over the last few years who have been practising in this space and looks to meet the growing interest in this field - as an initial entry and welcome point.
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This Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit is designed to platform and collate the wisdom of international collective imagination practitioners. The aim is to create an accessible and curated set of tools for anyone who wants to build the capacity to explore, learn and unlearn a range of practices related to the field of collective imagination. The structure and content of the toolkit has been developed by a range of people over the last few years who have been practising in this space and looks to meet the growing interest in this field - as an initial entry and welcome point.
We know that toolkits are not the sole answer to this work but we also care about different ways of opening up and spreading the practices.
We hope that the toolkit will take people on a journey from preparation through to action, with many different methodologies, modalities, and themes to choose from. These tools are intended for those working to build a better world through local place-based projects and networks, central and local government, and civil society work, and especially those who are comfortable at the edges and want to try something new. If you believe other worlds are possible and are looking for ways to open up to those possibilities within yourself and with others, then this toolkit is for you.
How to use the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit
You can work through the toolkit section by section, tool by tool, but it is more likely that you will want to jump around, taking what you like and leaving the rest. Some exercises might inspire you on a particular day, others not so much. Some tools are oppositional in their approach, and others complementary. We don’t expect everyone to connect with everything, but hope that there will be something for everyone. Choose your own adventure!
If you are not familiar with the language of collective imagination (and the term itself can mean many things to many people) then check out our table of key terms below to help you orient yourself as you go.
We put this out into the world with thanks to all of the practitioners who contributed, to those who have made work which inspired this project and to all who have created, cherished and passed on practices that nurture radical imagination across generations, so that we may be able to continue this practice today.
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 believe in, discover and reach for very different futures, then we need to start seeding new (or very old) patterns and logics in the present, and noticing those seeds of the future that are already here in the present. And we need to tend to these new patterns, as adrienne maree brown says - “what we pay attention to grows” so we need to pay attention to the soils in which alternative futures get seeded. This is where collective imagination practice comes in.
By resourcing work that invites more people to practice collective imagination we are trying to:
Pay attention to who gets to imagine and ensure different imaginations are centred
Through that work we draw on, value and cultivate different kinds of intelligences and world views
This ensures we seed entirely new patterns, in new soil, as Donna Haraway says - “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with..”
Spread the practices and grow the capacity of more people to do this work, like a muscle, so people wake up to other worlds being possible, which in turn is a mobilising force.
Acknowledge that we need to find ways to perceive things differently or anew. In his essay on Planetary Thinking Philosopher Yuk Hui says that “in order to regain the future we must nurture our relationship to the unknown.” A coming back to life. Imagination is an important way for us to experience novelty and impossibility, which in turn enables us to expand the horizons of what we thought possible.
We believe 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.
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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.
We’d love your feedback!
Please complete this 5 minute feedback form so we can learn who is interested in exploring collective imagination practices, and whether/ how the toolkit might be useful. Which tools might you experiment with and apply them to your work or personal life?
This is also our first iteration of the toolkit so we are also keen to hear your reflections on the accessibility, structure and content of the resource.
Join our Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit Learning Spaces
Sign up to join our mailing list for a series of learning/ reflection sessions. Meet others who are exploring the Collective Imagination
Practices Toolkit. Share how you are experimenting with the ideas, methods and frameworks of the toolkit: what is working, and what are the challenges and opportunities.
The learning spaces will be held every 6 weeks, on Zoom, on UK time.