Belonging, Care, and Repair

 

Possible, Plausible and Just Futures for Civil Society

March 2022

 

Who makes the future?

The futures in this report offer glimpses of three alternative worlds in 2036: worlds where the most important things are belonging, care, and repair. They are neither utopian nor dystopian but somewhere in between; a little like real life, but fifteen years ahead.

Each future, or imaginary, is an invitation to civil society organisations and funders to look beyond the relentless present moment and plan instead for what might – or what should – come next; an inspiration to create the worlds we want, not just the worlds we think we’ll get. 

The themes explored include personal identity and social division, the desire for spiritual purpose and belonging, and the redistribution and transfer of power. Each imaginary touches on parts of human existence that tend to get pushed out of forward plans and strategy documents because they are intangible and difficult to measure – things that are often taken for granted until it is too late – and which civil society is in a unique place to shape and create. 

These futures were developed in a series of workshops with people from across UK civil society in Autumn 2021. You can read the whole document to find out more about our process, or skip straight to Section 3 to explore the imaginaries. However you decide to read this report, we hope you find it intriguing and thought-provoking. 

Dominique Barron, Rachel Coldicutt, Stephanie Pau, Anna Williams

March 2022

 

“The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”

Explore Possible Futures

  • A medal, a map and official documents

    Belonging

    New infrastructure of belonging. Using practical action to establish belonging and solidarity across social divisions.

  • Artefacts from an imaginary future, including an exam paper in Emotions and Ethics, and a plate of food pills

    Repair

    Infrastructure for social repair. Exploring the role of spirituality and wisdom in building personal and social resilience.

  • Artefacts from the third imaginary future, including an award statuette and a billboard advertising relational connectedness

    Care

    Developing new systems of care. Exploring how empathetic connection and communication can help to overcome fear and hatred.

Read and Download the Report

Belonging, Care, and Repair brings together the findings from a series of relational foresight workshops run with Stephanie Pau from Studio andnand and thirteen civil society thinkers and doers and foresight practitioners. These workshops were an opportunity to test and iterate the methodology we outlined in A Constellation of Possible Futures.

You can read the full report online here, or download a PDF for offline reading below.

Citation

If you are using this document in your own writing, our preferred citation is:

Coldicutt R, Williams A, Barron D, and Pau S (2022) "Belonging, Care, and Repair: Possible, Plausible and Just Futures for Civil Society". London: Careful Industries https://careful.industries/reports/belonging-care-repair

Permission to share

This document is published under a creative commons licence: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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