Reilly’s summary of Week 3 sessions:

Week 3 of Camden Imagines

This week was a big milestone as the Imagination Activists came together in-person for the first time! It felt like a very special moment filled with connection, joy and of course imagination. Many of the participants commented on how they felt a deeper connection to each other and the programme being in-person, so there is a lot for us to think about as we continue to deliver the rest of the programme. Read on to find out about what we did.

It’s an exciting moment in the programme, because people are starting to notice how the tools and practices are shifting their sense of what is possible, and what they might want to work in their imagination activism project in Camden. A couple of project ideas and thematic ideas started to surface in the session, with people wanting to put their ideas and creativity towards making positive change for residents. Two people identified
a common interest in the same area, and so a potential collaboration area was born. We asked ourselves the question “what is everyone incubating?”

People were very moved by connecting with a sense of the future generations alive 200 years from now. Camden colleagues reflected that really deeply connecting with future generations gives a huge sense of momentum and purpose — and is something that cuts across all issue areas and all differences between people, because everyone cares about future generations.

Another thing people said was that they had started to go back to their teams to talk about the programme and what they were learning and uncovering. One participant said that they had been finding Reilly’s drawings very helpful to share with their team as it summarises what happened in the sessions and allowed a different way of sharing. As we go on we will be supporting imagination activists to share back what they are learning with their managers and teams.

The participants are exploring how to embed imagination activism into Camden. This looks different for all of them. We have offered the frameworks and principles of the imagination activism toolbox, and the council officers are being supported to work out how this applies and embeds in their own context, in the local council and in the Borough.

For some people, this looks like bringing the exercises of imagination activism into policy making. For others, it looks like bringing the point of view of children and young people into the work they are doing — “always having their voices in the building even if they aren’t physically present.” For another person, it means changing the red lines and boundaries between residents and staff. An example of this would be with tenants having more direct access to council staff — imagination can be an equalising force.

Next week, we will be back online and taking some time to think more about imagination practices in detail.

What has happened in the Camden Imagines programme this week?

• We kicked off with a discussion about Rob Hopkins’ recent podcast with Cyril Dion, where he talks about Imagination Activism and asks Cyril what being an ‘imagination activist’ looks and feels like to him. You can listen to the full podcast here. Cyril talks about his take on Imagination Activism in the final 6 minutes of the episode. Here’s an excerpt of what Cyril shared:

“Of course we need Imagination Activism. To me, trying to adapt to reality in the way it is all the time is a trap. If you look at climate activists, that’s the problem. They’re just trying to adapt a little bit, current reality, having electric cars instead of fuel cars, having windmills instead of oil, without thinking about how we could live differently. And it doesn’t work! And that’s what capitalism and this society succeeded in doing, telling us that there is no alternative, and we have to live like that, and that’s the best system, or the least bad.

You don’t change the world doing that. When Martin Luther King said, I have a dream… Having a dream is about imagining a different world. When you say I have a dream where my son will grow up in a country where he has the same rights as white people, you’re just imagining a world that doesn’t exist. And that’s the same thing as all the people who fought for equality between men and women. So that is what we need to do right now — we need to imagine a world where you can’t spend your life working to just have a salary at the end of the month, to feed a capitalist monster, to have economical growth. That’s not the point of being on this planet… You could do much more interesting things.

So, what would it be? How would you make a living? Would that expression exist anymore, to “make a living”? Maybe not! What we need to do is defend life on earth, in all of its form. That’s all we need to do. To defend life is to defend all animal species, and the trees and the oceans and so on. But it’s also defending the life inside yourself. What is making you alive every day? Why do you want to get up and live your day? Why? To do what?”

• Some of the group responded to how the excerpt made them feel, one reflection from the group was “I want urgency and I really want things to change now”
• Phoebe responded to questions about how to handle the tension of being someone who is part of the system and yet imagining something radically new. She shared her own reflections about how she feels imagination activism isn’t necessarily about going against the mainstream, it is about weaving in and out of it, and rather than resisting the current way of doing things, invites everyone to imagine together how it could look different.
• We then had our own discussion about what imagination activism means in Camden. One participant shared “imagination activism shouldn’t be an add-on — it shouldn’t be ‘more work’. Imagination activism should be part of our ethos and all staff should embody it. It should be rooted in Camden”. We also heard that “it is about capturing everyone’s voice and vision for the future — we want to create
  space for inclusion”
• Some people even shared that they already feel like they are an Imagination Activist which reflects the spirit of Camden.
• Phoebe introduced to the group to their first truly immersive imagination exercise: meeting the future generation and transporting ourselves to 2222 through a time machine
• Participants were taken through the Moral Imaginations Future Generations exercise where they met with their 7th generation ancestor who had a cultural record of 2022 and what we are doing on the Camden Imagination Programme, as well as the wider context of what has happened in the world over the past 200 years. They then invited that perspective into their work and decisions.
• They were guided through a process of talking through the future of what happened in Camden as imagination activism was embedded into the Borough — and imagined what happened at key milestones like 2030, when no child in Camden went hungry, or 2034, when all green spaces were transformed into rewilded nature.
• It was a transcending experience for the Imagination Activists with much of the group feeling a sense of purpose in the work and beginning to generate their ideas about Imagination Activism in Camden.

What are we hearing from the participants?

• “It was amazing… it was so nice to hear from the 7th generation and for them to thank us. It was also great to focus on what we can do”
• “It made me feel like the struggle is worth it”
• “It validated my values particularly relating to being a vegetarian and the trauma informed therapies work we do; it felt like my personal beliefs became common place and it was a powerful validation”
• “The term ‘someone who’s name you will never know’ really triggered an emotional response in me — it resonated that we are doing it for all not just for self”
• “It also triggered me but in the sense that I already know their name because I am already spiritually connected to my ancestors and they are guiding what I do now. I hope that what I am doing inspires them.”

What are we reading this week?

• Have a read of this article from Brain Pickings, Nature and Creativity: The Science of “Soft Fascination” and How the Natural World Presses the Reset Button of the Brain’s Default Mode Network. We teach about the Default Mode Network as part of our trainings — you can also connect it back to the importance of day-dreaming and read the blog Jo Brown and Phoebe wrote during the summer: Imagination is not day dreaming.

Keep imagining and see you next week!

Weeknote 3— Future Generations was originally published in Camden Imagines on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A 6-month Community Imagination Lab which invited local community members to reimagine their relationships to themselves, each other, and the world

This blogpost introduces the work Moral Imaginations did in Watchet as part of the Onion Collective’s Attachment Economics project, to support community members to reimagine an economy that is connected to community, care and what’s important. This post sets out the context to the work, the history and background of Watchet, the intervention we developed in collaboration with the project partners, and the impact and learning.

We outline our approach which used collective, immersive, participatory imagination informed by systems theory, complexity and deep ecology; covers the portfolio of activities we undertook and summarises our learnings. We welcome your questions or comments and if you would like to find out more please get in touch.

Background on the town of Watchet

Watchet is an marine harbour town. Since Watchet’s working harbour closed in the 1990s, seeing mass job losses, it has been struggling to recover. A marina opened in 2001 to try to boost the economy, but the closure of the local paper mill, which had operated for 265 years, in 2015 took an entire fifth of the town’s jobs with it.

The demise of the mill represented what Onion Collective director Sally Lowndes describes as “a devastating” loss of identity — still talked about as a collective trauma and something the community has struggled to process and move on from. The area now has the lowest social mobility in England, with around 25% of young people going to university, compared with 50% nationally. Eight community-interested women born and bred in Watchet known as the Onion Collective realised that no one else was going to tackle a chronic unemployment problem in a town that is among the most deprived in the UK.

So they decided to work to create a new story, a new identity, and a new economy for the town. This has included building a visionary £7.2 million arts and community centre, East Quay (featured in the Guardian here) creating 37 decent new jobs, five apprenticeships, and supporting 109 jobs indirectly from visitors’ spending on local businesses.

What were we invited to do?

Moral Imaginations was approached in September 2020 by the Onion Collective, a local social enterprise, after they saw The Impossible Train Story and resonated with the story and approach. Onion Collective was planning to write a collective book on community ‘attachment’ economics and their dream was to include written pieces from the local community. The chapters from the local community would communicate the things that really matter to them — that need to be placed at the heart of a new economy. They were looking for a process to support the community imagining to explore economic futures for Watchet.

Moral Imaginations designed an immersive imagination journey called a Moral Imagining Lab that would support 30 community members to vision an alternative economy for Watchet.

The week-long imagination lab would be delivered virtually, with community members supported to participate using Zoom and Google Docs and given onboarding support as part of the process. The idea was to use our experience of working with narrative design, collective imagination and embodied cognition to offer a journey that would be transformative for the community and support them to access their deepest imaginations through a state of pressure-free exploration and psychological safety.

What happened in the Imagining Lab?

Over the five days of the lab, we worked with 30 community members to explore the future, connect to the past and make sense of what a new identity for Watchet in the 21st century. We worked with metaphor, story, collective imagining practice and deep reflection to generate shared visions, images, shared metaphors and language. This was then followed by a weekly reflection session for eight weeks following the Lab, to integrate the shifts in awareness and work with the images, metaphors, questions and inquiries that emerged.

There were five stages to the lab:

• Opening the Portal (through the Impossible Train Story in the context of a new economy for Watchet)
• More-than-human World (exploring more than human perspectives)
• Future Generations (exploring a future generation perspective)
• Connecting with Ancestors (exploring a connection to ancestors and place)
• Closing and Celebration (showcasing the artwork and collective imaginations)

Through a team of 4 co-facilitators, an artist and graphic facilitator, we delivered an experiential journey that was carefully and rigorously designed based on our methods and approaches, and also adaptive and emergent based on the needs of the participants.

What was the outcome?

Over the four days, through a digital scrapbook, the community collectively created 121 pages of poetry, images, prose, future visions and speculative fiction, articulating their new-found motivation, hope and sense of possibility for the future. As part of our approach we also worked with community members to produce a shared immersive audio piece which captured the collective creativity of the group, creating a collective poem from the More-than-human Day of the Imagination Lab.

The community continued to host their own, self-organised imagination sessions (which we supported with our materials) after the end of the live Imagination Lab. This continued for six months with continuing enthusiasm and creativity, which was perhaps the most transformative aspect of the intervention.

The final collection of community artwork, poetry, metaphors and creative writing can be found here: Watchet Moral Imaginations Lab — Vignettes.

Community members created new artworks, poetry, drawings and even songs and continued to record, share and express creativity in the 6 months following the lab. It’s as if the 5 day Imagination Lab liberated the community’s imaginations and visions and gave them the permission and confidence to keep creating, long after the lab was over.

As part of the Lab, the community was supported to create new collective metaphors to capture their explorations, discoveries and collective sentiments about the past and the future. One example can be seen below: “sticks in the mud” was collectively created to describe the people the community felt fought to resist anything new, any new ideas, shooting them down. Below is the artwork created by our graphic facilitator and scribe Reilly Dow:

What was the impact on participants?

The results were transformative, empowering, and for some of the participants, potentially life-changing. The Onion Collective described the results as “extraordinary” and “transformative’. “It’s changed how we think about the future, how we think about ourselves, and what we feel is possible,” said Georgie Grant, one of the Directors of the Onion Collective.

“It’s changed how we think about the future, how we think about ourselves, and what we feel is possible”

The key thing that participants report is the sense of closeness, kinship and trust that developed from the 4 day virtual experience together. Participants experienced therapeutic effects and effects on well-being — something we could not have predicted from the outset of the project. One participant, who suffers from agoraphobia (a fear of outdoor spaces) said she was able to go outside and meet with people in a way that hadn’t been possible before the experience.

One participant said, “I feel I have found a new part of me that feels strong.” Others reported feeling a heightened sense of connection with nature, and a heightened sensitivity to sounds and colours — one participant reported “colours seem brighter after the lab, and I can hear more birdsong — I feel a grounded hope and inspiration”.

“I feel I have found a new part of me that feels strong”

The connections forged and the vulnerability shared has accelerated a sense of kinship, connection and mutual support — with many of the Imagination Lab participants continuing to meet up, help each other out with errands, volunteer for each other and carry out acts of mutual aid.

Reflections shared by participants:

“It’s the earth, the universe and everything. All massive existential questions. And yet it’s quite a playful way of doing it. And a way that people who might not have thought they could do it, could.” — Sara Summers, participant

“This has been a mind blowing experience… Now we need to work out how we continue what we started. I want to keep up relationships that have started. It’s been such an amazing brain stretching, emotional, experience, where we go from here I have no idea…” — Frank, participant

What was the impact on the Onion Collective?

The Onion Collective reported deep changes in their work and a resulting shift in their priorities. The process opened up a deeper way of working, created a space where they could talk about the ‘spiritual’ and ‘sacred’, and centred the importance of imagination and story as a way to unite the community and shift things at a deeper level. Jess Prendergrast and Georgie Grant, Directors of Onion Collective who took part in the Imagination Lab later went on to tell the Guardian:

“We really want to build an ‘imaginarium’,” says Prendergrast. The word conjures images of a coastal Millennium Dome, filled with vapid platitudes, before Grant explains. “Every town should have a temple of imagination,” she says, “a place where you can go to imagine what you want the area to be like.” “We’re all stuck in who and what we think we are, but we should be able to imagine different possibilities.” — Guardian article on the Onion Collective and East Quay

“Every town should have a temple of imagination, a place where you can go to imagine what you want the area to be like.”

The reflections from Georgie were: “I was surprised by how emotional it was, it felt like an opening up of my soul! The questions required deep soul thinking, which I don’t normally do, or know how to necessarily. It meant accessing a different part of my brain which is tiring and exhilarating.”

“It meant accessing a different part of my brain which is tiring and exhilarating”

Jess later spoke about the experience: “We worked with a brilliant group of practitioners called Moral Imaginations. And we undertook quite intensely for a week and subsequently over several months a game changing journey really of helping people in our communities to imagine what the next economy might look like and understanding the imperatives to which they wanted it to respond. And then from that thinking helping people generate creative work — so prose and poetry and art and writings all about economics of all things!

And I honestly think it was the most powerful engagement process I have ever been part of. And I really live and breathe this stuff.

We expected it to be hard and we thought that when we asked people to come to do a week’s worth of Zoom workshops on economics they would run a mile, but they didn’t — and we literally couldn’t shut them up — and they produced some of the most heart wrenchingly beautiful sometimes quite crushing but also really hopeful work about how things could and need to change.

“I honestly think it was the most powerful engagement process I have ever been part of. And I really live and breathe this stuff.”

And those in turn have really deeply influenced our own writings and own thinking on the way the next economy might be run for the better and how the values that matter to those communities can be integral to that change.

The process we experienced with Moral Imaginations was really revelatory but it was also hard. And hard for those people involved. It was emotionally quite taxing, and it awakened fears as much as hopes, and it was quite spiritual. Again, not something usually associated with economic thinking.

But it was really worth it, and it helped people not just process their own ideas, but rethink what was possible, build friendships and understanding of difference, create shared purpose and values.”

“It helped people not just process their own ideas, but rethink what was possible, build friendships and understanding of difference, create shared purpose and values.”

What did we learn?

Time, space and scaffolding
Our biggest learning is that communities need space, time, permission and scaffolding with imagination exercises and emotional support to engage in what can be a challenging, but rewarding process. Many of the community members talked about feeling a sense of reconnection with something that had felt lost before — a sense of freedom, creativity and hope, without denying the challenges and injustices that weighed them down day to day. Participants also said they had never experienced something like this before — and that the week-long Imagination Lab served as a catalyst for continued relationships, creativity and community support and mutual aid. A week-long experience paid dividends for the 12 months after.

Continued support and care after the Lab
Another important learning was the need for continued support, scaffolding and care in the time after the Imagination Lab. Arguably the most impactful time was in the 3 months following the intensive experience, where community members transitioned to hosting their own imagination sessions, supported each other to overcome challenges, and continue their creative and community projects. One of these projects was the “No Judge Club” created by Kate, who curated a space for community members to congregate, have a cup of tea, and be able to speak about their problems and feelings in a judgement free space.

Adequate support during the Lab
Having a team of co-facilitators was important to the process. The Moral Imaginations team had 4 co-facilitators and a graphic scribe, and the Onion Collective had 1–2 people present throughout the Lab. People needed different levels of attention and support to participate in the process, and there were also multiple complex needs in the room, so the team was essential to create a support structure that could respond to what was happening. Co-facilitators were available for one-to-one meetings after the Lab which was important for 4–5 of the participants in particular.

Conditions for a transformative process
Lastly, we learned a lot about the conditions needed to create a transformative community experience. We followed a process of emergent design, which allowed us to shape the experience responding to the community’s needs and levels of comfort which allowed a deep and responsive process. It was also important to enter the Lab with very little pressure on participants to produce or achieve anything — which yielded results far beyond what either Moral Imaginations or Onion Collective had expected.

Scepticism around imagination and dreaming
The Onion Collective expressed some concerns before the Lab about whether the community members would find this too “wooly” or “fluffy” or “spiritual”. Later they felt that the tone struck was one that held space for the sacred and important values, without being woo-woo or fluffy — and actually the themes and topics discussed were things that the community had struggled to discuss previously — like feelings of grief and despair about the future. Transformative processes are difficult to describe and talk about and this presents a barrier in the setting up of such projects and experiences. There is a need to develop better language to describe this kind of work and its qualities in a way that does the impact of it justice.

Closing thoughts

Communities deserve to shape their environments and infrastructure, and contribute to co-imagining the future. Immersive, transformative, participatory imagination should be available to all communities and not just those who can afford these experiences. A collective imagination approach with a focus on values and entanglement with future generations, ancestors and the more-than-human world can create a shared experience that unleashes energy, creativity, hope and empathy, with a strong shared articulation of what is vital and important. We are deeply grateful to work with the Watchet community and Onion Collective, and play a small part in their ongoing journey, and thank all the participants for giving their time, energy and creativity to this process.

Find out more

Who gets to imagine the future? | RSA — A panel discussion featuring Jess Prendergrast talking about the effects of the work.

Cultivating Everyday Imagination — What Next Summit — Phoebe speaks about the project and showcases some of the artwork.

Watchet Imagines: Municipal Imagination in the Town of Watchet was originally published in Moral Imaginations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last year, I was the Better Way Network Thought Leader on imagination. Moral Imaginations hosted an event on 18 November 2022 where we brought together a group of network members to imagine an end to poverty. This is a post written by Better Way co-convenor Caroline Slocock about the event.

Article written by Caroline Slocock about our workshop on Moral Imagining an end to poverty in November 2022.

“In November 2022, the Better Way Network brought together a group of civil society practitioners, anti-poverty advocates, funders and local council officers to explore the end of poverty and see if we would be able to envision such an end, and what it would look and feel like. The background to this as that during discussions in 2021 the network had concluded that:

• Our humanity can build bridges and move us to change
• Collective imagination can make a different future possible
• We need to find ways to make a different kind of space to listen deeply to each other, share our stories and tell new ones.

In 2022, we’ve been exploring this further with Phoebe Tickell, who is our thought leader in imagination for 2022. We were exploring the power of moral imagination earlier in the year and, in this session, asking ourselves: what if we could eradicate poverty? If we could imagine a different future, how would we work differently today and what would we do?

Introducing the session, Phoebe Tickell said that she describes herself as an imagination activist and her organisation and collective, Moral Imaginations, trains people to become imagination activists. This is a new kind of activist who is powered by imagination and vision, and is equipped with the tools to make those visions become real, and who is building a new kind of capacity, the capacity to imagine how things could be different and also help others to exercise their own imagination — ‘to stretch a muscle’ that has been underused since childhood. She explained that her focus was on moral imagination, because imagination can be used for good and bad ends.

She said that problems are often framed as resource problems (not enough money or people), even when as a society we have too many resources, resulting in food waste and garbage, and this creates a kind of learnt helplessness. The real problem is an atrophy of imagination about how to use the resources we have.

The leader of Camden council, Georgia Gould, is striving for a ‘new era of municipal imagination’ and Phoebe and Moral Imaginations have been working with the council to build capacity and understanding of the importance of imagination in local government and civic infrastructure. They’ve been identifying the blocks to imagination in how they currently operate, working with central functions to change what is possible, training staff, managers and leaders in imagination activism and providing them with tools, frameworks and new practices to shift culture. The next stage is to embed imagination into policy and projects, working not just with the council but also with local residents.

‘What if’ is the key question in this and other imagination work, alongside the question imagination activism is asking which is ‘what would you do if you have the fearless confidence you would succeed’.

Phoebe then took the group through a couple of exercises designed to give just a taste of how imagination can help address the issue of poverty, explaining that in practice this is really deep work which requires much longer than we had available on this occasion.

What if we eradicated poverty by 2030?

The first exercise was a form of guided meditation in which each participant was helped to imagine themselves in a distant future where they were able to look back to a time when poverty had come to an end in 2030. They are asked what poverty was like, what led to its eradication and what it felt like afterwards. Participants were asked to ‘journal’ their response.

We collected pages of shared imaginations using the method of collective imagining, which we’ve brought together into a continuous narrative here — it’s very inspiring to read.

A narrative from 2030 about the end of poverty

‘We had charities and a welfare system but more and more people became poor’ and it was ‘hard to keep hope alive.’

Participants wrote about the causes of poverty and how it made them feel

We had charities and a welfare system but more and more people became poor….We lost our compass on health and thriving people and communities…We felt painful, deep despair and disappointment in what we have created….There were huge discrepancies between the haves and have nots.

“Othering.” Pitting people against each other….False beliefs. Sides, Disagreements…Individualism….It was restricting — no one understood what it meant to be one human race…Those experiencing pain, stigma and shame were unable to be heard.

It was painful and hard to keep hope alive. People working on the frontline were frightened and tired, trying to do what they could and feeling guilty that they had more than the people they were serving….People were scared and knew there needed to be change.

Then there was ‘The Great Realisation of 2029’, when ‘we recognised our interdependence’

How did participants imagine why the changes came about?

It started when we changed who we listened to…..People having realised the deep pain and gaps….We recognised our interdependence — including with the natural world…We realised that we and our interests were inextricably connected and interwoven…‘The coming together.’

It became what we now know as The Great Realisation of 2029. More people started to realise that things couldn’t continue as they were. It wasn’t right that certain people owned all the money and resources. It wasn’t right to have powerful people dominating the rest of us. They also realised that what was important are people and the planet, not money and things. And they also realised there was an abundance of resources on this planet, we just needed to work out how to share those resources while looking after the planet. So they simply stopped. They stopped participating in these domineering systems. Without people participating, these old systems could no longer exist. They were no longer viable. So new systems emerged. No two systems looked the same, but in all places they emerged in similar ways. They created their own new systems that were all in principle anti-authoritarian, inclusive, and environmentally conscious. It was proliferation rather than scale…The fundamental structures were called to change though new ideas and possibilities.

People realised that there was so much waste, we had so much but weren’t sharing it and if we did we’d all be stronger. It was fear about the planet that really triggered this — seeing people across the world starving and their animals dying because of the waste and pollution we caused. We realised that we needed to stop dumping our problems on other people at home and abroad. We saw ourselves as one country, not lots of diverse groups, and we made our politicians decide to do something about it. Making all basic services free, talking to the people who were suffering and asking what they needed, not simply money, but love and hope and we opened up a national debate which those people were leading (not simply commented on as if they were ‘other’ and not in the room). We asked rich people to contribute to a fund, rather like the Bill Gates fund, to make more resources available but also to help innovate. We asked politicians to apply a ‘how can we end poverty test’ to everything they did, health, education, housing, and we held them to account.

It started to change with action groups and peaceful protests — we stopped allowing the government to make decisions which worked well for those who already had enough. We asked people who were seeking asylum to come into the UK and to teach us how to live better — their experiences were so valuable and we came together as community. The Green party joined forces with Labour and started to ask residents for their ideas and help — we moved away from deceit and towards integrity, serving one another and sharing. People were caught up in a joy in the little things — much like during the pandemic — and remembered that smaller acts of connection are what we really valued.

It was SUCH AN EXCITING TIME! It was absolutely CRAZY that we realised that this was something we WOULD NOT STAND FOR and everyone joined together to rule out poverty once and for all. First we said poverty would be stamped out completely, and we set a time by which that would happen — 2030. Then we started working backwards and deciding how we would go about doing that. If the poor person was not to exist again, they had to be able to access resources, services, clothes, food — in short, everything they needed, to be able to live a life of dignity and well-being and joy without needing to rely on money. It was around about that time that a Universal Basic Income and Universal Basic Services came into being…. Universal basic income started in one place and was so successful. After that there was no stopping it coming into place everywhere….And we set the global minimum for a quality of life that all of us, billionaires included, would be happy to stand behind. We’d be happy for any of our family members to live that life, that quality of life.

‘People were all flourishing, like never before’, it was ‘a great awakening of love’

Here are some of the feelings and experiences that participants described after poverty ended in 2030:

A calm descended over the earth and people began to flourish rather than just survive, for the first time ever people were all flourishing, like never before….It was the strangest thing in the world. Everything had been the same for so long that nobody could imagine anything any different. Then suddenly everyone had a new idea and the world became a very different place.

Realising that connections between people and ideas and resources made us richer and helped us build systems that were kinder….People became kinder and empathetic, realising that we are not the only ones suffering, many people suffer way more than us and if we help each other, we can not only achieve goals — eliminate poverty, hunger, war and all these big, horrible things happening in the world — but also feel better for ourselves because we helped each other and because the people who we helped do now have a better life…And we felt as if a great burden of guilt had been lifted, and we found we were all so much richer.

Our minds became freer when we learnt how much they were shaped by messages that kept us focused on being apart from one another, and that others were enemies…Accepting that others have different needs, that some need more of some things than others because of their health, their family situation, etc, and that’s ok, made it easier to let go of resentments….Discovering that if we listened close enough, we could hear what places and the land wanted, was a shift.

People all got along and helped each other more than they ever did before…People were concerned for each other….People cared about the experiences of everyone — before people were blamed for their life disadvantages — like whether they were born into not having enough love or support or material needs and instead society stood together and took responsibility jointly. Everybody shared responsibility for their part and, when they started to see this working together, people were less afraid of not having enough and stopped stockpiling and instead would share together. Before individuals or organisations would take the blame for things that went wrong but blame was no longer a thing, instead ‘mistakes’ were seen as learning opportunities and people would join together to find solutions.

Living in a fairer society made everyone happier….People gathered in communities to celebrate what was best about each other and the world around them…There was music and dance in the streets….Culture was valued and everyone had access to the humanities, philosophy, music, arts etc.

Greed was rare….Not many people were greedy for more than what they already had….There was equality of access.

There was a great awakening of love for fellow human beings.

What if we all had good food, housing, low cost energy and access to green spaces?

Addressing ‘What if’ questions

We then went into breakout groups to brainstorm a number of ‘what if’ questions that might help address different dimensions of how to eradicate poverty. Here’s a selection of some of the points coming out of these:

• What if our energy supply was low cost and locally generated? This break out group thought that we needed an energy policy, informed by more voices, eg children including under 10s, as well as over 70s. It was concerned that the media were pushing false narratives about the lack of energy supplies in the UK, creating a belief that the public don’t have the power to generate power and stifling imaginative solutions, and they wanted to see more positive reporting about green alternatives, the creation of a genuine public square forum and new ways of sharing information locally.
• What if everyone had access to beautiful green and wild spaces? The group thought that there needed to be more cross-party agreement on action to tackle climate change, advocated changes to planning laws to require new buildings to have access to green spaces, thought there should be more challenge about who lives where, called for a focus on making places safe for women and, to improve access, wanted to see a commitment to subsidised public transport (and politicians should be required by law to use that transport so that they were aware of where changes were needed).
• What if everyone had access to food abundance and low cost, nutritious food? This breakout group thought that the root causes of food poverty and lack of low cost good food included people not having enough money, an over-reliance on unregulated and profiteering markets, lack of knowledge about food preparation and lack of time and lack of access to affordable, local food in some ‘food deserts’. Their ideas for achieving the goal included a higher living wage and benefits, better education on food, local growing and sharing food schemes, universal free school meals and more supermarkets donating unused food to people who needed it.
• What if everyone had access to low cost, good quality housing? This group reflected most on the root causes of a shortage of affordable housing, including the high cost of land, a market controlled by a small number of property developers, and housing being seen primarily as an investment, rather than accommodation. The result was that not enough houses were being built, and overseas investors were leaving some housing empty. At the same time, there was abuse of the private rental market. They wanted to see more common ownership.

Concluding thoughts

In conclusion, Phoebe said how inspiring the session had been and how it highlighted that collective imagination was not about fixing things as they are but changing them to how they should be, exercising the power of active hope for change (as opposed to hope which can act as a sedative to taking action).

Caroline Slocock, the co-convenor of a Better Way, said she had been struck by Phoebe’s point that lack of imagination, not lack of resources, was the reason why so many problems seem apparently intractable. She reflected that some of the big moments when the world had changed — from the abolition of slavery, to the building of sewers to create clean water, to the introduction of votes for women — had happened because people had had enough imagination to see that was possible and had the courage to make it so.

The exercise where we projected ourselves into the future really brought this home. She said that we hoped to continue with this strand of imagination work in 2023 and Phoebe added that if anyone was interested in the work with local councils or is interested in embedding imagination in their own council or organisation they should get in touch with her at Moral Imaginations.

With thanks to Caroline Slocock for this article!

Imagining an end to poverty was originally published in Moral Imaginations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is an interview I did for Social Innovatie Fabriek before speaking at their annual congress with a 60-minute keynote titled “Imagination Activism: our Universal Power”.

Phoebe Tickell: “Imagination is the necessary force to get out of crises.”

03/10/2022

On October 21st, imagination activist Phoebe Tickell kicks off our System Shakers networking conference with a dazzling keynote on the power of imagination. Because by combining visualisation, science and art, we can help people take action. In this interview, the British-Hungarian scientist gives us a foretaste.

Who is Phoebe Tickell?

• Hungarian/English scientist and social entrepreneur.
• Graduated magna cum laude in Biological Natural Sciences from Cambridge University.
• Worked at The National Lottery Community Fund of Great Britain until 2021.
• As the founder of Moral Imaginations , she works with leaders, organisations, boards, communities and think tanks to drive change.
• Keynote speaker at our network conference System Shakers on October 21, 2022.

Efficiency versus creativity

The world is on fire, literally and figuratively. In addition to forest fires that flare up due to global warming, hot spots are popping up everywhere in our society. Poverty, childcare, waste, mobility, inclusion, mental well-being… we face a huge mountain of problems to solve. According to Phoebe Tickell, it can. But then we first have to change our mentality around those themes. We spoke to her via Zoom about the keynote she will give during System Shakers .

You believe that we can find solutions to difficult themes thanks to imagination. Explain.

“The way in which we have been organizing our lives, learning and work for decades, the way in which we organize our society, that no longer seems to work well today. As a result, we are gradually reaching a state of impasse. The good news is that together we can create a new reality. But then we have to dare to use our imagination. Imagination really is a superpower. It’s available to anyone, anytime, anywhere.”

What does an imagination activist like you do?

“I use playful methods to help people see the world in different ways, and that a different world is possible. Only when someone dares to look beyond what they already know, will they be able to change their perspective. And adjust their behaviour where necessary. Only we have forgotten how to think outside the box, for fear of doing something wrong or not according to the ‘imposed norm’. Industrialsation had a devastating effect on our creativity. We have become obsessed with efficiency and replicability, which is at odds with craft and genuine creation. Our school system also pushes creativity out of children. And then suddenly they are adults. I see a big link to the mental health problem we face today. A one-size-fits-all model is not humane. It creates a colonial system where most people people are excluded or “don’t fit the mould”.”

Does the place where you grow up affect your creativity?

“I think so. As a child I lived in Hungary, in a slightly poorer and more austere region. I spent the other half of my life in well-developed London, where everything is neatly arranged. The difference in imagination between the inhabitants is very striking. In Hungary I felt much more warmth, togetherness and creativity. When people have less, they share more with each other and look for ways to make their lives easier. Automatically they also use their hands more. So modernisation makes us sure no more creative.”

Does the government play a role in this?

“In any case, I notice a big difference between Europe and, say, South America, where there are often more links between politics and art. In Europe there is little room for deep and radical creativity. That is largely reserved for people who are paid to work in fantasy, like filmmakers or authors. Too bad, because the kind of thinking we need on a large scale to get out of our complex problems is not accessible to most people. Everyone is required to have daring, cooperation, courage, creativity and imagination, but it is not recognised that it takes time, space and practice. Imagination does not come by itself.”

How did you see the results of your work yourself?

“In the group sessions with the Moral Imaginations Lab, we use multimedia experience, sound and live artwork to tap into imagination. Last year we did a four-day journey with residents from Watchet, who all had certain issues. When I asked the group after a a few years back, many of them had really changed. One person was even elected to local politics. We didn’t tell them what to do to get on with their lives, but we did open the door to their imagination. Then suddenly there was a lot possible.”

What do you hope the audience will take home from your keynote?

“I would love it if everyone thought about the question ‘What do I need to get my imagination flowing?’ That can be anything, but it can have fantastic consequences for the rest of your life or project.”

Original article here.

Each week we will publish an update of progress, updates and what we are noticing in the Camden Imagination Activism programme — a training to build imagination capacity and practice with council officers and in the borough of Camden. Welcome to our second Weeknote.

Reilly’s summary of Week 2 sessions:

This week a lot happened, and we’re hearing that a lot has started to shift.

Many participants commented on how they could feel and notice things shifting in the way they are approaching their work, free time, connecting to imagination and creativity and feeling a sense of confidence in their own ideas, imaginations and ability to drive innovation.

Others feel that this course is allowing them to reconnect with their innate sense of purpose, and ability to affect change in the world. You can read some of the reflections later on in this Weeknote.

Next week the Imagination Activists will be meeting in person for the first time, at 5PS, and experience their first collective imagination session. This will introduce the Moral Imaginations framework of working with future generations, nature, and long-term thinking.

The aim is to embed imagination into policy, practice and place, starting by building the capacity for collective imagination and then embedding into place.

What has happened in the Camden Imagines programme this week?

• Participants are being encouraged to share creative things that make them come alive. Phil shared a poem by William Blake who was a great visionary and misunderstood or under-appreciated in his own times — see the poem below.
• We collectively signed the Imagination Contracts, to make a clear commitment to this process and ‘step over this threshold’ deliberately. This was a key moment of creating a deliberate commitment to the imagination.
• During the session we introduced core terminology around the Industrial Growth Society and Life Sustaining Society which is part of the essential toolkit of Imagination Activists. This enabled deep discussions about how we’ve come so far, but maybe have used the wrong tools or extractive processes to bring us to this point. We opened up about the constraints of the system and what we could do without these — we are working within the limitations we have created and are now needing to respond to the systems we’ve built.
• We explored something called the Three Stories Model and brainstormed together all of the ways we see three stories in action, today, in the world around us. Participants explored what this is like for them in their roles at Camden and in being a council officer, and our role as Imagination Activists to put our energy and focus on the story of change, while not ignoring the others.
• This week, participants have a new practice to reconnect to their inner voice and intuition which drives creativity. We will talk about how creativity is one of the three core elements in the Triangle of Imagination in the coming weeks.
• Participants have started to learn how to host their own check-ins, and have been given a variety of creative check-in questions to experiment with in their pods (small groups of 4–5 whom they will meet with consistently throughout the programme and practice their new tools and skills with).
• Participants filled out their first Learning Log, one of the graduation requirements of the programme. The themes we noticed were: people are noticing themselves thinking differently, people are connecting with an inner excitement and sense of purpose and direction, people appreciate having unstructured “playful” time each week, people are feeling their faith being restored in their own capacity to be creative, have ideas and imagine. Some of the reflections are shared (anonymously) with you further down.

London by William Blake

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

What are we hearing from the participants?

As part of Session 2, Participants were asked to think about what might get in the way, challenge me or create resistance to me nourishing my imagination? And on the flip side, what is really inspiring me to build my imagination muscle? Some of the thoughts that were shared included:

• “We need planned unplanned time”
• “How we’re taught not to let our imagination run wild, we have to get results, our drawing doesn’t mean what we thought it meant and others teach us to be different, to be rational”
• To change things we need to return to the love of life?

Reflections from participants

“I’m learning lots of new tools and methods that I can integrate into work. I’m noticing that I love the regularity of having a space to think innovatively and creatively about my work a couple of times a week — like a kind of “meaningful adult play-time” that is coherent with the goals of my job. I’m so excited to implement more of this!”

“I am learning how to give more time to myself and try to understand what helps my mind imagine in the right way for me. I have noticed I am feeling less scared as time goes on to think and act more like myself regardless of how that comes across.”

“I am taking the time to explore other ways of doing things rather than defaulting to what is usual or expected.”

“Re-building having faith in my daydreaming, starting to believe that my ideas aren’t just a fantasy and that I can turn them into reality.”

“What’s shifting is that I am starting to make space for thinking creatively.”

What has been happening in the wider Camden Imagines movement?

We had a great chat with people in the Neighbourhoods and Housing team about the ways his team are bringing in imagination practices into their work, and the possibility to build on the Neighbourhoods work and frontline forums. Moral Imaginations is also collaborating with the Participation Team around the What Matters festival, and Sue, Caroline and Phoebe will be catching up in detail about the collective imagination session she will be hosting next week.

On the 20th October, Think and Do will be running a series of What If World Cafes as part of the launch of the environmental e-learning module. Debbie from Think and Do talked with Phoebe and they decided to open the invitation to participate, facilitate and support to the Imagination Activists, as one of the first opportunities to take the tools of collective imagination out into the work of Camden.

Weeknote 2 — Building Imagination Activism was originally published in Camden Imagines on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introducing the Camden Imagination Activists

Here we share the biographies and photographs of the 32 council officers taking part in the 8–week Imagination Activism programme at Camden Council. The 32 officers have come from across the council, majority are frontline staff with some from corporate services.

We have people from the Equalities and Disproportionately team, Educational Psychology Service, Participation Team, Organisational Design Team, Children’s Services, the Sustainability, Air Quality and Energy Team, Inclusive Innovation Network, Camden Children’s centres, Camden’s Development division, Neighbourhood Housing, Digital & Data Services, Camden’s Regeneration and Development scheme, Learning and Development Team, Adult Social Care Transformation, Public Health, Camden’s Job Hub, Environment Services, Adult Social Care Commissioning, Regeneration and Planning team, Organisation Design Team and Sports.

Scroll down to find out more about our wonderful programme participants, soon to be Imagination Activists:

Imagination Activists of Camden

Abdilatif Shidane

My name is Abdilatif Shidane, I am a Neighbourhood Housing Officer working with our residents in Holborn and Covent Garden area. I want to use this space to creatively imagine a better environment for our residents to live, work and study in.

Neelam Kumar

Dr Neelam Kumar is part of the Educational Psychology Service
(EPS). The team provides specialist advice to support schools, colleges and early years’ providers to identify, assess and meet the needs of children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) aged 0–25. They address concerns about developmental, behavioural, emotional and mental health needs, including those with the most complex needs. The team draws on psychological theory and research to inform our practice.

Lioko Mabika

Lioko is a Senior Policy and Projects Officer in the Equalities and Disproportionately team. Lioko has been excited about this program from the get-go as it is a chance to start thinking about equality through a whole new creative lens. The work Camden has done so far is great, but it can feel hard to keep up the momentum when the change you’re advocating for is taking longer than it naturally should. Lioko feels like this program will reinvigorate our efforts and help us think about equality in new ways.

Tracy Aware

Tracy is a Digital Marketing Executive within Camden’s Development division. Tracy’s role involves the marketing and promotion of the new-build private sale homes that Camden offers. The sale of these new homes is a major contributor to the Borough’s Community Investment Programme (CIP) so impactful and cost-effective marketing is vital.

Philip Barrett

Philip is in Early Help within Children’s Services and works as an Early Help Coordinator. This is the ‘front door’ of Early Help and so they work with families for short periods, matching their needs to a range of internal and borough-wide services, as well as advocating on their behalf as we support them towards achieving their goals.

Ian Gilson

Ian is an Organisational Design Lead. Ian’s team work across Camden, to address the systemic issues that help us thrive in our jobs.

Elita Johns

Elita is a Digital IQ Development Officer in Digital & Data Services who leads on Camden’s Induction programme, intranet publishers network and maximising the use of your laptop.

Natalie Curd

Natalie is a Air Quality Projects Lead within the Sustainability, Air Quality and Energy Team. Natalie leads on community engagement and communications, as well as the development and delivery of projects looking to improve air quality for, and raise awareness about the health impacts of exposure to air pollution to, those who live, work, study and visit the borough.

Alison Morris

Alison is a Diversity and Inclusion Programme Officer working on a range of inclusion projects to ensure their successful delivery

Ali Alsaraf

Ali is a Principal Strategy and Project officer, leading the work on the Estate mission and leading on the Inclusive Innovation Network programme. Ali also leads on the Estate improvement project at Denyer House as part of the Estate Mission pilot

Liam Hall

Liam is a Locality Leader working within Camden Children’s centres helping to co-ordinate services for families with children under 5 years

Jane Murphy

Jane works across directorates to support Camden to deliver on the Prevent Duty. This involves identifying ways in which people may become vulnerable to radicalisation and ensuring we are doing all we can to mitigate this risk. Jane supports organisations to train, develop policy, report and co-ordinate individual support packages.

Martin Cuba Cote-Riopo

Martin is a Repairs Neighbourhood Coordination Officer supporting Neighbourhood Housing Officers to resolve repairs issues for residents at the earliest opportunity, with a big focus on complex cases. Martin does this by working closely with both internal and external stakeholders including supervisors, planners, contractors or sub-contractors. Martin also works on different borough wide projects, as well as assisting the insurance team.

Maybel Houston

Maybel is an advanced Learning and Development Apprentice working in Human Resource’s Learning and Development Team.

Rozita Leetham

Rozita is a Consultation and Engagement Officer for the Community Investment Programme, Camden’s Regeneration and Development scheme. The team builds new, or improves existing affordable homes, schools, workspaces and public open spaces. Rozita’s role helps to make sure that communities can have their say and shape the future of their neighbourhoods in this context, in meaningful, engaging, and innovative ways.

Emma Le Blanc

Emma has been working with Good Work Camden as a Job Hub Adviser for five weeks now. Good Work Camden helps residents gain employment, training and education and promotes their employability skills. It is part of the Inclusive Economy department. Emma enjoys the role it offers a chance to help residents to improve their confidence, economic well-being and life chances.

Charlotte Spindler

Charlotte is a Project Manager in the Adult Social Care Transformation Team as part of Supporting People Strategy. Charlotte is working on a number of projects to bring about positive and effective change in ASC, including how we can support people with learning disabilities to live a good life, and looking at how we can achieve a fair price and ensure quality for accommodation based packages in ASC. Charlotte is looking forward to meeting her fellow future Camden Activist, and exploring how everyone can take an imagination approach to re-think the way we deliver our services.

Philip Davies

Philip works in Organisation Development (part of HR). The team’s work involves building capacity, capability and commitment of individuals, groups and the whole organisation in order to find and achieve their purpose. Phil is also interested in creating environments that offer fairness, dignity, respect and opportunity for everyone — so that we can all live a decent life at least, if not a happy one.

Sue Sheehan

Hi, I’m Sue in the Participation Team. I am currently building community and business collaboration in Kilburn and imagining a better high street. I set up the Camden coproduction network and worked with voluntary groups and mutual aid groups during the pandemic to support them to support others. I also set up Think & Do which is now an independent community organisation doing much more than we originally imagined.

Ginni Smedley

I joined in 2018 to manage Camden’s Community Researcher team. Community Researchers are local residents employed by the council to engage with citizens on a range of issues, helping the Council put residents’ voices at the heart of policy and service development. I am part of Camden’s Participation Team.

Wahidur Rahman (CSP)

Wahidur is a Team Manager at Contact Camden and has been with Camden for 17 years. Wahidur manages a team of 17 Customer Service Officers in the Parking & Business Team supporting the team to deliver a great service to our citizens in Camden. One of the most enjoyable parts of the role is it is a key part of officers development and this is realised through coaching sessions and providing regular feedback on their performance. There have been recent changes in the team and Wahidur is excited about the year ahead at Contact Camden.

Sue Hogarth

Sue works in Public Health. Sue’s team works on mental health and wider determinants of health and they work with colleagues across the council to support residents and staff to stay happy and healthy.

Sofia Oliveira

Sofia works for the Job Hub doing admin and events. Sofia’s role involves signing up new applications, co-ordinating data sheets, newsletters and prompting what Job Hub has to offer.

Frances Evans

Frances is a Senior Environmental Services Officer for Environment Services, which sits within the Supporting Communities Directorate. Frances is currently developing Camden’s Reduction & Recycling Plan, leading on a range of projects relating to waste management, recycling, cleansing, street trading and managing aspects of our Environment Services contract with Veolia. Frances works closely with colleagues within the service, across directorates and external partners to identify barriers, develop solutions and fine-tune ways of working to bring improvements. The role is interesting, varied and often has a good sprinkling of challenge — there’s never a dull moment!

Tim Rising

Tim is Strategic Commissioner in Adult Social Care Commissioning.

Lisa Tang

Lisa is a Planning officer (Regeneration and Planning team) who contributes to preparing a sound, effective and robust planning policy framework to ensure development meets the borough’s need for homes and jobs, provides benefits to the community, responds to climate change, and contributes to reducing inequalities. Lisa’s role involves contributing to the production of sound evidence, effective community engagement, and monitoring planning outcomes.

Kirsty Dutton

I’m Kirsty and I work as an Organisational Designer in the Organisation Design Team. Looking forward to seeing you all in the sessions (virtually & in person)!! Have a wonderful day!

Stephan von Schilling

I’m Stephan and I am the Active Living Manager in Sports. My area of interest is physical activity for health, particularly for those living with a disability or long term condition.

Helen Long

Ododo Dafe

Nicola Monks

Hafid Ali

Introducing the Programme Participants was originally published in Camden Imagines on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An insight from one of the programme participants, Phil Davies, on the first week of the programme

Philip Davies

We have lift off! Last Tuesday we launched the Imagination Activism programme with 32 participants (me included) — and we are off to an exciting start. It kicked off with an inspiring introduction from Jo Brown, director of people and inclusion and welcomes from Phoebe Tickell and the Moral Imaginations facilitation team. We were introduced to what it means to be an Imagination Activist and how that differs to traditional activism. You can find more details on other things we did and introduction to the participants here

But what really stood out for me was when we were encouraged to look for anything that we would love to see more of in our vision of 2030. This exercise really got people thinking and talking about their visions for the future. I am keen on having more dignity, respect and opportunity for everyone, alongside pollution free society, and more wellness, both physical and mental, for all.

Over the coming weeks, we will share more messages on what is coming out of the programme. We will also invite you to guest-speaker events and our graduation event on the 29th November. All happening in this month and next. We will come back to you with precise dates as they are confirmed. In the not-too-distant future, you too could have the opportunity to take part in the Imagination Activism programme and experience its charm.

Perspective from Phil — Week 1 was originally published in Camden Imagines on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Week 1 updates from the programme — Launching

Each week we will publish an update of progress, updates and what we are noticing in the Camden Imagination Activism programme — a training to build imagination capacity and practice with council officers and in the borough of Camden. Welcome to our first Weeknote.

It’s the end of Week 1, and we have lift off of the Imagination Activism programme! This week we launched the programme with our 32 participants — and we are off to an exciting start.

We have officially moved into delivery of the Camden Imagines programme and we will be sharing Weeknotes on Medium (publicly) and Essentials (Camden’s internal systems”. The main content of our Weeknotes will include:

• What has happened in the Camden Imagines programme this week? We will share illustrations that the wonderful Reilly (from the Moral Imaginations team) has created.
• What are we hearing from the participants? We will share some quotes with you!
• What has been happening in the wider Camden Imagines project?

What has happened in the Camden Imagines programme this week?

Participants were fully onboarded on to the programme with inspiring
words of welcome from Jo Brown, director of people and inclusion and welcomes from Phoebe and the Moral Imaginations facilitation team.

Jo invited the group to get to know one another as people through this unique opportunity, and also underscored the importance of imagination in times like these, given the types of challenges we are facing at the local and global levels, and everywhere in between. She specifically noted that imagination is a key capacity within local authorities like Camden, as a place of last support for those community members who have been made vulnerable and who need it. Imagination, as Jo and Phoebe write in their article, is so much more than frivolous daydreaming — it is a core strength that allows us to connect powerfully with the here and now, with what could be, as well as the past and possible futures.

Our team, led by Phoebe Tickell, gave brief introductions and Phoebe began orienting the group to our programme as it will unfold over the next 3 months. Camden Imagines is about offering new knowledge, practices, and tools, and it is also about uncovering what is already there. The programme will focus on action — doing! — not just absorbing or listening. We will build collective responsibility to move from from building our toolkit to taking ownership of what we create, imagine, and do, together.

We then went through an overview of the programme, and broke out into eight pods or home groups to create names for each and reflect on a text by Rob Hopkins shared before the session. These pods will exist as a home base throughout the programme, within the larger cohort as a whole.

One of the core practices we introduced participants to was the Collective Scrapbook, where collective imagining and creating takes place. It is also a place where everyone can share their musings, drawings, what they’re reading, and their learning throughout the course.

We introduced participants to the core of what it means to be an Imagination Activist. We talked about the three different kinds of activism, and what kind of qualities and practices and tools equip the Imagination Activist. Participants reflected that this kind of activism is at the heart of Camden, and many people resonated with a kind of resistance that works by envisioning and enacting the new, and helping others expand their sense of what is possible.

Finally, each week we will be setting homework, this week everyone has been asked to pay attention to their environment on their next walk that is over 20 minutes. They have been encouraged to look for anything you see that you would love to see more of in your vision of 2030. This could look like children playing in the street, bicycle lanes, or a nice community garden — anything that captures your imagination. Each participant has been given a physical journal so we are encouraging everyone to use this (or a device that works best for them) to jot down what they see.

What did participants receive in their onboarding packs?

Each of the 32 participants have received their own personal onboarding pack, complete with a journal for the duration of the course, pens, pencils and a set of posters for them to create their Imagination space, at work and at home, and their welcome letter. You can see some of the posters below. They feature quotes from some of our favourite Imagination Activists, like Arundhati Roy and the late David Graeber.

Two of the posters the Activists received:

What are we hearing from the participants?

Participants are very excited about the opportunity to bring creativity into their work.

Some of the responses we heard when people were asked what has fired their imaginations so far in the session:

“Impossible is nothing”
“What excites me most is the permission for creativity!”
“I’m excited by the fact there are so many people from all corners willing to make a change”
“Feels like a huge opportunity”
“Excitement at the idea that we will not change anything with an old mindset”

What has been happening in the wider Camden Imagines movement?

Phoebe had great conversations with Jenny and Gillian and they talked about ways imagination could become embedded into the way things work at Camden, both inside the organisation and in the work with residents.

Next up

We will introduce our brilliant cohort of Camden Imagination Activists.

Weeknote 1 — Launching was originally published in Camden Imagines on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Incredibly, unbelievably excited that Moral Imaginations and Camden Council have launched an Imagination Activism programme for 32 council officers. We are training frontline and managerial council officers in Camden the skills of collective imagination and horizontal leadership to become agents of change of Camden.

These council officers and public servants work tirelessly every day to make things better for Camden residents in the borough. We believe there is huge imagination capacity in Camden to be unlocked, platformed and supported, and these council officers will be able to meet that.

Follow along for updates from the course, including meeting our participants, on the Camden Imagines blog. This project is about building imagination capacity in Camden, and partnering to embed imagination into how things work in Camden. Follow along this blog to read updates from Camden Imagines participants and insights from what we do and where we end up going.

The world’s first training in collective imagination practice and methodology, and it’s happening with civil servants, rather than tech giants. This is imagination justice in action — it’s not just what we imagine, but who gets to imagine.

This programme is about doing, not theory — it’s about practice. We’re going on an adventure together as a cohort for 8 weeks, and the result will be imagination activism — actions, projects and creations that can benefit all beings — future generations, nature and all people.

#CamdenImagines #ImaginationActivism #imagination #whoseimaginations

Camden Imagines: a Collective Imagination Training for Council Officers was originally published in Camden Imagines on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of my favourite events of 2020 was the EDGE Funders Alliance Annual virtual retreat, where “200 funders and activists come together interested in systemic change in a spirit of mutual learning and strategising.” A 3-day virtual retreat where over 50 funders from a range of different sized institutions and foundations joined the virtual retreat, which brought together sessions and speakers from the funding world, social justice and environmental justice.

I was invited to be part of designing and hosting the EDGE Funders Alliance Annual Retreat which involved contributing a ‘Rethinking Philanthropy’ workshop in the 3-day virtual event. I worked together with an amazing team of Tobias Troll, Martina Fin, Romy Kraemer and others from the EDGE Annual Retreat working group, and invited Felipe Viveros as a co-facilitator alongside me.

“The yearly EDGE Europe retreat is an important convening to cultivate what brings us together in EDGE: The conviction that we have to acknowledge the systemic, interconnected character for the fundamental crises situation the world is in, and to seek for systemic answers, through experimentation and learning, together.”

Ecosystems Approach to Philanthropy workshop

The workshop I designed was called an “Ecosystems Approach to Philanthropy”, bringing the lens of ecosystems and ecology to philanthropy and funding. We used an exercise I have developed for “Thinking Like a Forest” and focused on decision-making, measurement, building ecologies, creating learning ecosystems and sense-making.

Before working as a funder at The National Lottery Community Fund, I worked with organisations to introduce “applied ecology” practices to their ways of working. Some of what this looked like was training groups in collective decision-making, advising on online tools that allow for collective intelligence, introducing practices of horizontal leadership and teaching deep ecology, ecosystems and ecologies at Schumacher College, drawing on my background as an ecologist.

I was invited to host the design and facilitation of the “Rethinking Philanthropy” track of the retreat, so I decided to bridge the practices and worldviews of my previous work with the world of funding and funder practice. This is also what I was doing within my role in The National Lottery Community Fund, bringing tools like using Miro boards (remember, this was 2020!), facilitation, horizontal practices and imagination into working with my team at the UK Portfolio.

Focus of the workshop

The focus of the workshop was on ecosystems thinking. When I say ‘systems’ or ‘ecosystems’ I mean a combination of things. It’s about taking a whole-systems view, and as ecology is the science of relationships, it’s about moving from an understanding and view of the world that perceives relationships not parts.

The goal of the session was to provide tools and approaches that can help to think in whole systems in order to perceive, sense-make and then act with this whole systems perception.

Practically speaking, there are skills and capacities that can be learned about how to do systemic practice like collective decision-making and participatory budgeting. Here is one example of a collective decision making method called Generative Decision Making, which is part of a collection of horizontal practices called Going Horizontal:

What we covered in the session

Here is some of what we covered in the session that illustrates what this could look like applied to funding and philanthropy:

• Learning from the discipline of ecology — from ecological systems, and how Nature organises, and applying this to the how we organise and work with groups. In funding, this can look like moving away from funding single projects to funding ecologies of projects, both local and thematic, and learning the skills of how to support those ecologies. This can be implicit or more explicit like at the Organising Like Mycelium course we ran earlier this year.
• Decision-making: Many funders in the network have been testing out and exploring approaches of participatory grant-making. We heard from funders and activists from FundAction and Mama Cash who is making the transition to a participatory model of grant-making. Many of us agree it is a clear part of the solution — but in itself it represents a range of possibilities, approaches and models — and needs other systemic changes to support it.
• Moving from prescribing to collaborative sense-making: using tools and approaches for sensemaking, collective ethnography, to take the place of prescriptive practices. This is really important when it comes to decision-making — can we move from solo evaluation to collaborative sensemaking when it comes to making decisions?
• Measurement: What are we measuring? Are we measuring the right thing? What if the things that need investing in are difficult to measure? (i.e. relationships). What are we incentivising with our measurements and what are we not seeing?
• Globally-scaled solutions to horizontally-spread subsidiarity: A complex system can never be scaled — but it can spread, mutated and adapted horizontally. What are approaches and methodologies to scale approaches across and not above and over?

The session just scratched the surface of a whole-systems approach applied to philanthropy. Over the last year I have been inquiring into how the methods and approaches of whole-systems thinking could apply to philanthropy. I’m excited about what I’ve found but I also know it’s going to take both inquiry and experimentation with others to go further into it.

The questions I heard from participants

• Where are more spaces for funders to go to, to learn? We need more spaces to think together, compare strategies, support bold experiments, learn about new ways of working.
• How to do participatory grant-making well? What are different models of decision-making we can learn from? How do we support those in the decision-making process to truly decide together? How to avoid competition, and bring funders and grantees together in new ways?
• Do we need new narratives for philanthropy? There’s a need for a larger shift and for us to talk about it.

We still have a lot of questions (more than answers!) and we’d like to keep inquiring around how we can do this well. To fund systems change, maybe we need to learn more about systems and develop new practices (and learn from the old ones) together.

Outputs of the workshop

In the session, we worked through an exercise I created to help people “Think Like a Forest” called the Whole Systems Questions Game and created a collective artefact on Miro (picture below!) with many answers and further questions. The point of this exercise is to surface collective intelligence and explore a sector or organisation in a whole-systems way. A couple of people have been in touch and we would like to develop this into a collective resource and map — please get in touch if you’d like to be involved.

Some of the highlights are:

• What is our role in the ecosystem? — Fund risky experiments
• What is the role of philanthropy? — To inspire, stimulate and urge other financial actors to be progressive.
• What does philanthropy enable? — Risk-taking, diversification of voices and actors in movements, collaboration, connections, action, access, infrastructure, reparations
• What does philanthropy perpetuate? — Power of money with no democratic legitimation, Extractive Investment practices, competition, tax evasion, charity over justice, colonialism, a good feeling to be work in the sector but is it a small bandaid?
• How could we understand philanthropy as reparations, not charity? — Can we hold a conversation about this?
• How do we inform our decisions? — Inquiry of different knowledge and non-knowledge
• Might we lean into our roles at the boundaries, as signal funders for more risky / social impact focussed grants and investments?
• What are the things we will never go above or over (upper limits)? — Is it personal discomfort? What are our principles?
• How do we contribute to the ecosystem? — A role for philanthropy in facilitating spaces for reflection, scenario building etc.

Key resources shared:

Article on the Whole Systems Question Game by Phoebe Tickell

Why Whole Systems Thinking? by Daniel Christian Wahl

Warm Data: Contextual Research and New Forms of Information by Nora Bateson

Thank you to EDGE Funders Alliance for hosting this workshop, to Tobias Troll, Romy Kraemer, and the Annual Retreat working group for organising, and to Felipe Viveros for joining me as co-facilitator.

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Phoebe Tickell — Narratives, complexity, systems. Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on complexity approaches, systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development.