The launch of a project: "Camden Imagines"
On Tuesday we launched the report Imagination Activism in Camden and came together with the community for an evening to mark the milestone and hear from Camden’s Imagination Activists.
Are you asking yourself “what is Imagination Activism?” You can find out about it here, or dive in more deeply to the concept and principles in the report.
Six months on from the Imagination Activism programme at Camden, we invited Camden Council colleagues, collaborators, community members and allies from our ecosystem together to launch the report about the first phase of Camden Imagines.
It was an incredible evening hosted in the awe-inspiring Samsung KX building, a stone’s throw from Camden Council, which later we found out was designed by Thomas Heatherwick who talks about “designing the impossible” as an antidote to the “epidemic of boringness” — very fitting for the launch of Imagination Activism in Camden.
We started with a powerful opening from Cllr Georgia Gould, the Leader of Camden, who first talked about the power of community imagining as a way to solve problems that goes way beyond a normal policy-making process. She told the story about the start of Camden’s Think&Do project which started a pop-up on the high street as a space to “just say yes”.
What would happen if the council just said yes to everything?
It unleashed a load of energy where council officers and community members came together and just started saying yes to things. This was where Georgia’s eyes first started opening to the power of collective imagination to get things done.
“Collective imagination around a community takes us so much further than on our own”
Georgia went on to reflect on how imagination is an equaliser — because everyone can contribute something and everyone has an imagination, and then went on to talk about the Camden Imagines project and the ripple effects the council had seen as a result of the programme. She reflected on how whenever Camden has given support and permission for staff to have real space to imagine it’s created a space where staff feel completely different about their work — it brings “hope and inspiration to solve things”.
“It has had a huge ripple effect — it’s almost like it’s started a movement within the council, and change much beyond the 32 officers — it has created more openness to the imagination of our community”
Then our founder, Phoebe Tickell, opened by showing the Camden Imagines video, which took us all back to the 8 weeks of the programme in October and November, and brought back the memory of the shifts and energy that was unlocked.
www.vimeo.com/moralimaginations/camden-imagines
She followed on by speaking through some of the core concepts of Imagination Activism:
Imagination is not a talent, but a muscle, that everybody has and everybody can build, with time, space, permission and tools
Collective imagination work can build psychological safety, and psychological safety is what unlocks collective imagination
Choosing to build the imagination capacity of communities and a local council is an act of “imagination justice” — it’s not just what you get to imagine, but who gets to imagine, to create plural visions of the future (you can read more about imagination justice here)
Shifting perspectives and expanding worldviews has a place in policy-making
We don’t have resource problems, we have imagination problems, and when we say yes we find ways to make things work even without resources
And about the Camden Imagines work, and the findings and insights that have come out of the work.
“As we face scarcity and insurmountable challenges, we focus on efficiency and getting things done. Imagination is seen as a distraction, something woolly for an away day, but not core to the building of new policy and systems. This work flies in the face of that.”
They befriended failure and built their fearless ambition, asking the question ‘what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?’ and they discovered the power of what I have called Moral Imagining — a framework of imagining with future generations, nature and ancestors, and embedding these perspectives in our decision making.
The participants came from all across the Council, from front line staff to senior leaders, from teams working on housing, to air quality, to transport, to children’s services. It was humbling each week to hear about how participants were taking the tools and practices back to their work, and how the shifts were impacting the residents of Camden.
These 32 participants were equipped to build a movement throughout the organisation, to share their practice and influence those around them, spreading the programme’s impact from the 32 to the 300 to the 3000.
Panel with Camden’s Imagination Activists
The best part of the evening was the panel with two of Camden’s Imagination Activists, Ododo Dafe, Head of Housing Transformation, and Hafid Ali, Community Partner. Ododo and Hafid brought the experience of what it was like to be part of the programme to life, reflecting on how they felt before the programme, what surprised them, how they are applying their methods and tools in the workplace and where they could see this work going.
“How bold can we be? Let’s dare to be brave”
“The idea of working with communities to think about things that might be difficult is so exciting as people do dare to think about something different”
Hafid shared that he felt he had always been a dreamer, and in fact his friends had often called him “delusional” — but this had given him the theory behind the delusion. Now, he said, he felt confident about proposing visionary ideas, that may at first seem impossible. He took us back to the moment in the course where participants were taken through moments in history where things happened that truly felt impossible — like landing on the moon. That had given him confidence that the impossible isn’t always delusional — and in fact (quoting Rob Hopkins), “all real change sounds ridiculous at first”.
“The thing that really blew me away was thinking about the seventh generation”
“Taking advice from the 7th generation, what would they tell us? What would our ancestors say about what we are doing now?”
Ododo finished by sharing about how this thinking and helped her question the most fundamental assumptions in the housing system — “Someone dreamed up housing allocation at some point a long time ago. What if we dreamed up something completely different?”
“What if homelessness was eradicated — it’s about more of us having time or space to leap into what that future could be?”
To download the report, Imagination Activism in Camden, click here.
To read an article with the top insights from the report, click here.
To visit the project page on the Moral Imaginations website, visit this link.
A special thanks to Camden and the Camden Imagination Activists, the Camden leadership for having the vision to support this work, to Jo Brown and Nick Kimber and the entire Camden Imagines team — and for everybody who helped at the event, and to Samsung KX for hosting us!
Fabulous!