Toolkit
What is the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit?
The Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit aims to collate and platform the wisdom of Collective Imagination practitioners around the world, creating an accessible set of tools for anyone who wants to build the capacity to explore and learn a spectrum of practices related to Collective Imagination (as well as unlearn those practices that might block their inquiry).
Across six thematic sections, this toolkit shares frameworks, infrastructures and guided visioning, reflection, mediation and reorientation practices for individuals, groups and organisations to experiment with seeing, feeling and thinking differently, in order to act differently. The content has been developed by a wide range of brilliant thinkers, practitioners, and artists who have practised in this space for many years.
On This Page:
What is the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit?
The Toolkit
What is Collective Imagination?
Why invest in Collective Imagination?
Why have we created the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit?
How to use the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit
The Toolkit
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Preparing the Conditions: Introductory Talks
Clear the space for Collective Imagination work to feel possible, and orient us to our surroundings - talks connecting us to the land, our bodies, our rituals and ancestors and walking us through both visible and invisible contemporary social structures.
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Preparing the Conditions: Frameworks
Draw on the many existing structures, practices, and frameworks that can bolster Collective Imagination work with the scaffolding and rigour that it needs.
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The Collective Body: Collective Imagination and Social Imagination - Somatics, Relationships and Entanglements
Practices to connect us to the essential wisdoms and intelligences of the body, and the environments and relationships that our bodies are entangled with.
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Space and Place: Civic Imaginations
Practices embedded in our communities, our institutions, and the land on which we reside. Find liberation together in relationship, and how to rehearse different ways of being that are not predicated on hierarchy or domination.
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More than Human: Ecological Imagination
In times of ecological crisis, biodiversity loss, and climate change, these practices support us to draw from the expansiveness of planetary intelligences. Imagine and create a world that is equitable and just for all beings.
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Time, Ancestors, and Future Generations: Temporal Imagination
Practices that remind us of the quantum nature of time, that connect us to the new and the very old, to the wisdom of our ancestors and to our care for future generations.
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 includes methods, tools, and infrastructures that can work to destabilise the status quo, and create the conditions that emphasise our interdependence: what can the collective dream and build that the 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.
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.
We’ve used the term ‘Collective Imagination’ throughout this toolkit - however it’s important to acknowledge that it is one term used in a field that has many different and growing terms. We see some of these as distinct, like the Ecological Imagination or the Black Imagination, and some which can be used interchangeably, like Civic Imagination, Social Imagination or Public Imagination.
Why invest in Collective Imagination?
In the world that we inhabit today, full of hardships and heartache, there are those who would have us believe that the way we live now is inevitable. That environmental disaster and economic instability are assured. It can feel hard to hold on to hope in such a predicament, as we contemplate the future.
But, as people who are working toward a better world – whether in our local communities, governments, or institutions – it is up to us to push against that tide, to believe that we are all active agents of social change, and that together we can build new systems and ways of being that help us to heal and restore faith in a more just and hopeful future.
If we are to do this – to discover and reach for very different futures – then we must begin by planting new (or very old) patterns and logics in the present, and noticing those seeds of the future that are already here. Then we must tend to these new patterns, cultivating the soil in which these new beginnings can thrive (as adrienne maree brown says, ‘What we pay attention to grows’). This is the work of Collective Imagination.
Why have we created the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit?
The toolkit is intended to be an initial entry point for those with a growing interest in the field of Collective Imagination, and for those working to build a better world through local place-based projects and networks, central and local government, and civil society work.
It is especially for those who are comfortable at the edges and want to try something new. If you believe other worlds are possible and are looking for ways to open up to those possibilities within yourself and with others, then this is for you.
We are keenly aware that toolkits alone will not solve the challenges we face, but we hope that, by creating access to a depth of thinking, imagination, and research, and different ways of knowing, these tools might take you on a journey from preparation through to action. There are many different methodologies, modalities, and themes to choose from.
Our ambition is that over time, with continued investment and learning, more communities and organisations will feel equipped to use Collective Imagination practice and unleash its power. Collective Imagination can give us the freedom to dream and rewild, breaking out of cycles of despair to move towards a more hope-filled future.
Having said that, the work of Collective Imagination is not a purely utopian, or future-oriented exercise. One of the major themes running throughout the toolkit is the idea of staying with the trouble, an approach put forward by the feminist theorist Donna Haraway. She says:-
“In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”
So, whilst the toolkit includes practices for future visioning, it is just as concerned with the Collective Imagination of the now, and the ongoing practices which we can enact in the present in order to bring about a new and different world. The practice of, as Amahra Spence says, being in continuous rehearsal of the worlds we’re growing.
How to use the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit
Some of these practices will challenge people – there are a handful of guided meditations in the toolkit, to support us to tap into another way of knowing and being, a skill that we believe must be collectively strengthened as we move deeper into the 21st century.
There are rituals that help us to connect with the grief held in our bodies, that might block our ability to take action.
There are also exercises, games, and frameworks designed to help us play and feel more free. That will help us find sanctuary where we can (whether in the past, present, or future), communicate with our more-than-human kin, and challenge the existing narratives and institutional structures that dominate our lives.
You can work through the toolkit section by section, tool by tool, but it is more likely that you will want to jump around, taking what you like and leaving the rest. Some exercises might inspire you on a particular day, others not so much. Some tools are oppositional in their approach, and others complementary. We don’t expect everyone to connect with everything, but hope that there will be something for everyone. Choose your own adventure!
If you are not familiar with the language of collective imagination (and the term itself can mean many things to many people) then check out our glossary to help you orient yourself as you go.
We put this out into the world with thanks to all of the practitioners who contributed, to those who have made work which inspired this project and to all who have created, cherished and passed on practices that nurture radical imagination across generations, so that we may be able to continue this practice today.
“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.”