Institute For The Future

2018 Future for Good Fellows: Towards an Equitable Future

"To overcome poverty, we have to free our mind, imagine what has never happened before, and write social fiction. We need to imagine things to make them happen. If you don't imagine, it will never happen."

– Muhammad Yunus      

Systems change expert Donella Meadows notes the ultimate power of stories to change a system. The social, cultural, and economic norms we adhere to are a creation of our public imagination. They are a social fiction. Rules and desired skills follow from the large mythology of a society. This year’s IFTF Future for Good Fellows program is embarking upon a new experiment: we are engaging our networks around the world to develop hundreds of social fictions describing new futures that just might have the power to transform local and global systems rooted in inequitable policies and practices.

The need:

As wealth and economic inequality reach staggering heights, we face an urgent future. How do we transform local and global systems that perpetuate the accumulation of capital and wealth in the hands of a few, at the expense of the many? How do we address the social and political factors that perpetuate income and wealth inequality and create inequitable societies? How do we address the psychological and intergenerational impacts of inequity?

The solution:

The world needs new narratives that illustrate what equitable futures could look like. As we imagine these new social fictions, we'll pre-experience living in those worlds, and be able to begin creating them. The world needs futures that create space for a multitude of values and authorities to co-exist, futures that address and undo systems of exploitation and subjugations, and futures that are locally imagined. It is only from these narratives that we can paint a pathway towards a destination we struggle to imagine. What could a fair and just society actually look like? What could the end of poverty look like? Is there a post-racial future?    

As we develop hundreds and thousands of pragmatic and boundary-pushing images for these equitable futures, we will begin to strategically build towards them.

The project:

Alongside the 2018 class of fellows, IFTF is organizing an Equitable Futures Week and Festival in Spring 2019. To launch Equitable Futures week, we are creating a Future for Good Foresight-to-Action Toolkit: towards an equitable future. This toolkit will help communities around the world imagine new futures, and turn those ideas into action. The 2018 fellows cohort will help shape the toolkit, and engage their local and global networks to imagine new futures and commit to actions that move towards that future.