Seeding and growing an “imagination infrastructure” from the roots of communities is one way we can close the distance between the global challenges we face and the equitable and regenerative world we know is possible. Through the Emerging Futures Fund, imaginative seeds have been planted across the UK. We’ll share what we’re learning about what’s needed to equip communities to sense, imagine and shape better futures. In the session you’ll get to meet some of the initiatives patterning new hope and showing the power of community-led, collective imagination—with their practices, their rigour, and their creativity.
This session was curated in partnership with the The National Lottery Community Fund.
Iris weaves strategy, creativity and the sacred to build hope and action for the better world she knows is possible. She creates campaigns, stories and spaces that engage both heads and hearts to grapple with the big questions of our time. Iris’s work draws on over 15 years as a campaigner and cultural strategist, working on major social and environmental challenges with a diversity of international NGOs and businesses, high profile artists and influencers, and grassroots groups. It is equally informed by a decade’s yoga teaching, a lifetime’s personal development and her ongoing enquiry into how we can heal our relationships with ourselves, each other and nature.
Associate, Centre for Knowledge Equity and Co-founder and Executive Director, Healing Justice London
Farzana (she/her) is a writer, director, cultural producer and award-winning arts educator. She is the Executive Director and Co-founder of Healing Justice London (HJL) Her practice works on building community health, repair and self-transformation rooted in disability justice, survivor work and trauma-informed practice working with communities of colour and other marginalised and underrepresented groups. HJL cultivates public health provisions for collective liberation and dignifying lives made vulnerable. Farzana has over 10 years of background in Youth and Community work particularly focused on arts-based education projects both in the UK and internationally. Farzana is the former creative and strategic director at Voices that Shake, bringing together young people, artists and campaigners to develop creative responses to social injustice. She ran this working at Platform London, a climate and social justice organisation working across arts, education, research and activism. Farzana is a Fellow at the International Curatorial Forum. Farzana’s recent curatorial practice/art includes launching the Black Cultural Activism Map with the Stuart Hall Foundation and 'All Water Has Perfect Memory', writing on climate and gender justice and generational trauma & memory.
Deputy Director, Funding Strategy, The National Lottery Community Fund
Cassie is Deputy Director of Funding Strategy at The National Lottery Community Fund where she’s responsible for Innovation, Policy and Practice, and is also Co-founder of the Point People. She is a Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and has a Policy Fellowship at the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL. Cassie is also the founder of Stewarding Loss and Co-founder of Funder Ecosystems.
An experienced strategic designer, Cassie is a Nesta Creative Pioneer, sits on the Board of Organise HQ, and teaches on the MSc in Ecological Design and the Ecologies + Technologies programme at Schumacher College. She is on the Faculty of States of Change, and is one of the International Futures Forum Clan.
Cassie’s career hasn’t taken a traditional linear route. She prefers to live in more liminal spaces, and she’s taken on roles and projects that span the whole ecosystem of social change. From these places her passion is centred on connecting new thinking and practice, weaving together networks and growing relationships, always with the goal of justice – a more equitable and regenerative society. She’s spent time as Strategic Design Director at Doteveryone, a responsible technology think tank, as well as working directly with government departments (including DCMS and the Cabinet Office) and social businesses such as the Co-op. Cassie sees narrative and culture as an integral part of social change and she’s produced programmes of work that have shown at places like the Barbican, Somerset House and the Royal Festival hall.
She accompanies those who are on the edge of what we do not know and who are willing to lead, live into, and learn through, the deep changes that are being asked of us now. Transitions, transformation, this is her work.
https://www.cassierobinson.work/
https://cassierobinson.medium.com/
