Day 5 ⏐ Session 1
Just imagine:
where systems for a fair and flourishing future will come from
In this closing session, Charlie Leadbeater and Jennie Winhall were joined by nine pioneers of systems of the future. We heard from some of the leading lights in this fast-paced closing session, including: Rodney Foxworth, Common Future (US); Gabriella Gomez Mont, Experimentalista (NL); Carol Anne Hilton, Global Centre of Indigenomics (CA); Richard D. Bartlett, Loomio and The Hum (NZ); Cassie Robinson, Funding Strategy & Innovation Advisor (UK); Geoff Mulgan, University College London (UK); Amahra Spence MAIA (UK); Ella Saltmarshe, The Long Time Project; and Zita Cobb, Shorefast and Fogo Island Inn (CA).
“The future might be in your granddad’s house, it might be in your neighborhood, it might be in your street, but the future is now and the great rehearsal has already started”
Resources
Gabriella Gomez Mont
Carol Anne Hilton
Ella Saltsmarshe
Rodney Foxworth
Zita Cobb
Geoff Mulgan
Richard D. Bartlett
Amahra Spence
Pictures from Session
Quotes from the session
“We live in what has effectively become a winner take all economy” (Rodney Foxworth)
“My hometown is a tale of two cities. It really exemplifies the effects of post industrialization, economic dislocation, structural racism, mass incarceration, and over policing in American cities. Not only did I witnessed it, I experienced it daily. I wasn't removed from these effects, I was haunted by them, and continue to be.” (Rodney Foxworth)
“When I entered into the world of what was eventually dubbed as impact investing, it was really in response to what I saw as fundamentally broken in our system particularly as it pertain to preparing formerly incarcerated individuals for meaningful employment.” (Rodney Foxworth)
“I felt like I was rearranging chairs on the Titanic, pushing mostly black men into racist industries that didn't offer opportunities for family sustaining wages and long term opportunities for wealth building.” (Rodney Foxworth)
“Because of everything I've shared with you, I fundamentally believe that we must advance power, ownership, control, and community wealth building for communities most adversely impacted by racial and economic injustice. We need to build and invest in alternative financial institutions, infrastructure designed for equity and community wealth to create systems change.” (Rodney Foxworth)
“One of the lessons my colleagues now learn from my experience with our own funding was that control of capital was more important than access to capital. Access falls short because it does not equate to power.” (Rodney Foxworth)
“To make long term system change in our economy, we must further create and cultivate financial institutions and economic infrastructure that seats power and perpetuates power, ownership and control in communities that have been long excluded and diminished.” (Rodney Foxworth)
“What was established was world class forestry practices emerging of indigenous worldview and mainstream science and advanced practices within the forestry sector to actually take into account indigenous perspectives indigenous decision making frameworks and indigenous ways of being and knowing which that in itself centres on that concept of everything as one and interconnected.” (Carol Anne Hilton)
“When looked at as a decision making framework, it brings us back to that dignity of how we treat each other. The generational impact, the long term concepts of sustainability and the practices of that, those are natural markers within indigenous decision making that are steeped directly from within indigenous worldview. And when put into practice, we essentially see that as becoming world class practice and ways of being and standards and responses to resources, and its essential outcomes within regional economies.” (Carol Anne Hilton)
“Indigenous knowledge systems have essentially been systematically devalued through the process of colonisation. The revaluing and creating the space for indigenous knowledge is really what the opportunity is now.” (Carol Anne Hilton)
“Indigenous people taking a seat at the economic table, shifts the concept of management processes, shifts the concept of how risk is addressed. When risk is looked at as generational when risk is looked at as responsibility to each other when risk is looked at in terms of impact that inclusion and sustainability rather than cost or who's at fault, the distinctions of world view, Indigenous peoples essentially have a huge contribution to the concepts of the largest questions of our time today.” (Carol Anne Hilton)
“I am obsessed with this question. What would it look like? What would it feel like? What would it mean, if we if our horizon was in the spirit of liberation? What would that look like if we built towards liberation as the horizon?” (Amhara Spence)
I“Liberation is the only paradigm in which we're not only addressing and responding to harms of the past, we're not only removing structural barriers of our present, we're not only dismantling those barriers in our present, but we're also creating that capacity to positively affirm future outcomes. Liberation is the only paradigm where we get to exercise time travel, which gets me very excited. So what if liberation was our horizon?” (Amhara Spence referring to Bryan Lee Jr.’s thinking from Colocate, New Orleans Loisianna)
“Octavia Butler says, there's nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” (Amhara Spence)
“…If we built in the spirit of liberation, maybe it would feel like my granddad's house and my granddad's house is the most convivial, joyful, blessed space I've ever been in… So I say, what does it look like to build infrastructure from that spirit?” (Amhara Spence)
“In the words of Toni Cade Bambara… the role of the artist representing an oppressed people is to make the revolution irresistible. Can we make system shift irresistible? Can we make a compelling case that system shift is the only?” (Amhara Spence)
“We have to rehearse the world that we want to be in.” (Amhara Spence)
“We said what if we were really centering this idea of radical hospitality in the spirit of my granddad's house, could we call this ‘hotel abuelos’ meaning grandparents in Spanish? And could we build something that was owned by the people that redistributed the wealth that is typically extracted from our city? (Amhara Spence)
“We know that the large is just an accumulation of the small and in the words of Adrienne Maree Brown, in fact small is all. I have learned more about systems change from the living room of my granddad's house than I ever have anywhere else” (Amhara Spence)
“The future might be in your granddad's house, it might be in your neighborhood, it might be in your street, but the future is now and the great rehearsal has already started” (Amhara Spence)
“Fantastic. Radical hospitality is the spirit of the future. Give it form. Let liberation be irresistible.” (Charlie Leadbeater, reflecting on Amhara Spence’s introduction)
“We need to be weaving social fabric to get right to the root of the problem” (Richard Bartlett)
“When you can get people engaged on things that matter to them, their productivity, their output, their engagement, you know, skyrockets” (Richard Bartlett)
“The number of people now that don't have a single person that they can call on when they're in the depths of despair. That that's what that's what I'm trying to address here” (Richard Bartlett)
“...The micro solidarity approaches is kind of remedial work to compensate for something that we used to take for granted, which is you should be part of the community where you're known and people care about you… That's the kind of missing piece is this sense of companionship and being known to each other.” (Richard Bartlett)
“...how do we how do we recover these loss skills of being in community and kind of accelerating our evolution accelerating our learning process?” (Richard Bartlett)
“The whole domain of systems change is complex , it's difficult and we tend to over simplify complexity just to get by. But sometimes in oversimplifying, there's a few pitfalls. So there's the pitfall of thinking that systems change is out there” (Richard Bartlett)
“System change doesn't start out there and it doesn't stop in here and starts between us.” (Richard Bartlett)
“Power is this connectivity, the solidarity, the sense of being a part of something bigger than yourself and gathering the ability to move as a larger unit to recognise yourself as a member of the super organism that is inevitably powerful” (Richard Bartlett)
“And if we just look at the problem, we get caught up in it and and we allow the problem to sit the terms of our engagement and what we need to be able to do is to open up, open up possibility, open up the space of creativity, knowing that there are terrible things in the world and asking what is the next step and what does an optimistic future look like? And actually start to imagine that together.” (Richard Bartlett)
“We need hope, which is not naive, but is the courage to persevere without any certainty of a positive outcome. That's what happens, right? And where do you get that courage from?... You get courage, from encouragement from our companionship with each other from our mutual support from the sense that you know that I've got your back and you've got my back, and that we're stronger together” (Richard Bartlett)
“If I want to take on an ambitious, challenging, confronting movement. I need to be fueled by good feeling, by hope, by enthusiasm by companionship and good meals, that conviviality is the essential ingredient at the core of all of this” (Richard Bartlett)
There is… “a much bigger problem we've got right now across the world, not just in Europe, which is a waning of creative imagination. We are suffering I think often from fatalism, that sense things can't change or pessimism as some things are just getting worse.” (Geoff Mulgan)
“...it's really like the wild west right now. There is a lot of experimentation and nobody quite knows what's going to work but that's where the moments of greatest promise lie in those moments of unfolding possibility” (Jennie Winhall)
“My father and others finally figured out the only logic that could explain what was happening [in their fishing community on Fogo Island] is that they must be turning fish into money. And so my father said to me, ‘you have to go away and study this money system business because it's going to eat everything we love’... if my father was alive now, I would say to him, ‘I spend my time trying to figure out how to turn money into fish’ (Zita Cobb)
“...what we set out to do is to build an economy that supports place. How did we end up in this mess? We ended up in this mess because we ended up with the wrong economy arriving, one that we had no agency over and so let's build an economy in which we have some agency, an economy that works the way we'd like an economy to work, which is an economy that makes life possible.” (Zita Cobb)
“…It was really about economy building an economy that serves culture” (Zita Cobb)
“...place is just left out of everything… so trying to align yourself to the system is what we've had to do, but really what we have to do is bend the system so it not only accommodates place but optimises for place.” Zita Cobb
“One of the things about the leaders of these movements, the instigators, that stands out is their generosity. There's a spirit of care and generosity of giving or building a larger way of of sharing power and resources and opportunity” (Charlie Leadbeater)
“Charlie prompted me by saying that this role panel was to make a bit of wiggle room for the energy of the future, strangely enough, he had me revisiting the past.” (Gabriella Gomez Mont)
“Perhaps democracy in its very essence is actually us wanting to be part of a larger story… the very essence of how we belong to each other and what we think is possible” (Gabriella Gomez Mont)
“...a very big questions that we need to pose first of all, what do we even believe is possible? What reality is about? How the world works? Who we are individually and collectively? And sometimes these will be very expensive places and sometimes they will be full of constraints for ourselves, for our societies.” (Gabriella Gomez Mont)
“...the way that we make meaning interestingly enough, I think, is much more akin to what we see in the art world and the cultural world. Sometimes it is facts, but it is also our beliefs that we might be made out of our own histories, our own memories, but then also fragments of images, fragments of songs, etc.” (Gabriella Gomez Mont)
“Cultural shifts are necessary but how does culture shift? Does it only shift through many of these dynamic super interesting ways that we've been speaking about? Or can we also simultaneously be exploring other unusual sources of imagination more akin to the mysterious workings of art or poetry and what it does in us and can we bring back into the conversation the politics of fascination? I think art really shows the way down that path where the reason that we engage in interesting art is not necessarily because it solves something or because it gives us a clear path forward but we want to engage with it. It fascinates us enough that we will sit with the nuance we will sit with the questions, many times for decades or centuries to come, as many of the great world artists have shown us.” (Gabriella Gomez Mont)
“I think we need spaces of practice where we can rehearse reality, where we can reverse the future, where we can rehearse freedoms…” (Gabriella Gomez Mont)
“I think we need not to think of the possibility that we have of invocation and education of how we call things into being as part of our our toolkit.” (Gabriella Gomez Mont)
“I think we also need the politics of play, what play affords society at a philosophical level” (Gabriella Gomez Mont)
“Where we really need to begin is with emotions and values… First we have to open the door.” (Ella Saltmarshe)
“How you enable people to experience the stories you're telling, not just hear them… I always begin with a practice, whether I'm running an event for 2000 Canadian civil servants or for a group of teenagers at a secondary school in Bristol, I begin with a practice because if I don't enable people to experience to feel the story I'm trying to tell first, the work has so much less impact.” (Ella Saltemarshe)
“We need to start with our audience, not with ourselves. Sounds very simple. It's actually very hard to do in practice.” (Ella Saltemarshe)
“...many of us involved in this work are progressive activists and there are certain kinds of stories that we like. For a start, we like stories of change, of innovation and disruption, of transformation. A lot of people do not like those kinds of stories... So we really have to think about our audience, and sometimes that might mean that we don't like the stories that are going to be most potent, they might not be the stories that move us the most.” (Ella Saltemarshe)
“...at this particular time of chaos and overwhelm, and noise of there being so much content out there. How is your story going to contribute to people's lives, not clutter it? Will it give people joy, will it give them reassurance, will it give them inspiration, will it give them space? What is your story going to contribute to people?” (Ella Saltemarshe)
“How can our stories be glittering invitations?” (Ella Saltemarshe)
“I think we need stories of love and stories of power” (Ella Saltemarshe)
“Alex Evans has these three different categories of stories that will be helpful for building the kind of world that many of us want. The first one is stories of a bigger us, stories that expand our capacity to care… The second point is stories of a longer now… These are stories that enable us to develop a different perspective of our place on this planet, of its deep and long paths and it’s our future and our responsibility to that future… And finally the third category, of stories that tell us a different version of a good life” (Ella Saltemarshe)
“We need stories in the key of love, with a baseline of agency.” (Ella Saltemarshe)