Collective Imagination Practice Fund: What are we funding in year #2?
Summaries of the 35 collective imagination projects that are receiving micro-funding in 2024.
18 months on from the initiation of the Collective Imagination Practice Community and we’ve now funded 71 requests for micro-funding through the Practice Fund. In January I published summaries of 36 initiatives that we funded in 2023, and today I’m sharing summaries of the 35 projects the Fund Circle has chosen to resource this year.
In year 2 we re-shaped the criteria for the Practice Fund, and included some new prompts, to encourage fund requests that engage with specific audiences and/or contexts in a way that:
- ‘Lands’ collective imagination in unexpected places
- Brings a wider variety of people into the community (beyond civil society and the arts)
- Leads to material changes or shifts for people or places
- Causes resources to flow differently or shifts decision making
- Connects collective imagination work to resources holders, key decision-makers and/or policymakers
- Supports the community to tell a compelling story about the value of the fund and the practices
This call out led to such a fascinating and inspiring set of interventions being proposed by people across the UK, Europe — and all over the world! The growth in the number of fund requests we receive has been a challenge for the Fund Circle (read more about this here if you’re interested), but it has also been a privilege, to immerse ourselves in the depth of creativity, commitment and courage that so many people are bringing to the making of a better future. Hopefully reading the summaries below will give you a view into the kaleidoscopic mix of imagination and impact that we’ve been bathing in!
In the second half of 2024 we’ll be shifting our focus somewhat, to emphasise the collection, harvesting and synthesis of the huge volume of learnings and practices bourne out of our activities to date. I’ll be sharing more soon about how the community can contribute to this process.
Enjoy browsing:
Batch #3.1
Abdul Semakula
This is a follow-on application. In the first round, we organised 5 Neighbourhood Kinship Dialogues in Kiwaatule — a suburb of Kampala, Uganda. For this grant request, we want to do 11 more dialogues in the neighbourhoods we haven’t reached. Reaching all neighbourhoods in the target area is important to generate the collective will of the majority of residents to co-create the Story of Place — an image of a regenerative Kiwaatule in 2030. We started our journey by understanding what people value, the challenges they face, and mutually exploring the life we dream of in Kiwaatule. We’ve mapped the target area into 15 neighbourhoods (we’ve reached 3 so far). The idea is to organise dialogues in each neighbourhood, the first two are for collective self-discovery, and the next two are for harmonising individual and collective dreams with the natural environment around us — re-embedding human and nonhuman kin in wetland communities. Generally, we hope to share a process for convening neighbourhoods, taking pride in stewarding rather than extracting from the land and ecosystems they are part of — proving that it is possible to unbuild colonial narratives and structures and rebuild development on a living systems foundation.
£2948.00
Kimberley Willis, Land of Hope and Story
The Land of Hope And Story is a new collective of artists and creative industry leaders working together to build a new national story for Britain that puts creativity back at its core. We are a diverse group from across music, writing, entrepreneurship, AI and campaigning. We believe that creativity isn’t just a driver of economic growth, but is a lifeblood. It is not a luxury, but it should belong to everyone. And yet, our research shows that our national reputation for creativity is stagnating, resulting in a more limiting story about what Britain is. In April, 200+ creative leaders signed our open letter calling for a new national story that recentres wild creativity in our narrative, to build new energy and hope for the future. We will use the fund to create a working prototype for ‘a new national story’ workshop with a diverse mix of creative leaders in London. The work will form the basis of ideas and knowledge sharing with those on the leading edge of our national storycraft. Our intention is to then tour the workshop to each of the nations of the UK to build a collective dream for the future story of Britain.
£2300.00
Samanthi Theminimulle
I will facilitate a collective writing process with a small group of people who hold different global south migration experiences in London. Together, we will craft a series of writings that capture how knowledges and experiences (from our diverse migration experiences) for managing climate risks (like heatwaves and flooding) are negotiated and translated to our global north context. This work recognises three things. Firstly, global north cities do urban climate adaptation in a way that continues a neoliberal and neocolonial agenda, and that plays a significant role in shaping the city. Secondly, those facing injustices in the city are only engaged superficially and as part of that agenda, or as is often the case for those with recent migration experiences, not at all. Thirdly, despite this we continue with survival, resistance, and creative practices in the realities of our everyday lives, that value our diverse experiences for climate adaptation. We hope to share a series of writings that might unsettle dominant imaginaries — of migration experiences, of the city and of urban climate adaptation. More will also be shared on the collective writing process as a collective imagination method.
£2500.00
Sam Weatherald
Creativity, Wellbeing, Sanctuary: Imagining a church for all. A place based project at Highfield Trinity Church in Sheffield, a 19th century Methodist church which hosts multiple congregations alongside a variety of multi-faith and secular creative activity and community initiatives. Through Collective Imagination practices, alongside Huddlecraft’s peer-learning methodology, this project aims to: unearth the past, explore the present, and imagine the future of the church as both a diverse cultural ecosystem in itself, and an important niche in the wider ecosystem; support a generative conversation about the church’s future in a way which honours and sustains its roots as a sacred space, and weave creative and collaborative relationships between the people and communities that will play a part in shaping this future. The project will work towards a final community showcase, and will hopefully constitute a creative contribution to broader conversations around the latent potential of church buildings as inclusive spaces for communion, creativity, meaning making and diverse relationships to the sacred in precarious times.
£3000.00
Devyn Harris
With the support of the Practice Fund, we are creating an online Black Quantum Futurism LARP (live action roleplaying game) designed to guide participants in rehumanizing from this dehumanizing world. We invite anyone who believes in the inevitability of liberation to apply to be a traveler for a voyage into the future. On this voyage we will gather crucial knowledge to address the present global crises. In this collective embodied imagination practice, participants will be guided to rehumanize by building relationships with themselves, learning to listen to their bodies, regulating emotions, living in alignment with their values, and relating from an embodied knowing, all in service of collective liberation. This journey offers participants the chance to practice building collective power and narrative futures with each other, highlighting their individual and collective capabilities, and centering our agency to co-create the future. Our journey will be documented by a resident artist who will illustrate the path we take and the beauty that emerges along the way. This visual story and the template for this LARP will be shared with the Collective Imagination Practice community so that other visionaries can guide people on their own time travel journeys for liberation.
£3000.00
Joe Culhane & Malaury Kuhorn ~ Institute of Relational Being
Weaving Imaginational Being is an ongoing imagination practice and process aimed at enhancing the CIPC through cultivating further collaborations, engagement, and revealing emergent new imagination practices. Facilitated by the Institute of Relational Being (IRB), the project will map intersections between existing and emerging projects, using platforms like Mural and Hylo to visualise and connect the community. Engaging with the organisers, practitioners and grantees, this initiative seeks to deepen collective imagination practices, encouraging deeper creativity and community engagement. By integrating imagination exercises and relational methodologies, it seeks to reveal hidden possibilities and broaden the impact of the CIPC’s work. The project will produce dynamic Mural Maps and a living resource on Hylo, along with Substack articles to document the journey. These efforts will help the global community see itself in new ways, raising awareness and engagement. Through this broader holistic and relational work, IRB will explore integrating these practices into its internal and external activities, in service to enhancing the credibility and legitimacy of collective imagination as a transformative practice. Ultimately, the project aspires to secure more funding and support for future initiatives, cultivating a more interconnected and imaginative community.
£3000.00
Sitsofe Attah
My project ‘Ancestral Imagination (AI)’ honours ancestral wisdom and shows how positioning ourselves in the African memory can facilitate a journey of remembrance and inspire new imaginings. AI is aimed at engaging the Black Diaspora and continental Africans in rediscovering ancestral wisdom through transformative truth-telling and traditional technologies. By using mediums such as dance, visual arts, and other sacred technologies, we explore African-centred ancestral knowledge systems to unlock healing and manifest change. The project will produce: a blog post sharing various ancestral modalities and Indigenous forms (accessible to the CIPC and the wider public), two open workshops providing deeper insights into African and Indigenous wisdoms, and a commissioned piece from Ghanaian artists, shared with the CIPC and on social media to continue the conversation and practice of Ancestral Imagination. This project aims to reconnect individuals with their indigenous wisdom, indexing the communal and sacred nature of African art and wisdom. “Miaƒɛ susu mɛ nukpɔkpɔwoe nyɛ ɛtsɔ yi vayi klpɛ ɛtsɔ yi gbɔna ƒɛ dɛdɛfia”, in the Ewe language means, “our imagination lives in the realms of what was and what is. To remember is to reimagine — our inheritance, our birthright.”
£2798.88
Dr Natalia Eernstman, Black Mountain College
Black Mountains College (BMC) was founded in direct response to the climate and ecological crisis that is unfolding around us. We are dedicated to progressive education for social change, offering vocational and degree education, as well as community and CPD courses; all with the aim to help a wide range of people take climate action and adapt to a fast-changing climate change impacted world. We want to run more hybrid and online short courses, each tailored to address decision-makers and practitioners in selected professional sectors that we think have high current and prospective community impact, are underserviced in terms of climate education, and/or are well-placed to cultivate transformational resilience in the networks that they are part of. An important aspect of each course will be collective imagination practices. The CIPC funding will be used to run a 1-day R&D workshop to explore how we use collective imagination practices as part of our course delivery, and design a series of exercises that we can integrate into the Radical Adaptation course offer. This will include academics, BMC staff and 3 arts practitioners / CIPC members.
£1905.00
Jeroen Spoelstra (Life Centered Design School) and Chloe Smee (Innovation, Soil Association)
Creating a Voice for Soil. It is estimated that more than half of all earth species live in the soil. Humans are dependent on the soil for 95% of our food production. But we are losing fertile top soils at an alarming rate. The Soil Association (UK) advocates for food and farming practices that protect and enhance this vital element of our life support system and in 2024, we are collaborating with the Life Centered Design School (España) to strengthen our advocacy, by creating a voice for soil. If we gave this writhing, life-giving ecosystem a voice, what would it say to us and how would it sound? Through our collaboration we’ll be applying to soil the approaches embraced by the Life-Centered Design School: elevating the voice of nature through the immersive creation of non-human personas. We will experiment with different ways of creating and sharing the voices of nature so Soil Association stakeholders can experience soil differently. Through the Soil Association’s policy and practice work we’ll explore how this tool for imagination could be applied to create new ways of thinking and working. We’re excited to sharing this process with the CIPC through a compact playbook and to learn from the work of other CIPC creatives.
£2800.00
Serayna Solanki
Using my knowledge as a beekeeper / an apprentice to the honeybees, the Practice Fund will allow me to create a mini-zine of honeybee knowledge for community organisers that includes imagination practices and activities inspired by honeybees. For PoC climate justice creatives, I will host a series of batik workshops to create a collective mural that will include the collective imagination practice of ‘map sustenance using cultural symbols and motifs’ to demonstrate the complex practice of creative archiving for our collective thriving and explaining how honeybees depend on this. This fund will also support me to complete a myth-making prose about the honeybee mother goddess, drawing on my heritage and identity as an Indian Hindu-raised Dalit. I hope these tools assist community organisers to incorporate ecological arts practice and cultural/heritage renergerising into their organising praxis for climate and social justice.
£3000.00
Milly Shotter
Systemic investing is an emerging approach to funding that aims to support systems change towards more equitable, sustainable and regenerative futures. The nascent yet global community of systemic investing practitioners are unique in their position as resource holders open to emergent and experimental approaches. However, given that the power dynamics of funding are still inherent in systemic investing, it’s more vital than ever that the principles, mental models and practices of this promising new field are developed intentionally, explicitly and democratically. This project seeks to use collective imagination to help externalise and decentralise the vision of systemic investing. This project will work towards the co-creation of a visual ‘map’ that uses metaphorical spatial design. For example, drawing on the principles of the ‘open city’ and psychogeography to imagine artefacts, scenes and stories that represent the space of systemic investing. Often we default into mapping an ecosystem by naming organisations or initiatives, but this limits the vision of a space to what exists in the here and now. Instead, what if we mapped principles, roles, relationships, hopes, challenges and opportunities as a way of building the field into the future? This CIPC funding will support further research, development and stakeholder engagement to support the pitch of a co-creation workshop to the systemic investing community.
£2800.00
Bhavani Esapathi
Humanity in Climate Action: What would it take to weave the most neglected people, spaces and histories of climate activism into the very heart of conversations with climate scientists, policy makers and those that it affects the most? This is precisely what the Practice Fund is enabling me to imagine thereby, bring into existence. A collection of scientists, policy makers and migrants will come together to speculate, imagine and contemplate a renewed perspective of living under the climate crisis. It is my firm belief that such a speculation will at the very least yield fragments of momentary glimpses into what can be, rather than what will be if we are to progress as we are right now. These momentary fragments will be digitally captured and built into a narrative database that can be incorporated into a variety of use-cases to transform the way we understand and reflect on climate action.
£3000.00
David Heinemann
Leading Our Way: A Micro-Leadership Summit. I plan to host a micro-leadership summit to explore what it means to be differently-abled and/or disabled in the Climate Era. This project aims to redefine concepts like ‘disabled’, ‘healthy’, ‘victorious’ and ‘success’ through learning from other differently-abled leaders, fostering new alliances and dreaming into our futures. The summit has two parts. In the morning, a radically inclusive morning hike for disabled activists through a wild space in London, followed by an afternoon community forum. The summit will bring together grassroots leaders to discuss the unique insights of differently abled people on leadership in times of transition, climate breakdown and crisis. Both parts of the summit will be fully accessible. By harnessing the lived experiences of differently-abled individuals and groups, this project aspires to shift perceptions, drive social justice, and inspire regenerative leadership.
£3000.00
Ruth Ben-Tovim
Funds will enable artist and facilitator Ruth Ben-Tovim to work with skilled advisers to explore options for how to develop Town Anywhere (TA), a large-scale community visioning process, in the UK and Internationally. Since producing a short film documenting a recent TA in Hull, we are now in dialogue with a wide range of groups, organisations, networks and initiatives across the world who are interested in bringing TA to their specific context. In addition, A TA Apprenticeship programme is being piloted in Hull creating the first cohort of people trained to be able to deliver this immersive imagination process in their city. The combination of this opens up the potential for cascading out and sharing TA more widely. Through design workshops, we will explore how to build the ‘right’ model for developing TA. We’ll also examine how to articulate the change, imagination skills and competencies that TA can occupy and how to understand and share more deeply the impact of participating in TA for individuals, ie the inner experience, other ways of being, knowing and imagining, and the impact this could have on policies and decision making processes taking place in towns, neighbourhoods, and organisations.
£3000.00
Julia Kirby-Smith
Better Food Traders and Kent Food Partnership will explore the use of social and civic imagination to shift decision making around food, farming, supply chains and food retail. We will invite people working in local government, the local food chain, and members of the public, to spend a day at an inspiring organic farm. Here, people will come together in nature and be brought back to the essence of how food, farming, soil and biodiversity are interrelated. We will allow people to draw on different senses and think outside their usual modes, to take on the perspective of the land, the fields, the wildlife, the plants all around them. We will ask people to think about how these parts of the ecosystem relate to each other, and how they have changed over the centuries. We will then encourage people to collectively imagine a world where soil, biodiversity and local people are prioritised equally, and explore ways that fairness, well-being and sustainability, rather than traditional forms of economic growth, could be placed at the heart of the local food system.
£3000.00
Tim Frenneaux
Forking Beautiful Futures is a crowd sourced reimagining of business and government decisions from the Piʌot Project — the people powered movement for regenerative transformation. Imagine if, each time a business or government made a decision with significant economic, social or environmental impact an alternative trajectory was revealed — the fork never taken. We want to make imagined futures more tangible by grounding them in real world decisions and actions. This parallels the approach taken by Audrey Tang and the Sunflower / .g0v movement in Taiwan who created forked versions of key government decisions using hackers. Each season (Autumn, Winter & Spring) we will gather imaginings of the alternative futures that failed to germinate and hold a ritual gathering — a wake — for the futures we failed to choose. Our core outputs will be the forks we imagine, our documenting and sharing of these and the three wakes. Inventing new rituals and discovering how to hold our grief collectively whilst generating active hope is a core outcome of our work. We will twist the negative narrative injecting humour, colour and creativity to draw attention to the urgent need to turn towards a more beautiful future; right now!
£3000.00
Goldie Chaudhuri
Stroud Intergenerational Imagination Cafe. Mapmaking builds a bridge from where we live to the fantastic places of our imaginations. We see this everywhere from children’s treasure maps to the fictional worlds illustrated in maps in many of our favourite storybooks. I will be running a series of workshops that put young people into conversation with elders to map places and possibilities onto our here and now. We will be gathering a library of imagination prompts that enable all ages to journey from their homes to their streets to the places that define their local area. We will share our imagined worlds and some of the opportunities identified with the broader community at Stroud Imagines in order to build on these ideas and gather feedback. We aim to produce a “map-zine” to share these ideas more broadly and to host a supper club with people who could help bring some of these ideas to life. This support will allow us to share our process and learnings so that others can apply it in their own areas.
£3000.00
Batch #3.2
Cristina Leoni-Osion
How can we collectively imagine and practice community care around stigmatised or under-represented reproductive experiences? This funding will support the realisation of a somatic community care practice centered around abortion and other reproductive experiences. We will imagine or re-imagine how we can approach,share, and somatically engage with our personal and collective abortion and reproductive stories. Situated marginally, and often outside of legality, the reproductive justice movement is built on imaginative and collective community practices. I/We will expand on these practices by offering and collecting somatic-based practices and documenting and archiving how individuals and communities use these imaginative, often speculative, structures to nurture and sustain spaces for community care and movement building presently and into an uncertain future. As the saying goes, “Everyone loves someone who has had an abortion”. Not only do I hope that documenting and sharing these practices will be helpful for abortion-havers and seekers but also for any community interested in de-stigmatising and creating collective space for the full spectrum of reproductive possibilities. There is no collective future without reproductive care and justice.
£3000.00
Frederike doffin
Workshops for: Embodied Nature Connection and Transitional Momentum (wt). I’m curious to engage with practices that foster the imagination of possible futures characterised by relationships of mutual care between humans and more-than- humans. Through practices of Earth Care in combination with bodywork I would like to create space in the soma for creative expressions to set root for collective imagination processes to dream up possible environmental scenarios and enhance a larger field of resilience and sustainability. These workshops will invite different modalities of nature-connection in combination with somatic exercises in order to engage with visions and imaginative body-based thinking to develop environmental care and community care. I would like to place an emphasis on drawing back on my recent Master thesis ‘Transitional Momentum for Ecological Grief’. I would like to continue investigating somatic practices in collaboration with plants for metabolising emotions evoked by the profound environmental changes we experience at an individual and collective level. The project creates a communal setting for composting emotions, for deepening our understanding of transition phases and for activating our power of imagination through an artistic lens.
£3000.00
Pedro Reis, Komuhn
We propose a series of school-wide meetings and events on re-imagining local governments based on fairness and sustainability principles. This initiative aims to engage students, teachers, parents, and staff in learning, reflecting, and discussing politics and governance from a perspective of possibility. Recognizing that many young people feel indifferent, negative, or hopeless about current systems, our goal is to foster conversations and experiences that highlight practices not typically associated with governance, such as openness, decentralization, inclusivity, and long-term thinking. Over 3 to 12 months, we plan to facilitate gatherings — like open spaces, workshops, and discussion groups — culminating in a city-wide event with presentations, talks, and exhibitions, ideally with municipal participation. A dedicated website will document the project and provide tools for replication elsewhere. The Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) supports this initiative, offering facilitation design and promotional assistance through its networks and platform.
£3000.00
Alan Raposo, alliance of 10 civil organisations
An event to change a city. We are an alliance of >10 civil organisations fighting back against the vision and the narrative that our local government has been establishing in our city. A council that does not believe in climate change, that denies violence against women and girls, that is reinforcing racist narratives and has destroyed local democracy. Together we are working on a new strategy that will change the way our neighbours imagine our city and empower a new alternative vision for all. We plan to organise 3 events that will feed each other — a march against touristification, a main street event for an alternative city and an open citizen assembly. We will be using the funds from CIPC to organise the street event, a space that will bring together hundreds of local citizens and will showcase what we can achieve. We will be working with local artists who will help us imagine new possibilities, local musicians will use music as a political intervention and friends from the local Saharan and Palestinian communities will use food as a tool for integration. Each of our organisations will be present, showing our work and embracing a message on the importance of active participation to change our city.
£3000.00
Mercè Rua Fargues
My objective with the Collective Imagination Practice Fund is to bring together people involved in milk production and distribution in the valley of the Cerdagne for a kick-off meeting to imagine and plan a better milk distribution system. I am concerned about the widespread problem of plastic waste, which affects our environment deeply. I’ve identified milk production and consumption as a key area where we can reduce plastic waste. At the same time, the transnational self-contained ecosystem nature of the valley of the Cerdagne, makes it an interesting place to try this out. I am planning to use the funding to gather all the relevant people for a seed meeting to discuss and brainstorm. We will look at how similar inverse logistics systems work elsewhere and think about how to make it work in la Cerdagne. The mid-long-term vision is to create a system in la Cerdagne where milk is packaged in reusable containers. These containers would be returned after use, cleaned, and reused, creating a sustainable cycle.
£2581.00
Uri Noy Meir and Ilaria Olimpico
Sono Gaia (I am Earth), TheAlbero. We want to prototype creative and embodiment-based tools for shifting awareness in the field of eco-social justice: a shift from me to us and from we human to We Gaia. We reclaim our imagination power to go beyond what we are taught to be “normal” and reconsider the Earth, not as an entity separate from us (to exploit and consume) but rather as a connected part of our beingness. Collective Imagination is for us a door for ‘at first unimaginable’ possibilities of interconnectedness. We will facilitate a Theatre and Stories that Reconnect workshop, an emerging practice combining Work that Reconnects, Social Presencing Theater, Theatre of the Oppressed, and narrative practices. We will involve people from different backgrounds, genders, and social statuses. Together, we will prepare an interactive performance as a prototype model enacting Gaia’s perspective, needs, and dreams into the decision-making. Local institutions will be invited to support the process and be spect-actors in the performance. We will share with the Collective Imagination community a video of the performance, an in-depth review article of the work, including poems and images created during the final event.
£3000.00
Esther Grossman, Andrea Gilly, Savannah Vize
We are three collaborators blending our interdisciplinary skills and lived experiences to investigate how a systems hospice concept can be grounded in Collective Imagination and accessible facilitation tools for everyday communities. Drawing inspiration from Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s “Hospicing Modernity,” which weaves care, or “hospice,” into the sticky and painful work of bringing an end to a dominant system (i.e., industrial farming), we want to acknowledge just how difficult it can be to step out of an extractive and dying system with dignity and the ways in which communities can practice Collective Imagination to support each other through this vital transition to save our planet. As designers, facilitators, and Collective Imagination practitioners, we crave a practical yet playful set of tools and methods to facilitate Collective Imagination conversations about the role of care in systems change. CIPC funding will generously provide us the space to research, ideate, and prototype this. We plan to share these draft tools with the Collective Imagination Practice Community through practical resource lists, open-access facilitation activity instructions, exploration and feedback calls, and reflective blogs.
£3000.00
Francisco Ramazzini Estivallet
‘A Camera of Possible Futures’. This initiative, which blends generative AI and speculative design, aims to democratize its collective imagination process by making its methodology accessible and open-source. Initially developed for an event in Brazil, the project involves gathering a group’s visions of the future, generating these visions using AI, and producing instant photos that participants reveal together. This process fosters deep emotional connections and collective reflection as individuals see their imagined futures materialise. With the funding, the team will refine the project’s materials and documentation, ensuring others can easily replicate the method. The grant will support the design of visual aids, hosting international meetups, and documenting these sessions through photos and videos. The final output will include a detailed blog post and a comprehensive guide, enabling widespread use of this powerful tool for collective imagination. This project holds potential for broad impact, from educational settings to corporate environments, by facilitating the expression of often unspoken visions of the future, fostering collective imagination, and promoting creative collaboration.
£3000.00
Christopher Harris
By centering the Orcas we’ll engage in the participatory research of bioregional needs in my locality around the Strait of Gibraltar. The endangered sub-species of killer whale travelling through here are involved in a popular human-wildlife conflict. The Orcas have learned to attack sailing ships and nobody knows for sure why. We’ll use this starting point of ecological speculation to host workshops that engage multi-cultural stakeholders situated in marine and maritime interaction. By working with our collective needs and desires for cooperative water governance, through a series of online and in-person gatherings integrating science, policy, and culture, we’ll build a coastal future imaginary on our shared needs as earthlings. Publishing our synthesised dialogue and systemic designs to seed future collectivity and activism around water policy in the strait. We’ll make small steps in a ‘just transition’ towards exciting visions of human-cetacean, coastal cooperation that could reduce our chance of mutual extinction.
£2600.00
Živilė Mantrimaitė and Karolina Zakarauskaitė
Culture of Care. Climate and health justice movements in Lithuania are fragmented, without resources and time to look at both of the issues in systemic ways. Through embarking on a collective imagination process we are hoping to connect activist groups, practitioners and workers from climate, health, and urban topics to envision shared economic, social, or political models, which simultaneously address the root causes of the issues we are faced with. We will host two city-based agoras and collective reading sessions to gauge wide input into shared imaginaries of hopeful and caring future. This will be followed up by systems change imaginaries workshop to create a theory of change, which we would like to embrace together. Through this process we are hoping to create a living resource — mini book — where we will include our hopes and created imaginaries as well as, detail the process and learnings from participants.
£2955.00
Bethany Copsey, RE-PEAT
Peatland Justice is a campaign launched by RE-PEAT to advocate for a just transition away from peat extraction for use in the horticultural sector. We are creating a deep map as part of this campaign to describe the entire supply chain of peat products, including both current and past trade routes (both raw peat as well as the products that use peat), present and former peat sites, and accounts of possible future situations. We are holding four workshops across Europe as part of the deep map creation, which CIPC is supporting. The workshops allow us to bring people together to create the map and experiment with different forms of mapping. The workshops explore how maps can be language-based, time-based, creatures-based, and planetary-based. We will use a variety of methods to enter into spaces, discussions and frames of mind which facilitate an exploration of these topics. Visioning and future dreaming will be a key way of exercising our collective imaginations in all of the workshops. The workshops will each bring in another creative practitioner/artist to showcase the particular methods and topics.
£2992.80
Batch #4
Ally Kingston, Will Brown, Heather Knight
In 2023, we explored Death & the Collective Imagination over a three month Huddle. Our belief was that while it’s important to imagine the new, it is equally critical — and perhaps more challenging — to do good hospicing & composting work for the values, norms and processes whose time has come. A significant barrier to this work is the lack of a shared vocabulary that is both accessible and appropriate to our times. We’ve dreamed into the qualities of ecological practices like composting, bonfiring, coppicing, weeding, and worming, as distinct ways to word — and facilitate — the endings of our lives. Having piloted this practice in our huddle, our funding request is to develop a toolkit — consisting of a card deck & facilitation instructions — that can be used in group settings to collectively imagine and plan for endings. Our hope is that these metaphors can provide a gateway to new conversations with decision-makers and resource holders who are resistant to perceived loss.
£1650.00
Sam Furness, Channel Twelve
Creative Quests come to Margate. Through support from the CIPC we will be experimenting with bringing our flagship, Creative Quests programme to Margate, Kent. We’ll be exploring the question ‘What does it look like for a town to go on a Creative Quest?’. To date, our Quests have been hosted digitally and are open to curious people around the world. Through this pilot, we will learn how Quests can come to life as a place-based experience — that invites the curiosity and imagination of people united by geography. We aim to conduct research with local residents and then design a pop-up experience, taking over a disused shop for a long weekend. Our Creative Quests hub will act as place for gathering, creative conversation and crucially act as a space to pick up creative prompts that help residents see their home town in a new light. Sparking inspiration and connection which they can take with them far beyond our pop up. From our learnings we hope to have unearthed a clearer model for how we can bring Creative Quests to other towns around the UK, for longer periods of time.
£3000.00
Rebecca Lee & the Universal Recognition Movement
Making sense (& Sense-Making) Flourishing Futures. When imagining futures for us all, innovators can often be limited by their own sensory experiences. The folks who typically get to imagine, will choose how we imagine. This in turn limits who gets to take part and restricts us all to a future where many (in all our glorious diversity) don’t fit. Our wild-card experiment is for those of us who don’t fit the mould. We are creatives from the Universal Recognition movement. We are visually-impaired, blind or have limited mobility. Together we will make sense of, and sense-make, flourishing futures fit for us all. We excitingly are not sure what this experiment will yield! We do know that ‘how’ and ‘what’ we make will be:
- accessible to us
- fantastical, futuristic and not trapped by our inaccessible realities
- inclusive to who we are, just as we are
This is a social model of disability exploration. The fund offers us the creative-rest and accessibility we need so we can imagine in a world not designed with us in mind. We plan to share what we discover or make as an online and pop-up exhibition/show. Together we will make sense of our flourishing tomorrows, through our sensory experiences today.
£3000.00
Noah Schöppl, The People’s Dreaming Collective
The People’s Dreaming Collective is a global constellation of radical public sector leaders dreaming up more just and loving models for how we govern. We facilitate generative gatherings and create open-source tools to imagine, explore, and bring to life audacious new visions for democracy. In government departments around the world, there exists a vast network of public servants challenging norms and steering bureaucracies toward more just and joyful paradigms. These radical public servants deftly navigate the tension between operating within government systems as they exist today and grappling with — even spearheading — alternative futures. Everyday, they are imagining new ways of serving communities that are more inclusive, participatory, and loving. At The People’s Dreaming Collective, we believe that radical public servants are essential and often overlooked dreamers and changemakers. With their deep knowledge of existing government systems, dedication to service, and desire for transformative change, radical public servants are uniquely equipped to be the midwives of new democratic systems. Our collective is committed to providing the support these public servants need to imagine and build new governing models.
£2800.00
Ágnes Fernengel, The School of Public Life
The School of Public Life, a Hungarian community-based research and education center, will implement two transformative projects with the provided funding. First, in collaboration with a locally embedded community house, the School will run an easily accessible multidisciplinary event series aimed at engaging a new precariat community. By combining artistic and gamified methods with principles of critical pedagogy, this project seeks to raise participants' social imagination and critical consciousness. The goal is to encourage them to critically reflect on their social positions, explore the potential for social change, and recognize their agency in driving that change. Second, the School will develop a training course on Participatory Action Research (PAR), a transformative methodology where layman researchers gain a deeper understanding of their own oppression while also being empowered through the experience of competence and community strength. The course will incorporate non-verbal and artistic methods, further deconstructing research approaches, and enhancing the liberating effect on PAR’s participants. These projects aim to foster critical consciousness, social agency, and community empowerment through innovative, participatory, and artistic approaches.
£3000.00
Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson
Chaoscare (CC): 7 HomeComings Meditation and Collective imagination community group focuses on healing and supporting each other in understanding how the ‘outside’ world affects how we show up and make solo and collective decisions that impact our shared communities. Allowing community organisers/healers to further share and receive new approaches to sustainable support, whilst implementing robust health-art-wellbeing protocols. By restoring a sense of agency, trust and commitment to touching into ancestral/indigenous practices, this project has long-lasting benefits. For our immediate members and extended communities, ChaosCare acts as a key respite and resourcing space to share imagination tools towards world-building reality. Promoting sustainable/survival principles to continue the advocacy and healing/trauma-sensitive space holding we provide to many with experiences of mental ill-health/trauma.
£3000.00
- You can get in touch with the Fund Circle via fund@imaginationpractice.info
- Or you can reach me directly via zahra@huddlecraft.com
