Equitable Futures: Community Speaks

Institute for the Futures’s Equitable Futures Lab is committed to engaging diverse communities from around the world in imagining more equitable and sustainable futures. With support from the Blue Shield of California Foundation, IFTF hosted three community-based events in 2018 to re-imagine the future in collaboration with Afrofuturist artists, gender-focused thought leaders, and seven global nodes in a week-long network of distributed social reimagining. Here are the studies from the sponsored events at IFTF.

The future is dark, speculative and surreal

Afro-artists find themselves at a pivotal moment in the long history of peoples with roots in Africa. It is a time when histories of fighting oppression can be transformed into futures that are powerful, sustaining visions humanity engaging technology, reimagining and rebuilding the planet, and even exploring the universe beyond the planet. To incubate this perspective, IFTF hosted a one-day AfroFutures Festival. We teamed up with the Black Speculative Art Movement, the Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, the Museum of the African Diaspora, and ZooLabs as well as Cal State-East Bay and San Jose State University to bring together artists, community members, and future practitioners—exploring what Afrofutures tools and methodologies might look like. Download PDF.

The future of gender is a six-word story

If you had just six words to describe your vision of the future of gender, what would they be? This is the question that opened a day-long Foresight-Insight-Action workshop where two dozen social inventors and thought leaders explored the future of gender norms and gender justice. What six-word futures did they imagined? What felt fixed is actually fluid. Bound feet, breaking free, grandmother’s smile. Humanity our core…he, she, they. Gender racially unscripted, positioned, experienced, resisted. Download PDF.

Welcome to a more equitable future

A more equitable future begins with more equitable participation in imagining the future. To engage people worldwide in imagining equitable futures, IFTF launched its first Equitable Futures Week, April 1-7, 2019. The goal of the week was to introduce an Equitable Futures Toolkit to groups around the world and pilot a process for seeding a global participatory network of on-the-ground activists committed to tackling the super-wicked problem of global inequality. The week also celebrated IFTF’s 2018 cohort of Future4Good fellows, selected for their focus on aspects of equity ranging for designing an ecosystem of financial institutions aligned in the public interest to helping young people, immigrants, and other marginalized members of society participate more fully in democracy. Download PDF.

In the News

For more on Blue Shield of California Foundation's strategic foresight initiatives see this article in the Southern Grant Makers' Back to the Future Blog.

About IFTF’s Equitable Futures Lab
In a time of unprecedented economic inequality, persistent racial disadvantage, disintegrating social safety nets, and deteriorating job quality, IFTF’s Equitable Futures Lab combines expertise in social science quantitative research, policy analysis, and public engagement with proven foresight methodologies to develop and prototype innovative solutions for an equitable future.

About Blue Shield of California Foundation
The Blue Shield of California Foundation builds lasting and equitable solutions that make California healthiest state end domestic violence. Well-being depends upon much more than traditional healthcare services and crisis intervention. Learn how we’re moving further forward to help improve the lives of those who struggle the most in order to create a California that is full of possibility for all.