The Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit
Tools from Collective Imagination practitioners around the world, for anyone who wants to build the capacity to explore and learn ways of creating better, more hopeful futures, together.
If we are to build alternative futures, we must collectively untether from entrenched ideas and start from a very different foundation.
Collective Imagination work is the soil upon which that foundation is built. It enables us to engage with and embody different perspectives, weave together diverse perceptions and worldviews, and mobilise to take action.
Toolkit Themes
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Preparing the conditions: Introductory Talks
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Preparing the conditions: Frameworks
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The Collective Body: Social Imagination - Somatics and Entanglements
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Space and Place: Civic Imaginations
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More than Human: Ecological Imagination
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Time, Ancestors, and Future Generations: Temporal Imagination
What is Collective Imagination?
Collective Imagination is a multidisciplinary practice(s) involving a group or community who come together to dream into, rehearse and enact different possible futures. This has the potential to illuminate pathways forwards, as well as to unsettle the status quo.
It is about growing our capacity to shift perception and reveal how unsustainable and incongruous many dominant systems are. The methods, tools, and infrastructures that are part of this field of practice emphasise our interdependence, exploring what the collective can dream and build that an individual cannot.
Collective Imagination practices touch on many different ways of knowing and being - on healing, grieving, dreaming, sensing, tracking, embodying and enacting. They engage with methods linked to somatics, with future generations, myths, histories of place and social foresight - all in service of collective reflection, wisdom and insight.
We exist in realities created often by a small, privileged minority. Building the muscle of collectively imagining means more people who may not normally be invited to do so, can practise designing, rehearsing and influencing wider cultural, social, economic or political events from which our communities can flourish.
What do these terms mean?
We’ve created a glossary to help you orient yourself to different terms that are in use within the Collective Imagination practice community, knowing that language and its meanings are ever in flux.
“The world, the values of the world, are shaped by the choices each of us make. Which means my thinking, my actions, my relationships, and my life create a front line for the possibilities of the entire species. Each one of us is an individual practice ground for what the whole can or cannot do, will or will not do….We live (and die) inside of systems that were imagined centuries ago by those ambitious and narrow minds of colonists and patriarchs. We live inside the lineage of relatively ignorant imaginations, which were obsessed with protection and domination. But we know so much more now.”
Get Involved
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Join Our Learning Community
Join us for a series of learning / reflection sessions.
Meet others who are exploring the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit. Share how you are experimenting with the ideas, methods and frameworks of the toolkit: what is working, and what are the challenges and opportunities.
The learning spaces will be held every 6 weeks, on Zoom, on UK time.
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Join the Community of Practice
The Collective Imagination Community of Practice is run by Canopy.
As part of the community, you will get invitations to regular ecosystem online meet-ups, invitations to submit content to our publication, and can join a peer learning journey (through Huddle).
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Take Our Feedback Survey
We would love you to give us feedback.
How might you use the tools? What can we do better? Who is interested in exploring collective imagination practices? Which tools might you experiment with in your work or personal life? Fill out our feedback form - it takes about 5 minutes.