Who We Are
The Future for Good Fellowship Program
The Future for Good Fellowship Program We believe good futures come from the work of good people IFTF's Future for Good Fellowship program supports positive changemakers to bring futures thinking and innovation to the critical challenges of the 21st century.
Fellows at IFTF are focused on causes such as climate change, education, democratic participation, economic opportunity, and computational propaganda. In addition to providing financial support, we immerse our Fellows in IFTF's research and methodologies so they can future-proof their work.
As part of our 2022 plan, we're embarking on a two-year initiative focused on the future of Equitable Enterprise, an ecosystem of businesses, financial institutions, health organizations, schools, and civic institutions that will equitably distribute assets among the participants in the system.
Over the past decade, six cohorts of Future for Good fellows have joined IFTF in bringing futures thinking, innovation, and an entrepreneurial sensibility to the urgent futures we all face today. For the duration of the fellowship, the fellows engage their networks to imagine local futures for good, and commit to actions to build that future. Our fellows also have a chance to immerse themselves IFTF research and methodologies, in order to future-proof their work.
IFTF Future for Good Fellows Examples
Paul Radu, a Romanian investigative journalist, came to the first IFTF Ten-Year Forecast Practical Visionaries Workshop at IFTF and outlined his idea for the Investigative Dashboard, an online database that brings together information on companies from around the world—their ownership, registration information, financial records, etc. Today, the organization he and another IFTF Future for Good Fellow, Drew Sullivan, co-founded—Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)—has become the largest global investigative journalism network in the world, responsible for Panama Papers, Pandora Papers, Pegasus Investigation, and many others. An example of an impossible future vision over 10 years ago becoming a reality today.
Natalie Foster, another IFTF Future for Good Fellow, imagined a world where everyone would have some form of a guaranteed income—an idea that seemed far-fetched just a few short years ago. With the support of the organization she co-founded—Economic Security Project—several Universal Basic Income (UBI) pilots were launched and today hundreds of cities throughout the US and globally have enacted various types of UBI programs. Impossible future no more!
These examples are the most life-affirming aspect of futures work for us—the community we do “futuring” with, the people we bring into imagining and creating the futures with—to make such visions real. It is people like Paul Radu, Drew Sullivan, Natalie Foster, and hundreds of others IFTF has had the privilege of doing futures with. It is every one of you in our dedicated community. If you’ve participated in any of our workshops, trainings, interviews, panels, conferences, webinars, or projects, you are a part of making the future more equitable and sustainable for everyone.
Equitable Futures Toolkit
IFTF's 2018 Future for Good fellows worked with their networks to imagine equitable futures, and to begin taking local action needed to build towards those futures.
To find out more, click here.
More Information
Looking for information on how to partner with IFTF and about our futures research labs? Contact:
John Clamme | [email protected]