A New Kind of Activist: The Imagination Activist
Introducing the imagination activist, new kind of activist who harnesses the power of imagination and vision to build new systems rather than fighting the old.
In April 2022 I stood on a stage and introduced people to a new term to describe the movement I see emerging everywhere: Imagination Activism. It was in a concert hall in Stockholm before guiding 4,000 people from around the world through a collective imagination exercise and a call to a different kind of activism: one that is powered by imagination and vision to build new systems.
“I’m Phoebe, and I’m an Imagination Activist”
In this exercise participants travelled 200 years into the future, in their imaginations, and had a conversation with a human of the seventh generation. From that imagined future place, they were asked to reflect on what is important to them, what they are fighting to protect, and why they are motivated to take action.
These are the kinds of exercises Imagination Activists facilitate at scale, with the mission of catalysing urgent, systemic, transformational shifts in mindset.
It takes stretching our minds to engage in moral imagining. When people ask me ‘what is moral imagination about?’ I say, think of it as imagining with your feet firmly on the ground, connected to yourself, and the things you care about deeply.
Exercises like this can act as a cultural incubator and catalyst for a new kind of activism — one that puts imagination and vision at its core, and celebrates what is beautiful, true, and sacred. Together we could build a movement based on what is truly important to us, fuelled by practicing hope together.
The exercise was a powerful moment of shared imagining between 4,000 people. We faced the seriousness of the crises we are in today and invited the lightness of play to face the crises fully without looking away. The audience were in both tears and laughter. Later, people said they were holding the full complexity of the moment, with conflicting emotions and multiple perspectives.
It seems a bit far fetched, but what if we could build a movement based on such exercises, and shifts in perspective and imagination together? What if people could be equipped with the practices, tools and mindsets to think and see the world differently?
Rather than name the movement or build the movement itself, we want to train a certain kind of activist, who can go on to create their own movement. This new kind of activist is something we’re calling “Imagination Activists”, and you can hear more about it in this conversation on the Spaceship Earth podcast.
But what is an Imagination Activist?
What is Imagination Activism?
What if activism was powered by imagination and vision, rather than guilt and despair?
What if we focused on imagining the new, as well as fighting the old?
What if there were tools and a programme to train such activists?
We are all familiar with the incredible activism and leadership shown by the movement of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion. The movement changed hearts and minds and got people who wouldn’t normally consider the climate crisis to talk about extinction. There are valid criticisms of the movement, but it had an impact (how important an impact remains to be seen).
But Extinction Rebellion and the existing climate movement cannot be sustained. You cannot have a movement that is driven only by despair. In order to have the impact it needed to have, Extinction Rebellion based a lot of its messaging and media on images of the future that depicted climate chaos, extinction and panic.
And it’s important to say that we also need that. It is important that we sound the alarm, and raise awareness of the science and the facts. If we don’t radically change the way our society functions, the future does look like (and already feels like!) apocalyptic collapse.
But we also need a new kind of activism, a kind of beautiful activism, that is built on something different — something that goes beyond fighting the old and moves into building the new. One that is built on a sense of what is deeply important and sacred to us, and a deep connection to the kind of world worth fighting for.
This is where I believe the Imagination Activist comes in.
An Imagination Activist is a new kind of activist powered by imagination and vision and equipped with the tools to make the world better for everyone.
Rather than working with guilt and despair, Imagination Activists work by inspiring others, giving people permission to dream, and expand their sense of what is possible.
They highlight the options not on the table, and envision a future that engenders their deepest qualities and values. They raise collective ambition to help make the “impossible” seem possible.
The role of the Imagination Activist is to help people remember that the world could be different. It’s very simple.
Their equipment is varied, and they come in all shapes and sizes. There are many ways to fuel your Imagination Activism. Shifting perception, connecting to what is sacred and true, making time and space, engaging in practices that connect to self, community, local place, and wider ecology.
Learning communities and platforms like Advaya, Bayo Akomolafe’s learning community, Nora Bateson’s Warm Data Community, Dougald Hine’s A School Called Home and Martin Shaw’s School of Myth are all places to go to engage in this kind of imaginal nourishing and learning. Communities like Inner Transition and Schumacher College have also existed for decades to fuel the imagination of a different world being possible.
Crucially, Imagination Activists are deeply connected to what is truly important, and fight off the mass distraction of advertising driving consumerism, short term media cycles, polarisation politics, manipulative algorithms, media manipulation and the fragmentation being driven by social media. They are conscious of how imagination can be weaponised, and used to manipulate and control.
Another reason why Imagination Activism is important is because of the tendency of activists to replicate the dynamics they intend to fight against. A new kind of activism powered by the collective vision of how things could be otherwise orients us towards what we would like to see, rather than focusing on what we are against.
Like Audre Lorde famously described, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. So when we turn our focus not just to the issue at hand but also the practice of the activist, to the activist imagination, we open up the possibility of acting from a different place. This is perhaps one of the most important parts of the shift to Imagination Activism.
The Imagination Activism Movement
What does Imagination Activism lead to in action? That is up to you to decide. You might imagine something that looks like artivism. But my view is that the point is not to organise a demonstration that is separate to the everyday, but to infuse the everyday with imagination. To find ways to embed and anchor our collective imaginings of a different way of being into where we are — whether that’s a community, a council, an organisation, a family or a collective.
We need our activism and social change infused with radical imagination. And you can see examples of that already throughout the UK. Civic Square is organising on a local scale to create pockets of the future in neighbourhoods of Birmingham, demonstrating the new and possible through demonstrators of today. I had the pleasure of working with the inimitable Onion Collective in Watchet, Somerset in Spring 2021, running an Imagination Lab with 20 citizens of Watchet to reimagine the economy through a future, ancestors and more-than-human lens.
Rob Hopkins wrote the book ‘From What Is to What If’ which has inspired many around the importance of imagination and the need to prioritise it in our schools, workplaces and cities. In Devon, Rob and many from the Transition Network are organising around something called Atmos Totnes, calling on the power of imagination to save a plot of land central to the community of Totnes which is being taken over by developers. London National Park City is a movement that is using the imagined future of London becoming transformed into a national park city to organise park rangers in boroughs across London to plant trees, make guided tours, and bring this future into reality. All of these projects combine the reimagining of something new, creativity, boldness and activism, with the building of infrastructures that can continue to support that way of being. They don’t just focus on fixing the problems of today but building the world of tomorrow.
“When I grow up, I want to be an Imagination Activist” — Mark Cridge, London National Park City
This scaffolding and movement building is needed to support more and more Imagination Activism to take off. This will look different in local communities, movements, local councils, policy-making, corporate governance boards and organisations. It might be physical, in the form of spaces and new uses of land and buildings, or intangible, like stories, myths and rituals.
We start with where we are and reclaim our imaginations — rewilding them with visions and possibilities born from places other than the corporate industrial competitive machine. We create gaps in-between business as usual to exercise the more beautiful world our hearts and imaginations know is possible.
Importantly, Imagination Activists bring together their rewilded imaginations with others and allow this to ferment into collective action. They are not dreamers stuck in imagining different realities. They are what Anasuya Sengupta calls pragmatic revolutionaries, driven by the knowledge and faith that another world is possible, but willing to engage with reality and meet the world fearlessly as it is today. They bridge the world of visions and the imagination with the practical tools to make these alternatives a reality. In this way their work is rooted deeply in their collective values.
Imagination Activism in Practice
Across the country, myself and a small group of Imagination Activists have been running workshops, prototyping trainings and testing out what it looks like to ‘activate’ Imagination Activists. What we have been hearing is that people leave with a clarified sense of what is sacred, and important to them, and can articulate this in various different ways that weren’t available to them before. This surprised us — of course we hoped that people would feel energised and inspired. But this kind of deeper connection to values and what is sacred has kept reappearing.
The early work we have been doing, for example in the small town of Watchet, shows a reconnection to something that’s untameable, wild, fresh and pulsing with life. In the barren landscape of modern life we can find ourselves disconnected, lonely, parched for creativity and a sense of meaning and purpose. In the workshops, we saw people reconnect to something that was impossible to lose. Imagine a root delving deep into the soil and looking for fresh water, and suddenly finding an underground freshwater spring. And those roots finding the roots of other plants, and mycelium — slowly rejoining the complexity of Life.
What we’ve realised is that Imagination Activism, at the core, is about reconnecting deeply to what is important to you — and imagining from that place of deep connection. Crucially, this work is done collectively, in relationship. It is not done alone. So the sense of what is sacred, and connection to values, happens in the group, among and interwoven and collectively held with others.
This kind of praxis opens up a new possibility, to ask “what if the world were different?” In a world where our sense of what is possible is hemmed in by advertising, Hollywood movies, and bipartisan politics, achieving cognitive breakthroughs and perspective shifts is essential to breaking out of the guide rails of how things usually are. If we want to create a different possibility, a different way of living, we need to allow ourselves to imagine differently together.
Get involved
If this speaks to you or your work, please get in touch. We are just getting started and we welcome any feedback, ideas or proposals for collaboration.
We are building a community and movement of Imagination Activists and exploring ways to scale the movement, so if you are interested in supporting us, please get in touch. Help us come together and build this important field and make it possible for anyone to train up and be equipped as an Imagination Activism.
If you want to find out more about Imagination Activism, listen to these two podcast episodes:
Imagination Activism: exploring radically better futures (and SolarPunk) on Accidental Gods
What are the most effective tools we can engage to create new, different, better futures? How do we translate our…accidentalgods.life
Episode 57 — Phoebe Tickell — Imagination Activist — The SpaceShip Earth Podcast
Phoebe Tickell is a Biologist and Systems thinker who develops methodologies and approaches suited to a better world…www.thespaceship.earth
Moral Imaginations exists because tackling the big challenges of our times requires radical shifts in mindset and perception. We research, develop and work with post-rational activist approaches that combine imagination, science, rigour, art, truth and beauty to help people make sense of the climate crisis and move to transformative action.
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I find this refreshing and inspiring. I am currently supporting a small yet powerful NGO to re-think its purpose and strategy and we have come to a point similar to this through a different path. It feels more energising and hopeful. Would certainly like to connect.
I believe one of the main jobs of artists is to imagine a better future. The first step toward creating it.