Conditions of today — Tools of yesterday.

Asserting, enacting, and defending the liberty, the right, and the responsibility to future is a critical step to actualizing the beautiful futures we desire, deserve, design, and demand.

We are pulled — by circumstance, training, and disposition — to focus our energy and attention on immediate and often important concerns. We are facing an extended wave of urgent crises that will pull us even further toward immediacy — and defensiveness — in our actions. That urgency challenges our ability to chart our path toward the world we mean to create. And, while we have to develop many of the capacities we need to create that world, we also need to meet this world with readiness, adaptability, and fight.

The current governance, economic, cultural, and social conditions drive so many of us — as individuals, organizations, and communities — to struggle just to meet our immediate needs. The crises focus us on the next steps we need to take, and too often we can find neither the space nor the grace to be able to imagine the joyful and just future that buoys us and supports our thriving. The urgency of crises deprives us of the time and space we need to future, to think and create ways of doing and being that step us into the future. And therefore, we cannot prepare for it or strategize for the challenges and opportunities we may face along the way as we chart our path toward it.