Imagining Impact: get creative with your vision. For Purpose Lunch & Learn. Register

Having a clear vision for the change we want to create is an essential part of movement building, but it can be hard to communicate a vision of a possible future in ways that feel achievable or even inspiring. How can we get beyond mission statements and strategic language and talk about the future in ways that feel tangible and meaningful?

In this session, we’ll explore creative ways to explore possible futures and bring them to life. We’ll experiment with ways to engage with the future through storytelling and play and discuss how we might use futures-thinking and creative storytelling as advocacy and movement building tools.

What to expect

About the hosts

Anna Jackson

Anna has explored many paths in her career, but these always seem to lead back to media, storytelling and social impact. She combines elements of strategy, communications and storytelling in her work with For Purpose. 

Zenaida Beatson

Zenaida is half Filipina, half Pākehā, and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. She is a Director and Designer at For Purpose, a campaign and movement building agency and social enterprise. Zenaida’s practice combines visual and collaborative design to understand and engage people in issues that matter.

In this session

We used a version of the ‘Headlines from the Future’ visioning activity to creatively describe a change we’d like to work towards. We touched on some of the ways this activity can be used and adapted, such as:

• Building out more detailed future scenarios
• Working as a group on a single challenge or focus
• Using physical materials, objects and artefacts to build future prototypes
• Working with artists and designers to bring the vision to life
• Backcasting to work backwards from your vision of a desirable future to identify the actions and supporting conditions needed to achieve that vision.

For advocates and movement builders, spending time imaginatively engaging with your vision can be a good way to co-create impact goals with your community and to connect with the sense of possibility that we need to drive change. When talking about our vision or shaping messaging, creative visioning can help us to talk about a more vivid vision for change that connects to actions and solutions.

We were fortunate to have a bunch of experienced and knowledgeable futures-thinkers in this session - thanks to everyone for generously sharing tools, resources and experiences. Here are resources that we collaboratively generated in this session:

RESOURCES

In Aotearoa & Australia

• Design Futures Aotearoa is a diverse community of people at work on futures design. Their online community of practice meets on the first Friday of every month.
• Te Korekoreka is a kawa for Māori Future Making developed by Tokona Te Raki.
  • This presentation by Alice Dimond and Sam Wixon, hosted by Leadership Lab is a great introduction to this framework.
• This session with futurist Amanda Reeves, hosted by The Centre for Public Impact explores the vision of reimagining government.
• Sam Rye has compiled a great list of futures resources in this post from his Fieldnotes blog.
  
• The Tomorrow Party - developed by a team from Monash University’s Wonder Lab is a co-creative futures method for policymaking and systems change. It looks like a lot of fun!

Other tools and resources

• Superflux creates speculative design, immersive installations, experiential futures. You’ll find loads of creative inspiration here.
• Jane McGonigal discusses her futures book, Imaginable in this YouTube conversation with the author Curtis Sittenfeld. This features a good discussion on holding onto optimism.
• Activist’s Handbook has a facilitation guide for a collaborative visioning activity here.
• Near Future Laboratory has a great gallery of creative futures projects and resources here.
• The Thing from the Future is a card game for prototyping possible futures. You can play it online here.
  
  

We have a whole lot of Lunch and Learn sessions coming up soon. Join us for:

Leading with Aroha: Our Obligation to Each Other with Dan Anderson.
Friday 11 April, 12pm-1pm (NZ time)
This session will be an open conversation with Dan Anderson from Te Hou Ora Whānau Services where he’ll share his thoughts and experience about leadership. We invite you to come and share your questions and reflections in a safe and supportive environment
Register for this event

Measuring with purpose: social impact measurement beyond reporting with Dr. Anabel Fernandez
Friday 27 June, 12-1pm
This session will be hosted by Anabel from Purpose Partner. It will be a practical session on measuring outcomes for learning and improvement and understanding impact contribution for systems change.
Register for this event

Cultivating the conditions for co-design to create meaningful impact with Emma Blomkamp
Friday 15 August, 12-1pm
Drawing on years of experience in project leadership, capability building and evaluation across public purpose sectors, Emma Blomkamp (New Know How) will share how organisations can cultivate the conditions needed for co-design to flourish and create meaningful impact.
Register for this event

There are more Lunch and Learn sessions coming, if you’re interested join our newsletter or connect with us on linkedin and Instagram to stay up to date.