#OpenDialogue 10 Oct. Nurturing New Spaces for Social Change: Reimagining Community and Action Across Generations
Happening on Thursday, October 10th at 5pm CET & SAST / 4pm UK / 11am CET / 8am PST. Please RSVP by registering on the Zoom Link here)
How might we create and nurture new spaces to cultivate and encourage authentic engagement that fosters meaningful social change across generations in a rapidly changing, increasingly digital, world?
Reflecting on the evolving landscape of social change, this conversation will seek to bridge perspectives across generations to understand how traditional notions of collective action are transforming. This shift recognises that personal growth and societal change are deeply intertwined, calling for a more holistic approach to engagement.
Central to this conversation will be exploring how young people express their perspectives in the digital age and what strategies there are for fostering meaningful intergenerational partnerships and creating spaces for authentic youth expression and contribution.
Join us for this dialogue that seeks to embrace diverse perspectives as we work to nurture new spaces for change. Our conversation will both seek to find common ground and value the richness that comes from our differences. We invite participants to bring their own experiences, questions, and ideas to contribute to this collective exploration of how we can create environments that support meaningful social change across generations.
Key themes and questions in this conversation’s emergence have included:
- (Re)Examining the notion of community in the digital age and recognising its power
- What counts as community when our connections span both virtual and physical spaces?
- How can we redefine “community” to address issues of loneliness, mental health, and societal wellbeing?
- Balancing virtual and place-based connections
- The role of technology in shaping new forms of engagement
- Encouraging authentic intergenerational dialogue and collaboration for social change across age groups
- How do we challenge assumptions about maturity and chronological age?
- How do we create safe and authentic spaces and platforms for youth expression and contribution to changing the future even as we retain responsibility for change within older generations
- Integrative Approaches to Social Change
- Moving beyond traditional activism: Exploring new models of responsibility, response-ability and civic engagement
- The interconnectedness of personal growth, community well-being, and societal change
- Developing capacities for integration in a complex world
- Nurturing Mental Health, Resilience and Hope
- How might we balance acknowledging the severity of current challenges while fostering resilience and hope, particularly among young people?
- Fostering futures literacy and long-term thinking seeking ways to empower individuals and communities to have response-ability and take action in the face of uncertainty
- Balancing awareness of challenges with empowerment to act
- Prefiguring the Future We Want
- How can we ‘be’ to prefigure the future we want?
- What are the conditions needed to create the change we seek?
- How do we respond to the challenge of integration and the need to embrace plurality even will driving meaningful action – both in how we approach complex problems and in how we create spaces for change?
- How might we reimagine the relationships between having, doing, and being in our approach to social change and community engagement?
- How do we build democracy and Inclusive Decision-Making and Representation even whilst recognising the power of protest?
- What are the new models of civic engagement that reflect our interconnected reality?
Please RSVP by registering on the Zoom Link here)
Conversation guides include:
Indra Adnan has been writing, consulting, network-building and event-organising on the themes of future politics, conflict transformation, the role of the arts and integral thinking for the last twenty years. She is Founder and Co-initiator, together with Pat Kane, of The Alternative UK political platform, which answers the question: if politics is broken, what’s the alternative? A UK publishes The Daily Alternative blog, and runs community collaboratories around the UK, building Citizen Action Networks (CANs) to reconnect people to cosmo-local eco-systems of solutions available. Central to the vision of an Alternative politics is the interdependency of the complex individual, the community and the planet: I, We, World. Indra has been writing consistently about soft power, public diplomacy and the power of attraction and relationship in international relations for over a decade, in major UK and US publications. Indra is concurrently a psycho-social therapist, founder of the Soft Power Network, and a writer and events producer. She has consulted to the World Economic Forum, Indian, Finnish and Danish governments, NATO, the Scottish Executive and the Institute of Contemporary Arts amongst others. Indra is currently Co-Lead in Bounce Beyond, a social enterprise network doing transformative work to cohere and connect the next global economies. Her book The Politics of Waking Up: Power & Possibility In The Fractal Age is published by Perspectiva Press.
Joe Elborn is the Executive Director of the Evens Foundation, a foundation that seeks to amplify the voices and needs of people who are often under-represented in public life. The Evens Foundation is exploring the state of democracy at a time when young people’s trust in institutions is in severe decline and looking at the impact of new technologies while continuing to support, develop and highlight strategies against authoritarianism.
Ila Malhotra Gregory is Ecosystem Weaver and Gardener at YouthxYouth. They are exploring how we might organise, in ways that are both effective and beautiful, by growing meaningful relationships with one another. Ila has a strong commitment to care for all beings and is exploring kincentric ways of being, doing, leading and working informed by deep resonance with the values of reciprocity and relationality.
Shaun McInerney is School Leader and Strategy Lead for School Effectiveness at the Institute of Education at the University of Worcester. His role in coaching and developing senior leaders in education centres on weaving ecosystems to help schools meet the emerging needs of young people in a rapidly changing world. Shaun is an Associate at the Edge Foundation, a Trustee of Impact Trust UK, Vice-Chair of Governors at his local Primary school. Nationally, he co-leads ‘Rethinking Leadership’ a network of system leaders advocating for more transformational approaches to leadership development within the English school system. Shaun worked closely with international NGO Ashoka on a leadership development framework to help ‘Changemakers’ to unlock their potential and has pioneered a New Capabilities for a New World approach to leadership development to support school leaders in England respond to the emerging needs of young people
Nicklas Larsen is a Futurist and facilitator of Futures Literacy at the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies. He works to cultivate anticipatory capabilities for individuals and organisations through futures and foresight. He speaks, writes, teaches, and advises on futures thinking with an aspiration to democratise futures literacy through arts, culture, and education. He is senior curator for UNESCO’s Futures Literacy Summit, and he has been on the SteerCo for the Future Oriented Museum Synergies network organised by Museum of Tomorrow International. As the Danish node in UNESCO’s Global Futures Literacy Network, Nicklas is committed to establishing the Danish UNESCO Chair in Anticipatory Leadership and Futures Capabilities together with Aarhus University as the regional platform for futures literacy and anticipatory practices. Furthermore, he acts as the educational lead on the newly established Tech the Future hub and has integrated futures studies in various curricula across art, design, and business domains in Denmark. Nicklas is behind the interview series “Applied Futurism“, where he explores the future as a source for hope, social innovation, and sustainable development together with pioneers in the field, the ‘Futures shaping art – Art shaping futures’ research project, as well as ‘Using the Future – Embracing Uncertainty, Improving Decision-Making and Democratising Tomorrow’.
Joan Diamond isExecutive Director of Stanford University’s Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere and of the Crans Foresight Analysis Consensus. Joan has executive background in private and non-profit sectors, including Fortune 500 energy enterprises, and is a senior scenarist who facilitates uncertainty scenario workshops on human security. Joan is a senior advisor to Omega.
