Collective Dreaming in Turbulent Times:
Participatory Futures for Social Healing
Published in COMPASS: The Global Voice of Professional Futurists, December 2024 Issue
Participatory futures - harnessing collective wisdom by actively involving diverse groups in imagining, exploring, and creating possible futures - offers a process that opens doors for people to see themselves in a future of their own making.
Through years of creating participatory futures experiences, these have become my guiding principles:
Acknowledge the past
How we understand history shapes how we see futures.
Honor fear about the future
Creating safe spaces allows us to move through difficulty into possibility.
Allow people, not their circumstances, to define themselves
It is the role of the facilitator to listen and observe without imposing narratives.