Collective Imagination Practice Community 2024–25

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Collective Imagination Practice

8 min readMar 21, 2024

In our second year of the CIPC we will continue to share practice and connect to each other with open sessions and our practice fund. And building on year 1, we will be exploring the policy and practice contexts in which Collective Imagination can drive infrastructure for transformed futures.

Join our mailing list if you haven’t yet.

WHAT IS COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION PRACTICE AND WHAT IS THIS 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. The intention behind all terms is to imagine together worlds which break out of the cycles of depletion and injustice we feel stuck in using practices that centre the imagination — and pay attention to pockets of the future that are emerging, today. The practice we use for this transformational work is Imagination Practice.

This community is supported by JRF Emerging Futures team, and is stewarded by Canopy and Huddlecraft. We will also collaborate with the Centre for Public Impact.

YEAR 1 ROUND UP

We have 540 people on the mailing list
We ran 8 ‘seed swap’ sessions in which people shared imagination practice and told stories of their work (see other stories in this publication)
We trained 7 Huddle hosts who hosted focused learning journeys on Death and Collective Imagination; Ecologies of Collective Imagination; Hopeful Climate Futures; Your Town Jam; Creative Transcendence (with African Women); Decentralised Creativity with Web3; Whose Democracy? Our Democracy? (see other stories in this publication)
We started a members Whatsapp Group where you can keep abreast of events and opportunities and chat to one another in thematic groups
We shared a scrap book for our practices and learnings

YEAR 2 GOALS

These have been established with our funder the JRF. We’ll be building toward a more visible and distilled set of outputs and outcomes, of interest to those who can grow space for collective imagination: resource holders, key decision-makers and policymakers:

1/ Continue to support practitioners to deepen their practice through our online sessions, whatsapp community and the fund.

2/ Distill and share the ‘fruits’ of the community

Learnings and practices — showcase practices,grow discernment about what the work is.
Frameworks — make sense of Collective Imagination as a field of practice within the social / systems change / transformation discussion, to speak to the ‘credibility’ and ‘impact’ of this work
Collective story — demonstrate and showcase the collective value of the community.

3/ Nurture the credibility and legitimacy of this work with key audiences

Showcase practitioners working in unexpected places eg. government and business. Where do they understand this work is heading next?
Diversify who we engage with — encourage projects and practice that reach new spaces with transformative potential for CIP.

YEAR 2 OVERVIEW

Overview diargramme of how our activties will unfold over the year

YEAR 2 DETAIL

SEED SWAPS

These are online sessions open to everyone. In year 1 we focused these on sharing and experimenting with collective imagination practice and hearing examples of each other’s work. We selected that format based on what you said you wanted through the membership sign-up form.

This year we are opening the format of these sessions up, and welcome community members to propose and lead topics and formats that inspire you. We will help you to plan them, host them, and send out the promotional materials to the community.

Some of your ideas include:

Hearing each other’s stories
A Book Club session
Hearing back from the Huddles
Having multiple practitioners present practice in parallel sessions

If you would like to run one of these get in touch with Hannah@canopy.si We provide a £150 honorarium per session for community members that lead.

LEADERS TALKS

Online talks with people playing a leading role in using collective imagination to address complex social and environmental challenges. These will be open to everyone and will include time to discuss with each other how the insight shared relate to our own experiences and the implication for our own practice.

Across 3 sessions, we will be exploring 2 big questions:

How can we land this work in environments that have power and resource but do not share our culture? E.g. government

Looking across the field of imagination practice, what are the trends we can see emerging? What needs to be grown now?

THREE HUDDLES WITH A MIX OF IMAGINATION PRACTITIONERS AND SPECIFIC AUDIENCES

A ‘Huddle’ is a scaffolded peer learning journey with up to 12 members exploring a shared theme. Last year community members were invited to propose Huddle themes and were trained to host them and members of the community then joined them on the journey. They also received funding to resource their time investment. This year there will not be an open call for Huddles to the community (but see the next section for what we are doing to fill that gap!). Instead we are running three Huddles with pre-defined topics of which half the participants will come from a specific context defined by the Huddle theme and the other half will be imagination practitioners from the community. So if the theme looks food to you look out for when we recruit for participants so can apply to join.

The intention of these Huddles is to connect imagination practice to real life contexts and learn how to apply practices within these contexts. Huddle themes are:

1/ Place Based — in partnership with a local authority and meeting in person.

2/ Innovation Labs — that work with central government to support policy making. This will happen online.

3/ Local Government — open to UK authorities and practitioners across the UK

The Huddles will run from June — September with recruitment coming ahead of that.

DEPTH GROUPS

If you were hoping to host or join a Huddle which isn’t covered by the topics above, you can apply to the fund to lead your own self-styled learning journey. This will have less input from our side than a huddle would have but we can offer the following support to make it happen:

Tools from Huddlecraft on how to plan and host a learning journey
Financial resource to support your time (you can justify this in your application)
We will promote your learning journey through the community to help you recruit people to join it
Light-touch coaching sessions from Canopy to get you started and be a sounding board along the way.

You can apply through the standard application to the fund. We will be trying to gauge whether your chosen theme will have appeal to a significant number of the community, so think about how you make it broad enough to appeal to many and also specific enough to offer a clear focus — it’s a delicate balance.

SENSE-MAKING SESSIONS

Collaborative sensemaking sessions digging deeply into big questions on behalf of our field. We will run three of these sessions, they will have a fixed number of participants to help us go deep with these 3 questions.

1. Practice in Place — How do we create the conditions for collective imagination in our places and organisations?

2. Practice rigour — Perspectives in practicing collective imagination well

3. Developing opportunities & professional identity as collective imagination practitioners

Keep your eyes peeled for invitations to join these coming to you via email.

SEED LIBRARY AND SHOWCASING

We will be distilling and presenting the insights, practices and stories from the community into a ‘seed library’. This can be a shared to inspire each other and to collectively make our work more visible.

Later in the year we will be offering community sense-making roles to help contribute to the Seed Library so look out for those.

When the Seed Library is ready we will launch it in an online celebration.

THE PRACTICE FUND: £125K IS AVAILABLE FOR REQUESTS UP TO £3

for full details please see this blog about the fund criteria and application process.

The fund is available to respond to your collective imagination passions and all applications which meet the criteria are welcome.

But if you are wondering what you could bring, here is some inspiration! We held some reflection session with the community in early 2024 to explore some of the things you would love to see, and these are the ones which go beyond what we can offer as stewards but the fund could help to make them happen:

A way of mapping the community and it’s interests so we can find each other (in addition to our Whatsapp group)
building a Collective Imagination reading list
Running a book club
having accountability circles which meet regularly and briefly to check in with each other
establishing local chapters so we can meet in person

Last year we established the Fund Circle to govern our micro-grants funding process. This includes Zahra from the Stewdarship team, and two members of the community, Tim and Kass. The funds are distributed through Open Collective so you must be residing in a country where you can receive funds via Open Collective and Wise in conjunction.

ALL fund requests must aim to strengthen / deepen collective imagination practice.
In year 2 we are ALSO particularly interested in fund requests that engage with specific audiences and/or contexts.
We are open to funding applications from any country that can funds.

BATCH #1 Request by midday Tues April 30th

BATCH #2 Request by midday Fri June 28th

NEXT STEPS

Join the mailing list if you haven’t yet
Join the Whatsapp group if you want to connect
Make a fund request by midday 30/04
Look out for more info and invites soon!
emails:

hello@imaginationpractice.info

fund@imaginationpractice.info

MORE ABOUT THE ORGANISATIONS 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 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 Anna.