How might we create more spaces where people can think, feel, imagine and act together in order to create a future they can all feel excited about?
Over the last few years, I’ve noticed my practice shifting. I’m still interested in big ideas, how people build viable models, and entrepreneurship. But increasingly, I’m more interested in the futures that our ideas make possible.
And this question feels really central.
Jo Hunter and I have been chatting this through from different angles. In many ways, it's an ongoing conversation that started over 10 years ago on a research trip to Brazil, exploring models of practice and business rooted in community. Here's a pic of us on that trip looking young and hopeful :)
Collective Hope Labs is that new idea. A new participatory experience for groups of changemakers to come together, access their creativity, imagine stronger shared futures, and work backwards into grounded action.
It is early, emerging and very much alive as a process. In the spirit of sharing the thinking as it develops, we’ve written a piece about what we’re exploring and why we think this work matters now.
We’d love to hear what it opens up for you.
Ellen & Jo in Rio, 2015.
“There’s no single answer that will solve all our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
— Octavia E. Butler
We (Jo Hunter & Ellen O’Hara) have been working in connected spaces for some time. While our work takes different forms, over the years we’ve found ourselves circling many of the same questions and tackling them in similar ways.
Creativity has always been at the core of both our practices as a way of making meaning, shifting systems and bringing new possibilities into being.
For us, creativity is the way hope becomes practice.
The question we keep coming back to
Right now, we are sitting with one central question:
How might we create more spaces where people can think, feel, imagine and act together in order to create a future they can all feel excited about?
The immense global, social and economic change we are moving through is leading to the fragmentation, and sometimes collapse, of systems. While this presents opportunities, many people have reached burnout after years of trying, and often failing, to create change inside systems that feel stuck, depleted or immovable.
We see this in community leaders, artists, social entrepreneurs, organisers, educators, funders and cultural workers. People who are holding complexity every day. People who are trying to imagine and build something better while navigating crisis, scarcity, polarisation, inequality and exhaustion.
The scale of what we are living through asks something different of us.
It asks us to remember that change is collective. And to take hope seriously.
Hope as a courageous practice
When we talk about hope, we do not mean passive optimism. We do not mean denial. We do not mean pretending things are fine when they are not.
We mean hope as a courageous practice.
Hope that helps us stay in relationship with possibility, even when the present feels hard.
Hope that allows us to imagine beyond the limits of existing systems.
Hope that becomes more powerful when it is shared, tested, shaped and acted upon collectively.
Because without some sense that things could be different, it becomes very hard to keep making change at all.
Introducing Collective Hope Labs
This is why we are developing Collective Hope Labs: a facilitated process for groups of changemakers who need space to reimagine stronger, more hopeful futures together, and then work backwards into practical action.
It creates spaces for people to explore:
What would become possible if we stopped only responding to crisis, and started rehearsing the futures we want to grow?
What future are we trying to seed?
And what can we begin doing now?
The process brings people together to imagine with more courage, reconnect with purpose, and identify tangible next steps that can be carried forward.
From imagination to action
Collective Hope Labs has been designed as a programme to run over time, allowing a group to build trust, deepen imagination and sustain action. We are also testing a focused one-day lab for bigger conversations.
At its heart, the process supports groups to move through four stages:
Finding the group Identifying the community, network, organisation or collective taking part, with attention to representation, equity and who needs to be in the room.
Collective dreaming Using embodied, creative and reflective techniques to imagine more hopeful, radical and generous futures.
Practical action Working backwards from those imagined futures to identify meaningful actions that can begin now.
Maintaining momentum Providing coaching, reflection and accountability to help the group keep going, adapt and grow the work together.
This is not an abstract visioning exercise. It is about helping people find the confidence, clarity and collective energy to act.
Why now?
Between us, we bring decades of experience in creative facilitation, social enterprise, business modelling, coaching, cultural strategy, community practice, and leadership development.
We have both spent our working lives supporting people and organisations to bring bold ideas into the world.
And right now, we believe there is an urgent need for organisations supporting changemakers to invest not only in delivery, outcomes and impact reporting, but in the imaginative, relational and emotional conditions that make long-term change possible.
People cannot keep producing change without spaces to replenish imagination.
They cannot keep responding to crisis without time to reconnect with possibility.
And they cannot keep carrying complexity alone.
An invitation
We do not believe there is one answer. There are thousands of answers.
Some of them are already sitting inside the people and communities you support.
Our work is to help bring those answers into the light, give them shape, and support people to begin growing them together.
If you are a grant maker, funder, network, infrastructure body, cultural organisation, leadership programme, community foundation or social change organisation already supporting a group of changemakers, we would love to talk.
If this resonates with something you are holding, funding or developing, please get in touch with either of us.
We would love to explore how Collective Hope Labs could support your changemakers to imagine, reconnect and act with courageous hope.
— Ellen O’Hara and Jo Hunter