Collective Imagination Practice Community 2023–24
Be part of a network of imagination practitioners, learning together and drawing on a £100k practitioner’s fund to evolve the practice of collective imagination
Join our mailing list. Watch back the recording of our recent launch event. Fin
CONTENTS
- Introduction
- A programme of activities
- What’s a Huddle?
- Ways to engage this year
- Key dates
- The £100k practitioner’s fund
- What we hope to create and achieve together
- More about your hosts
INTRODUCTION
Funded and supported by JRF Emerging Futures team, Canopy and Huddlecraft will steward the Collective Imagination Practice Community over the next year. We will also collaborate with the Centre for Public Impact who will connect the work internationally to peers around the globe, and offer storytelling support to the community.
Collective Imagination is one of the terms used for this emerging field of practice, some also use the terms Social Imagination, Ecological Imagination, Civic Imagination and Public Imagination (perhaps you know still more?). The intention behind all terms is to imagine together worlds which break out of the cycles of depletion and injustice we feel stuck in — and pay attention to pockets of the future that are emerging, today. The practice we use for this transformational work is Imagination Practice.
JRF recognise a growing demand for this work and a growing desire amongst practitioners to learn from each other, experiment together, develop more practices and demonstrate the value and visibility of the work to the world. JRF’s investment in the Collective Imagination Ecosystem intends to deepen the practice which has started, and broaden the reach of those involved. There are already so many brilliant people practicing in this space, from Superflux, MAIA Group and CIVIC SQUARE in the UK, to Intelligent Mischief, Toronto Imaginal Transitions, Indigenismo, and Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures globally.
A PROGRAMME OF ACTIVITIES
We have imagined a programme of activities to meet these intentions. Seeds are hardy bundles of life-replicating potential, waiting in the dark for the right conditions to prompt them into action. In a harsh environment, seeds still find the gaps in the pavement and put down earth-moving roots. Nurturing powerful seeds of imagination practice is at the heart of our approach!
The key components are:
- Regular ‘seed swaps’: online meet-ups open to the whole ecosystem. We will explore important questions about imagination practice, share practices and dream together! Find all open events here.
- Deeper, peer-led learning journeys (known as Huddles): ‘seed containers’ where we’ll incubate our practice over several months by exploring a shared imagination practice topic or question in depth.
- ‘Sunlight’ to encourage growth: a Practitioner’s Fund of £100k which can be easily distributed in small amounts to support practice experiments, the creation of materials and blogs, practitioner exchanges, and whatever is needed to support the community to grow strong roots.
- A final celebration event and ‘seed library’ output, where we will share learnings and practices from the Huddles and across the ecosystem.
Alongside these activities CPI will be supporting the international imagination practice community to connect to this work. They will also be supporting the community with documentation and storytelling to ensure you can communicate your learning and we can collectively share what we are growing as part of our seed library.
WHAT’S A HUDDLE AND WHY ARE WE DOING THAT?
For >6 years Huddlecraft have been creating infrastructure for peer-to-peer learning and action, in the form of networks of Huddles which pop up through our own Host Fellowship and our collaborations, e.g. a network of ‘Renegade Economist’ peer learning journeys putting Doughnut Economics principles into practice in their neighbourhoods (with CIVIC SQUARE and Doughnut Economics Action Lab).
Huddles are purposeful, peer-led learning journeys, undertaken by small groups of peers who pool their knowledge, experience, perspectives and creativity, with the support of a host and a structure, to co-develop their learning and development.
We hope that Huddles, which will happen over several months, will bring a depth that will complement the breadth we can create through the open learning sessions for the whole community.
Huddles offer a learning opportunity to the participants, but often they offer the most transformational experience to the Host: the person who guides and facilitates the Huddle (whilst also participating alongside their peers). We will be training 6–8 Hosts within the community to play this role.
This might be for you if you’d like to really ‘lean in’, if you’re curious about how to distribute power, navigate complexity and cross-pollinate diverse perspectives to create stronger practice and inclusive culture.
Example themes we may explore within Huddles:
- Creating and sharing ecological imagination practice which gives the wild-world a voice in imagined futures and connects us to how we are nature.
- Researching and gathering examples of collective imagination work which has transformed ‘places’ and can be used to inspire new work across the world.
- Putting ‘imagination’ at the centre. How do we explain to potential partners, funders and clients that collective imagination is the necessary new soil for all other change work?
- How do we grow the space for communities to have agency in shaping their future places? What would it take for the imaginaries of communities to be put at the centre of how local government distributes resources?
More background information about Huddles for those who’re keen.
WAYS TO ENGAGE THIS YEAR
1/ Join the ‘seed planting’ launch session (Wednesday April 12th 2–4pm)
We’ll gather those who are keen to engage with imagination practice this year, to go deeper into our plans for the year ahead, meet each other, build relationships, explore how the fund will be accessed and what you can use it for.
Here’s a recording of the launch session for those who missed it.
2/ Hosting a Huddle
If you’d like to develop and host your own Huddle, drawing on the practitioner’s fund to support you to play this role, you will be able to apply to join online host training with Huddlecraft which will take place on May 18–19th.
You will then be supported to host your Huddle with other members of the community joining as participants.
You can apply to host a Huddle via this short form, by 12pm BST on May 9th.
3/ Participating in a Huddle
Once we’ve trained a group of 6–8 Hosts, they will release the themes and intentions of their Huddles and invite you to sign up. Participants may also be able to draw on the practitioner’s fund if need be, in order to join.
4/ Join our ongoing programme of open events
Members of the network and Huddles will be invited to open up events to the whole network. So if hosting or participating in a Huddle isn’t for you this year, there will still be ways to connect and learn within the network.
You can find and sign up to all open events here.
5/ Draw on the practitioner’s fund
You’ll be able to draw on the £100k practitioner’s fund to participate in what we’re offering, and there will also be a list of activities that you will be able to draw on the fund to support you to do. This will include documentation of learnings, practices and projects, hosting events, conducting experiments and collaborations etc. We will be using Open Collective to distribute the fund.
More information coming soon.
6/ Digital community space
We’re going to be exploring, with you, whether a digital communications space is something you want, so that you can connect with one another in between sessions, share resources, etc. We don’t know yet what the appetite is, and which platform we should use. More coming soon.
KEY DATES
We will update this section as additional key dates emerge:
- ‘Seed planting’ Kick Off session Wednesday 12th April 2–4pm
- Deadline for applications to host a Huddle 12pm BST on May 9th
- Host training May 18–19th, timings tbc
THE £100k PRACTITIONER’S FUND
At our ‘seed planting’ Kick Off session we will explore in more detail how you will be able to use and access the fund.
- We will use open, community-led technology, Open Collective (OC), to manage and distribute funds. We hope the approvals function will lend to a simple collective decision-making process that network members could participate in.
- We will borrow (and perhaps rename?) the idea of ‘bounties’, used by ‘decentralised autonomous organisations’ (DAOs). Bounties are lists of tasks that are open to members of a decentralised community, to take on in exchange for tokens or money. We will publish this task list to help guide community members in what they might draw on the fund to do.
- We hope these bounties/tasks will also enable the network to create outputs which share learning in all creative forms (blogs, videos, animations, artworks, podcasts etc).
WHAT WE HOPE TO CREATE AND ACHIEVE TOGETHER
We’d love to see:
- Practitioners identifying and exploring learning questions at the edges of their imagination practice
- Development of a depth of practice in the ecosystem, that we can see what the practices are and where/how they can be used
- That we find a way to balance precision and rigour with ‘this is everything’, and everyone can do it
- Learning ‘agency’ that will sustain beyond the end of this programme of work
- A sense of co-ownership within the collective imagination ecosystem that will act as a solid foundation for movement building to follow
- New and different people can discover this work, feel welcome and get involved, and that they are representing lots of different identities and backgrounds
- New relationships and collaborations developing and flourishing
- That people have used the £100K to bring the work to life more
- That people have found ways to describe their practice that means it lands
- That we increase demand for the work not just supply, in all kinds of different contexts
MORE ABOUT THE ORGANISATIONS AND PEOPLE WHO’LL BE HOSTING YOU
Canopy
Canopy puts social imagination at the heart of all our work. That means we work as imagination partners, playing with and developing imagination practice which can support leaders, communities and wild ones to grow and make hopeful futures. We will know some of you already but we are very excited to grow the network to include all those eager to bring the power of imagination in from the margins of social and environmental change projects and cause a joyful rumpus! We want this network to be a place which supports the growth of imagination practice as a credible approach to transformation and supports you as fellow imagineers finding and re-making this new path. We are delighted to be working with Huddlecraft and CPI to coordinate this network, and we hope to share any of the tools and frameworks we have developed in our practice to support network members, but most of all learn from everyone else.
You’ll see Hannah and a bit of Jake!
Huddlecraft
Huddlecraft specialise in peer-to-peer learning and change. In the 21st Century we face the steepest collective learning curve in human history: we exist to unearth more of our infinite potential to learn together. We’ve been creating infrastructure for collective learning since 2016, through our own Huddles and our collaborations, e.g. a network of ‘Renegade Economist’ peer learning journeys putting Doughnut Economics principles into practice in their neighbourhoods (with CIVIC SQUARE and DEAL).
We’re hyped to be collaborating with Canopy, CPI, JRF, and with you — the collective imagination ecosystem. We have no doubt that bringing collective imagination and collective learning together will bear some magic fruit. We look forward to tasting it! In particular we’re excited to be stewarding the practitioner’s fund as part of this work. Open Collective is a brilliant tool for resource sharing and distribution that supports collectives and networks to work in new ways. We’re curious about how this will support the development and evolution of collective imagination practice.
You’ll see Zahra and you might meet other members of the Huddlecraft team, Anna, Anneka and Daniel.
About Centre for Public Impact
At the Centre for Public Impact (CPI), we believe in the potential of government and the public sector to bring about better outcomes for people. Yet, we have found that the systems, structures, and processes of today are often not set up to respond to the complex challenges we face as a society. That’s why we have an emerging vision to reimagine government so that it works for everyone.
We are thrilled to partner with JRF, Canopy and Huddlecraft to work with, and be part of, this emerging ecosystem of imagination practitioners. As a UK charity, with a global reach, we serve as a learning partner to the diverse network of changemakers who are leading the charge to reimagine government. We believe in the potential of these practitioners and leaders. Producing and stewarding generative spaces to enable imagination unlocks the potential of practitioners to imagine how things could be different and supports them in building the collective bravery needed for change.
You will see Aurora, Karen and occasionally Katie and Keisha.
Join our mailing list or get in touch via email: hannah@canopy.si OR zahra@huddlecraft.com
