Camden Imagines Launch
On Tuesday we launched the report Imagination Activism in Camden and came together with the community for an evening to mark the milestone and hear from Camden’s Imagination Activists about their experience.
Are you asking yourself “what is Imagination Activism?” You can find out about it here, or dive in more deeply to the concept and principles in the report.
Six months on from the Imagination Activism programme at Camden, we invited Camden Council colleagues, collaborators, community members and allies from our ecosystem together to launch the report about the first phase of Camden Imagines.
It was an incredible evening hosted in the awe-inspiring Samsung KX building, a stone’s throw from Camden Council, which later we found out was designed by Thomas Heatherwick who talks about “designing the impossible” as an antidote to the “epidemic of boringness” — very fitting for the launch of Imagination Activism in Camden.
We were joined by a mix of Camden colleagues, local community, collaborators and ecosystem partners who have either been part of the work, or following along the journey. It was great to see people from across academia, local government, community activism, arts, culture, technology and the private sector coming to celebrate the cross-sector power of collective imagination.
We started with a powerful opening from Cllr Georgia Gould, the Leader of Camden, who first talked about the power of community imagining as a way to solve problems that goes way beyond a normal policy-making process. She told the story about the start of Camden’s Think&Do project which started a pop-up on the high street as a space to “just say yes”.
What would happen if the council just said yes to everything?
It unleashed a load of energy where council officers and community members came together and just started saying yes to things. This was where Georgia’s eyes first started opening to the power of collective imagination to get things done.
“Collective imagination around a community takes us so much further than on our own”
Georgia went on to reflect on how imagination is an equaliser — because everyone can contribute something and everyone has an imagination, and then went on to talk about the Camden Imagines project and the ripple effects the council had seen as a result of the programme. She reflected on how whenever Camden has given support and permission for staff to have real space to imagine it’s created a space where staff feel completely different about their work — it brings “hope and inspiration to solve things”.
“It has had a huge ripple effect — it’s almost like it’s started a movement within the council, and change much beyond the 32 officers — it has created more openness to the imagination of our community”
Then our founder, Phoebe Tickell, opened by showing the Camden Imagines video, which took us all back to the 8 weeks of the programme in October and November, and brought back the memory of the shifts and energy that was unlocked.
She followed on by speaking through some of the core concepts of Imagination Activism:
- Imagination is not a talent, but a muscle, that everybody has and everybody can build, with time, space, permission and tools
- Collective imagination work can build psychological safety, and psychological safety is what unlocks collective imagination
- Choosing to build the imagination capacity of communities and a local council is an act of “imagination justice” — it’s not just what you get to imagine, but who gets to imagine, to create plural visions of the future (you can read more about imagination justice here)
- Shifting perspectives and expanding worldviews has a place in policy-making
- We don’t have resource problems, we have imagination problems, and when we say yes we find ways to make things work even without resources
And about the Camden Imagines work, and the findings and insights that have come out of the work.
“As we face scarcity and insurmountable challenges, we focus on efficiency and getting things done. Imagination is seen as a distraction, something woolly for an away day, but not core to the building of new policy and systems. This work flies in the face of that.”
She talked about the journey of the Imagination Activists in Camden, and the shifts and changes they had seen during the course:
Over 8 weeks, 32 council officers came together on a pilgrimage of imagination, learning how to include future generations in decision-making, connecting to the more-than-human world, and moving from accepting what is to imagining what if.
They befriended failure and built their fearless ambition, asking the question ‘what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?’ and they discovered the power of what I have called Moral Imagining — a framework of imagining with future generations, nature and ancestors, and embedding these perspectives in our decision making.
The participants came from all across the Council, from front line staff to senior leaders, from teams working on housing, to air quality, to transport, to children’s services. It was humbling each week to hear about how participants were taking the tools and practices back to their work, and how the shifts were impacting the residents of Camden.
These 32 participants were equipped to build a movement throughout the organisation, to share their practice and influence those around them, spreading the programme’s impact from the 32 to the 300 to the 3000.
Panel with Camden’s Imagination Activists
The best part of the evening was the panel with two of Camden’s Imagination Activists, Ododo Dafe, Head of Housing Transformation, and Hafid Ali, Community Partner. Ododo and Hafid brought the experience of what it was like to be part of the programme to life, reflecting on how they felt before the programme, what surprised them, how they are applying their methods and tools in the workplace and where they could see this work going.
“How bold can we be? Let’s dare to be brave”
Ododo reflected that the only thing she was surprised about was how much we can do in this space. At first she thought the training sounded interesting, unusual, but probably wouldn’t have huge amounts of impact. After the programme she sees how much these tools and practices could open up energy, shared ambition, purpose and collective action and the opportunities seem endless. Ododo reflected on her work with communities, through the work she does on housing, and about how much energy is unlocked when you work together on solving problems in radical and ambitious ways.
“The idea of working with communities to think about things that might be difficult is so exciting as people do dare to think about something different”
Hafid shared that he felt he had always been a dreamer, and in fact his friends had often called him “delusional” — but this had given him the theory behind the delusion. Now, he said, he felt confident about proposing visionary ideas, that may at first seem impossible. He took us back to the moment in the course where participants were taken through moments in history where things happened that truly felt impossible — like landing on the moon. That had given him confidence that the impossible isn’t always delusional — and in fact (quoting Rob Hopkins), “all real change sounds ridiculous at first”.
Both Ododo and Hafid shared about one of the most powerful moments of the course — the session that focused on time travelling to look through the eyes of the seventh generation. Ododo shared that it made her connect with what we are doing, and how our decisions today are so important — impacting the lives of many people we will never meet, and never know the name of. This exercise is one of the core exercises of the Moral Imagining toolkit, giving people a deep shift in perspective to seven generations in the future.
“The thing that really blew me away was thinking about the seventh generation”
“Taking advice from the 7th generation, what would they tell us? What would our ancestors say about what we are doing now?”
Ododo finished by sharing about how this thinking and helped her question the most fundamental assumptions in the housing system — “Someone dreamed up housing allocation at some point a long time ago. What if we dreamed up something completely different?”
“What if homelessness was eradicated — it’s about more of us having time or space to leap into what that future could be?””
A special thanks to Camden and the Camden Imagination Activists, the Camden leadership for having the vision to support this work, to Jo Brown and Nick Kimber and the entire Camden Imagines team — and for everybody who helped at the event, and to Samsung KX for hosting us!
