The Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit, developed by the Collective Imagination Practice Community (funded by JRF Emerging Futures and hosted by Huddlecraft and Canopy), offers tools and practices to enable people to imagine more hopeful futures. The toolkit supports work that pays attention to who gets to imagine, centers diverse imaginations, and cultivates a range of worldviews and ways of knowing. The practices are multidisciplinary—drawing on somatics, embodiment work, connection to future generations and ancestors, working with land and the more-than-human world, social foresight, narrative therapy, and myth-making—all rooted in growing people’s capacity to see more possibilities, shift perception, and untether from familiar or entrenched thinking.
Why It Matters: We are living in times requiring us to imagine things we may find hard to even perceive—and even those who practice foresight have been culturally conditioned to limit possibility so drastically that we struggle to conceive of desirable futures. Unlike futures work that scans what’s coming or narrative work that shapes understanding without reimagining, collective imagination creates conditions to construct alternative futures. As philosopher Yuk Hui writes, “in order to regain the future we must nurture our relationship to the unknown.” The toolkit emphasizes that collective imagination is a craft that, like a muscle, can be strengthened—and that this work must lead to material change, influencing decisions and shifting how resources flow.
