5 Questions For… Lonny Brooks and Nina Woodruff-Walker
Lonny J. Avi Brooks, PhD (pictured left) is a professor of communication at California State University East Bay, and Nina Woodruff-Walker, MA (pictured right) is Executive Director of the Museum of Children’s Art (MOCHA) in Oakland, Calif. What’s Next Health reached out to them to talk about how MOCHA’s Community Futures School is helping students from across the city showcase their visions of the future. Using Afrofuturism, these teens are reimagining a future where Black and Indigenous adults and youth exist and are thriving. This work is supported in part by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
This interview is part of our 5 Questions For…Series, where we learn about the ways RWJF’s Pioneering Ideas for an Equitable Future grantees are helping us get to a healthier tomorrow — today.
Q: What do you hope to accomplish with this project?
Lonny: We created the Community Futures School to guide high schoolers in re-imagining a more inclusive and antiracist world. Each year we introduce about 60 students to futures-thinking — to the traditional methods of forecasting, which have been more of a Eurocentric endeavor, along with Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, and queer futurism. This gives them the long-term thinking skills to become agents of change in their high schools, neighborhoods, and communities. We want them to be able to imagine futures where they matter and where they count — futures where Black and Brown people are thriving — and then translate their visions into change, whether that’s cultural programming for their neighborhoods, legislative agendas for their communities, or another form of activism.
Nina: Children are almost never actually consulted about the future or even really allowed to envision the future from their perspectives. Yet their way of thinking is a lot less linear than adults, and they’re also way more creative. In our program, the students are articulating their visions of the future through the arts. Art is one of the spaces in the world where it is comfortable for people to use their imaginations — it’s why science fiction movies are so enjoyable for people to watch. We begin with world-building, where students envision what Oakland could look like in 2045. To do this, the students have to look for what futures forecasters call “signals of the future” that are here in the present and think about how they will scale up in the future. We also use games like AfroRithms to build stories about the future. Then, the students develop artifacts from the future: things that reflect what we want to see in the future such as products that could help make it healthier, more anti-racist, and friendlier for all folks. When the kids see these artifacts, it makes it real for them. They know their vision of the future is possible. And, of course, we’re a museum so at the end we exhibit their artwork to showcase their visions and their voices.
Q: What signals about the future or emerging trends inspired this work or helped shape it as your work progressed?
Nina: The arts is one of the few communities that are extremely welcoming to all walks of life. And while the arts have tended to be undervalued in traditional realms of forecasting, they’ve always been a cornerstone of Afrofuturism. The arts is one of the many ways that people from the African diaspora communicate about how we interpret the world, whether it be in song, rap, poetry, or visual arts. And art often carries signals of the future — think about Sun Ra or the Harlem Renaissance in the ’20s and ’30s. Now, our youth’s art provides signals about the future. It’s going to be amazing to look at these artistic renderings in 20 years to determine what the kids were able to forecast — and influence — and what was possible.
Lonny: What I loved about the first year of doing this was that the students discovered that their own desires, experiences, and family histories held important signals for the future. When they began to build stories of the future from that ancestral knowledge, it unveiled a whole range of possibilities for them. For example, one student came up with a bracelet with voices from your ancestors — maybe it’s your great-great-grandmother or Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass or Ida B. Wells — that would guide you throughout your day. With artificial intelligence, we’re coming close to that being possible.
Q: Looking ahead five, ten, fifteen years, how do you see this work helping individuals and communities create healthier, more equitable futures?
Nina: A child that sees themself thriving in the future grows into a healthy adult. And so, the more children of the global majority that we have seeing themselves thriving in the future, the stronger our future will be. They’re going to go into the future being critical thinkers and knowing the power of research, the power of knowledge, and the power of community-building, and they will be able to add their ancestral intelligence to making the world a little bit easier to tolerate. These are youth that in 20 years will be in their late 30s, and they will be the next directors, the next politicians, the next CEO leaders, the next attorneys general.
Lonny: In 20 or 30 years from now, these students will have a mindset that goes beyond inequality and advancing equity — they will be focused on maximizing liberation.
Q. What should people read, watch, or listen to that will help them understand this project or issue? Where should people go if they want to learn more about your project, and this issue overall?
Lonny: I think Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World is a really important read. Grace Dillon’s Walking the Clouds is a really important read for Indigenous futurism. Laura Jackson in Canada is a filmmaker and created a wonderful virtual reality installation looking at how we could rewild our cities, for example, what Toronto would look like if it was based on Native principles.
I also recommend following the work by the Black Speculative Arts Movement. Black Quantum Futurism with Rasheedah Phillips is a really important signal to look at. Also, Timnit Gebru*, who created the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). I think even the Black Panther films, especially the second one, really shows not only Africana futures, but unveils Indigenous futurist thinking, too, in a really clever and interesting way. Lastly, these two are must reads for understanding the history of afrofuturism: Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness and Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures.
Nina: We call Dr. Brooks our librarian because he collects things in his brain and then you need a basket so that you can fill it up with all the information he shares. And so, I’m going to throw his name into the basket as well and encourage people to read this blog I wrote, inspired by Dr. Brooks, that provides a great overview of what we’re trying to do with the Community Futures School.
A child that sees themself thriving in the future grows into a healthy adult. And so, the more children of the global majority that we have seeing themselves thriving in the future, the stronger our future will be.
Q: What didn’t we ask you?
Lonny: We’re not only looking at activating and expanding the imagination, we’re also looking at what happens when we do that: Can our imaginations help heal individual and collective trauma of slavery and discrimination? By giving students pathways to create alternative memories of the future, can we repair the impact of intergenerational trauma? As part of our Robert Wood Johnson Foundation project, we’re working with a neuroscientist named Dr. Sara King to track how students’ mindsets were before they began the program and how they look after, and we think that we’ll be able to see a growth in imagination literacy and healing. In addition to Dr. Sara King’s evaluation, we actually have an ongoing education assessment researcher, David Reider, who is looking at before/after impacts of our youth at the Community Futures School (CFS) and where they were at in terms of imagination/futures thinking and other qualitative variables and what skill sets and orientations emerge after CFS.
Nina: We’re seeing immediate impacts on the students. When they begin the program many of our youth find it difficult to speak about their ideas because education, especially K-8, has taught them that their ideas are less important and they’re really just supposed to be rearticulating what’s been told to them. They stumble for sometimes as much as two months before they are willing to actually tell us what they think. But they walk away feeling more confident, and as they’re exiting the program, some of them are beginning to challenge rules at their school that they feel infringe upon their rights. It’s been amazing to see them using their voices and building their own agency.
BONUS QUESTION
Q: What’s next?
Lonny: In the coming year, our students are going to be developing characters in artificial intelligence (AI), testing the limitations and possibilities of AI to create what we call the mothership. So, by the time that they graduate, they will have an AI literacy that they can shape and bend the arc of justice in the favor of using and leveraging that technology to heal.
Nina: We are also working to take 10 students to Ghana to look at the history next year, and then eventually we will take them to South Africa to get a more robust understanding of Afrofuturism as well. So, we’re continuing to iterate. Every year, we’re doing something new, and it’s based on the feedback of our youth. So, it’s not like we’re in a vacuum doing this as adults. We really are listening to what they’re saying and what their needs are.
The views expressed are those of the interviewee(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
