Imagining together in Hounslow: an invitation to Huddle
Calling all Hounslow Council staff, community members/leaders and collective imagination practitioners based around London!
This six month peer-to-peer ‘Huddle’ — hosted by Collective Imagination Practice Community Steward, Jake Garber— is an opportunity to build capacity and skills in collective imagination and group learning, in order to unlock hopeful, caring and equitable Hounslow futures, for people of all ages.
Apply by Monday 8th September at 9am BST via this form.
Watch the recording of our Open Session (held in August) to find out more.
Hounslow Council is embarking on a journey to collectively imagine the future, together. They are calling this Vision 2050, and it is the ‘North Star’ guiding the work that they do over the next 25 years. This Huddle is forming to focus and support this process of visioning, and the Council are particularly interested in drawing out and exploring themes related to care, ageing, life transitions and time.
What is collective imagination?
Collective imagination is about groups of people coming together to imagine and build the places they want to be part of. This practice is about moving beyond fixing what is broken and seeking new horizons, new worlds and new ways of being. This article ‘What is collective imagination, and how is it different?’ provides useful context and detail on the practice of imagining together.
Local authorities and communities are increasingly looking for ways to unlock capacity for the big challenges we’re trying to tackle. Across the UK and beyond we’ve already seen some trailblazing collective imagination practice happening in local areas — like the Camden Imagines project embedding “municipal imagination activism” in their council; and policy makers coming together in an Interspecies Council at The River Roding.
In this Huddle we’ll gather a number of collective imagination practitioners based in London, a selection of community and organisation leaders in the Hounslow area, and folk working in Hounslow Council. Together we will pool skills, resources and networks to:
- Create community-owned visions of the future;
- Explore big and challenging questions affecting communities in an expansive way, for example around care, ageing, learning, housing and work;
- Look back as well as forwards to acknowledge and include our individual and collective histories in the making of our futures;
- Include humans and the more-than-human world in our visioning;
- Explore how future visioning can support relationship building, decision making and action in the present.
What is a Huddle?
A Huddle is a way of learning that is cooperative, creative and purposeful. It’s a 6 month peer-led learning accelerator for groups of 10–12 peers who pool their skills, resources and networks in order to multiply their development. We use coaching methodology to help each other access our own wisdom and skills which helps us build our capacity for learning.
Huddling provides the structure to help participants lead their own learning, and to grow valuable, transferable skills such as coaching, feedback, facilitation, collaborating across difference, learning exchange and critical and design thinking. There is much to gain personally and professionally from this opportunity.
“[Huddling is] a way to recode, rewire, learn together and unlearn together… that also creates a really different relationality, governance and agency amongst people.”
Annette Dhami, Dark Matter Labs
At the beginning of the Huddle each peer chooses their own unique Learning Question. This question is the thread you follow throughout the process. It can evolve as the weeks pass, but it will sustain, anchor and guide your learning process.
In this particular Huddle we are exploring:
- The borough of Hounslow
- The power of imagining as a collective, in order to develop visions of the future for Hounslow
- Themes of care, ageing, life transitions and time
A Learning Question that speaks to these explorations will be ideal for this Huddle. It can relate to your work, but it must also be a question that you deeply and personally care about. An example of a question you might bring to this Huddle is: ‘How would care look in Hounslow if we wanted everyone to feel supported and secure?’
Huddles are powered by passion, not duty.
“This process definitely gave me a sense of greater possibility: that when we gather people together AND provide the tools and structures to support their joint exploration, beautiful things are possible.”
Mary Stevens, Friends of the Earth
What will it be like?
Huddles are flexible and can be organised around a place, theme or question, but at their core is a structured pathway that creates a culture of co-accountability. The pathway is as follows:
- The Huddle begins with a Kick Off session. This is where we get to know one another in playful ways, share learning questions and co-design the journey ahead.
- After this we will gather online fortnightly for 2 hour meet-ups on Wednesday mornings, 10am — 12pm (BST) from September — March. The first 2 of these meet-ups will be sessions covering Collective Imagination Practice 101, where the group will get a shared grounding in the practice. Over the following 6 sessions each participant will take in turns to co-lead a workshop/learning session that will power their Learning Question and your own.
- In-between the meet-ups you will have “buddy sessions” that you can schedule to suit the both of you. You may also want to do additional preparation for some of the meet-ups.
- There will be 2 in-person ‘Power Up’ sessions at particular moments in the journey, where we will each share our process and receive peer feedback and support. We will then finish with an in-person Showcase event where we will synthesise and share our collective learning, inviting members of the wider community into our process. All of these moments are important punctuation points in the journey to help you develop and refine.
We estimate that the Huddle will require an average of 2–3 hours of your time per week for the 6 month Huddle duration. This will be slightly more on the weeks when there is a Kick Off, Power Up session and around the Showcase.
Is this opportunity for me?
This Huddle is about bringing together people working with Hounslow Council; folks from the Hounslow community; and people who have experience working with collective imagination as a practice.
If you work in the Council or at a community organisation in Hounslow you might:
- Feel stuck in the limitations of your current ways of working
- Sense that a different way is possible and feel intrigued by the idea of collective imagination practice
- Be seeking a learning community to develop yourself and test new ideas with
- Be curious about being part of a group with mixed backgrounds, professional skills and perspectives to grow our imagination capacity together
- See potential to apply new practices in your work, e.g. to a live challenge or project
If you’re a collective imagination practitioner, you might:
- Want to develop your craft further
- Be curious about how to work in this way in different government and community settings
- Be seeking to build your collective imagination network and portfolio in contexts with high potential for impact
- Be curious about being part of a group with mixed backgrounds, professional skills and perspectives to grow our imagination capacity together
“I’m going to cascade this learning throughout the Trust to help us transition to more peer-led learning — it will be a key part of our work going forward.”
Julie Doherty, Head of Communities and Engagement, Avon Wildlife Trust
Practicalities
To maximise the individual and collective impact of this journey, we are asking for a minimum commitment of 80% attendance. Please check the dates against your current commitments before applying.
Because of the place-based, community-focused nature of this Huddle, and because a few sessions will be held in-person in Hounslow, it is crucial that all Huddle participants live in or can travel to Hounslow on the dates provided.
Programme Dates
- Kick Off Session: 24th September, 10am — 4pm — in-person @ a location in Hounslow TBC
- Meet up 1: 8th October, 10am — 12pm — online
- Meet-up 2: 22nd October, 10am — 12pm — online
- Meet-up 3: 5th November, 10am — 12pm — online
- Meet-up 4: 19th November, 10am — 12pm — online
- Power Up 1: 3rd December, 10am — 4pm — in-person at a location in Hounslow
- Meet-up 5: 17th December, 10am — 12pm — online
- Meet-up 6: 7th January, 10am — 12pm — online
- Meet-up 7: 21st January, 10am — 12pm — online
- Power Up 2: 4th February, 10am — 4pm — in-person at a location in Hounslow
- Meet-up 8: 18th February, 10am — 12pm — online
- Meet-up 9: 4th March, 10am — 12pm — online
- Showcase: 11th March, 10am — 4pm — in-person at a location in Hounslow
“It was liberating to experience learning that was genuinely more about process than end-product. To really understand how learning didn’t have to mean a set curriculum and a final award.”
Beth Hammond, Huddle participant
Open Session
We held an Open Session on Wednesday 13th August. You can watch the recording of the session here.
How to Apply
Fill in this application form by Monday 8th September, 9am BST
About your Host
Jake is a leader in the field of Collective Imagination Practice. He co-founded Canopy in 2017 to explore the power of imagination to help address complex social and environmental challenges, working with local government, NHS, major charities and community groups. Jake is one to the stewards of the Collective Imagination Practice Community. He also developed and taught a course on ‘Society and Imagination’ at Goldsmiths, University of London.
He says, “I get very excited about these Huddles. It’s such a powerful experience to get to learn alongside a group of diverse and wonderful people.” Jake uses imagination practices that work with nature, image, model-making and play and he is deeply interested in the relationship between loss and change. You can find him on LinkedIn and Instagram.
FAQs
Does this cost money?
Participating in a Huddle is a personal and professional development opportunity. Typically places on Huddles range from £700 — £1,500. However, this Huddle does not cost money and requires only your time and energy — thanks to generous support from The Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Hounslow Council.
In addition, we are able to offer each participant the opportunity to claim the sum of £200 to contribute towards their time or expenses required to take part, if you feel you need it. We understand this is a small amount of money so we’re also offering each person the opportunity to waive your portion so that someone else in the group who needs it more is able to access more.
Who will be teaching me?
This Huddle is not a programme that is being run for you by someone else. It is a peer-to-peer programme which means participants take on shared responsibility for success and realisation of the experience. Your Host will guide your journey and help you to make the most of this opportunity. In this Huddle your Host will also offer two sessions of training in collective imagination practice (which you can contribute to if you want to). The more participants contribute to the collective, the more value there is available to everyone.
How will you approach equity, inclusion and accessibility?
We would like the Huddle to be representative of the communities living in Hounslow as much as is possible with 12 places. In particular, we will prioritise people from communities who are often excluded from conversations imagining the future. People from diverse communities — including race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and class — are especially encouraged to apply.
We want to welcome and support anyone with a strong intention to take part in this Huddle, and aim to ensure that your identity or background will not be a barrier.
The Huddle format we’re using centres peer-to-peer learning which can be a really inclusive approach to education. The non-hierarchical relationships can create an environment that welcomes each of us to bring more of ourselves into the learning process, and you will likely be brought together with people with different perspectives, ideas, experiences and more. We are open to input and evolving things as we go.
On your application we invite you to tell us about your access needs and preferences and we will also invite the group to share what they’d like to with one another, so that the group can co-create an inclusive space.
I have more questions
Please get in touch with hello@imaginationpractice.com to ask questions. We can schedule a call if needed.
I’m ready to apply
Great! Get your application in via this form by 9am (BST) on Monday 8th September.
The Collective Imagination Practice Community is hosted by Huddlecraft and Canopy and funded by Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Emerging Futures Team and Arising Quo.
