on better futures

Humanity needs Gen Z’s ideas and dreams to shape the future, which means giving them a seat at the table

Many of us have clear visions of what kind of world we don’t want to live in, but are struggling to imagine the kind of world we would live in - let alone how to build that world. We need new narratives to illuminate what’s broken in our society and hands-on solutions for a more sustainable, equal and resilient world.

Our job as activists is to have good ideas lying around, so that when the crisis occurs, the impossible can become the inevitable. The good news and the bad news is that here in the digital 21st century, we are really living through a great surplus of crisis. And in that world of crisis, there are so many opportunities for us to demand something

claiming it's over is just an excuse to avoid building what's next.

We define a shift as social, political, economic and/or cultural transformation. From our perspective, we want shifts in the direction of ecological resilience and social equity, as an imperative. We believe that shifts can emerge from collective “aha” moments when social movements awaken the popular imagination to new possibilities and spark

We could bemoan the fact that things have come to this, or we could steal the tricks and channel all of that weird energy into something productive, something that makes peoples’ everyday lives better.

From mythmaking to legal treaties to weaving to movement building, what knits these various examples together is their avoidance of single solutions to complex problems, instead enabling a pursuit of multiple different actions and wider systemic changes with long term, positive transformations

Elsewhere, while COVID-19 may have abated from peak hellish weirdness, the narratives that collapsed then have not been put back together again

Neither of these individuals are saying that we should not be working with organizations, businesses, governments, for-profits, non-profits, or any other entities where people work and live — and neither am I. What we are saying is that our thinking and acting toward the future must challenge the systems that would seek to short-circuit the very